GOOD NEWS FOR YOU: GOD UNDERSTANDS

This is the second week of Lent and Good News for You never stops!  Be sure to check out the Lenten study The Explicit Gospel.  Make time to do the study if you can.  You will find the sermon videos and study guides on our website, sjpcjax.org/lent-study-2021.  One of the great problems of our society is that we have communication without genuine connection.  Many people often feel as if they have not been heard or understood.   The pandemic has enhanced the trend of isolation that was occurring before 2020.  Isolation makes us believe that others do not care and reinforces our loneliness and despair.  The Good News for this week is God Understands. This sounds so simple, but it is so powerful.  We love our friends because they try to understand us. The last lesson of the second section of our Lent study focuses on John 4 which is Jesus’s conversation with the Samaritan woman.  This woman is isolated, alone, and angry at her lot in life.  Jesus wants something better for her, so much so, that he is waiting for her at this well with a simple question: “Will you give me a drink?”  This begins a somewhat sarcastic, if not caustic, exchange from the woman to Jesus.  Yet, Jesus does not condemn her, but he wants to connect her to the spring of living water!  This conversation is not just for the unsaved, but for every believer who feels that they are dry, barren, or overwhelmed.  Jesus guides this woman and every believer to find the Good News of hope and strength because this spring of living water is alive and flowing in our hearts!  As you read John 4:13-24, let the flowing stream of God’s grace in Jesus become a torrent that will overcome your isolation and despair!  John 4:13-14: 13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” 15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” 16 He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.” 17 “I have no husband,” she replied. Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. 18 The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.” 19 “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.” 21 “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”