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Apr 15, 2012

Healing At the Well

Passage: John 4:1-54

Preacher: John Repsold

Series: Life to the Full

Category: New Testament

Keywords: healing, wholeness, jesus, serving

Summary:

We all need healing....all the time. This message looks at how Jesus brings healing into our lives through the most troubling areas of our past.

Detail:

Healing @ the Well

John 4—April 15, 2012

 

When is the last time you experienced healing? 

Fact is, we’re all constantly experiencing healing.  Our bodies are designed such that healing is a 24-7 reality, even when we aren’t aware of it.  In the normal, daily functioning of our bodies, we’re constantly repairing and replacing millions of cells.  Whether it is the creation of white blood cells to fight unwelcome and unseen invaders of our body or whether it is the mending of broken bones internally or scratches on the surface of our bodies, we all experience healing.

            But what of the often more painful and hard-to-heal wounds of our lives—the hurts or downright abuse we’ve experience in life that leaves us emotionally, relationally, psychologically and spiritually broken o+r bleeding?  When is the last time you remember healing happening there?

 

We’re back in the book of John today.  It’s a book about “living life to the full.”  It’s also a book that contains several unique stories about healing.  In today’s text in chapter 4, Jesus is going to do one of those healing miracles, not of some broken or diseased body, but a healing of a much more difficult and deep level—healing of a woman’s heart…and through that the healing of a whole lot of people in an entire town. 

 

Turn in your Bibles to John 4 and follow along as we walk through this story.  Read John 4:1-3.

 

Background:  Jesus is just wrapping up his first teaching trip to Jerusalem and Judea.  Prior to this we know that he was beginning to form his “ministry team” by inviting a few of John the Baptist’s disciples to come play on his “disciple’s team” (John 1—Andrew, Simon Peter, Philip and Nathanael).

 Jesus had already launched his ministry up north in the region of Galilee and in cities like Capernaum and Cana where he had turned the water into wine at a wedding feast.  From there he had made his first “ministry trip” to Jerusalem where he met a clerical mucky-muck named Nicodemus in the dead of night and let him know he (Nicodemus) didn’t have a clue about how to get to first base with God.  He also found time to ruffle more than a few Jewish feathers in the Temple courtyard when he came in and “cleaned house” of people, poultry and prime money makers.  It frankly ticked him off that people a lot like us had turned the one place in the world where Jews and non-Jews alike could connect with God into an animal house and bank exchange! 

 

That’s probably partly why, when you get to chapter 4 of John, you find that Jesus and the Pharisees are already not exactly having a love-fest together.  In fact, John tells us that these Pharisee clergy types were quickly getting spooked by the number of people who were publicly indicating their desire to seek after God the way Jesus was calling them to do it. 

            Rather than rejoicing that lukewarm and nominal Jews were repenting of their sins and busting out with fresh spiritual hunger for God Almighty, the Pharisees got all freaked out about the numbers game:  John the Baptist was bad enough with all his “followers”.  Now this newcomer Jesus was even seeing bigger crowds at his baptismal services in Judea (southern Israel). 

 

Right out of the gate, John lets us know that Jesus isn’t your normal 21st century “evangelist” or TV preacher.  Where most of us might see increasing crowds as a growing customer base and an opportunity to launch a new campaign fund drive, Jesus sees his growing notoriety as a potential and dangerous distraction from what God had called him to do in his few short years of ministry.  So he leaves southern Israel (Judea) and heads back north to the region of Galilee. 

 

Look at vs. 4.  John makes the editorial comment that Jesus “had to go through Samaria.”  That was about as attractive as saying,

“You have to go through Butte, MT to get to Yellowstone Park” or…

you’ve got to drive through central California in the middle of July with 115 degree heat to get to the beaches of San Diego.” (Sandy is from Central CA.  Believe me, you don’t want to do that trip more than you have to…unless, of course, you are madly in love with someone who lives there! J )

 

Now, Samaria wasn’t exactly the Jewish preferred destination resort for a number of reasons.  It had a lot to do with a little bit of bad-blood history between Jews and Samaritans that went back a few centuries and involved a less-than-nice pagan people called “Assyrians”. 

            (I have to be careful here how I say this next part of the story because, when our family gets together, I’m usually surrounded by a bunch of Assyrians and I’m the “minority” Anglo presence at the table.  With Sandy  being 100% Assyrian, that makes our biological children 50% Assyrian…which makes me THE odd-man-out.)  Here’s the historical connection with Samaria.

            Back in 722 B.C., my wife’s barbaric forefathers, those mean and nasty Assyrians, overran the Jews of northern Israel, killed a bunch, tortured some more and carted off the rest to Assyria as prisoners.  The very few Jews who were left behind were both ‘the few and poor’.  They ended up intermarrying with foreigners like the Babylonians and other pagan races who then overran northern Israel.  The resulting Jewish “half-breeds” became known as Samaritans.  So you have a racial issue going on in this story.

 

Add to that a serious religious issue and you pretty much have the same mess you have there today.  Only leading up to Jesus’ day, there was a religious cat-fight raging between Jews from Judah (southern Israel) and these “Samaritan” half-breeds.   It had been simmering for, oh, just about 600 years.  After the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple in 586 B.C., the Samaritans had “gone native” by setting up their own priestly system in Samaria, something God had forbidden the Jews to do. 

            Well, when the exiles from Babylon returned with Ezra and Nehemiah some 50-140 years later, the Samaritans did the “neighborly thing to do” and offered their services in helping to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem.  The answer they got you can find in Nehemiah 4:1-2.  Basically it was, “WE (pure Jews) will build it… and YOU (half-breed Samaritans) can’t come!” 

            So, rather than whimper and grovel about it, the Samaritans built their own temple on a local mountain in Samaria called Mt. Gerizim…which was subsequently destroyed by, guess who?  Zealous Jews from Judea during the period between the Old and New Testaments called the Maccabean Period, about 128 B.C. 

            Basically, all you need to know is that people in the Middle East 2,500 years ago felt about each other just about like they do today—they hated each other’s guts!  Just makes you want to be the next Secretary of State, doesn’t it? J

 

Anyway, the shortest distance between Jerusalem and Galilee was through Samaria.  So Jesus sets out with some of his early disciples from Jerusalem and arrives at the town of Sychar in Samaria about noon.  Remember central California in July?  Yah…that was a lot like Sychar on a good day.   J

 

Vs. 6—We’re told by John that “Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well.  It was about the sixth hour” (or noon).  I love the way the Bible tells it like it is.  If you or I had been trying to write about God in human flesh, we’d probably just have jumped right over that little fact that Jesus was just plain out of gas…thirsty…and hungry.  (Sounds like most men you know around noon every day, right?)           God wants us to know that when Jesus took on humanity, he took it all on—limitations and all—but without sinning. 

 

Vs. 8 tells us that Jesus’ little ‘band of brothers’ “had gone into the town to buy food.”  They were on a hunting expedition to bag the biggest kosher lamb burgers they could find and bring them back to share with Jesus. 

            Apparently the disciples had taken all the canteens with them when they went because vs. 7 tells us.... 

Vs. 7—“When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?”” 

Now jump down to vs. 9:

Vs. 9—“The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman.  How can you ask me for a drink?”  (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)”

Now, my guess is that what we just read may not have hit any of us as anything out of the ordinary or with the emotional force a first century Jew would have felt.  Fact is, there are a number of out-of-place things going on in these two little verses. 

            First, Jesus is alone at this well in the hot sun in the middle of the day when along comes a woman “to draw water”. 

Oddity #1:  women usually came in groups when they went about their daily chores in public.  This woman is alone.

Oddity #2:  they usually came in the cool of the morning or evening when their job was slightly less taxing.

Oddity #3:  Jesus speaks directly to her, a woman.  That in itself was a bit outside the prevailing cultural norms of the day, especially when you consider that within a few years the Jewish leaders would write into their religious code a law that said, “All the daughters of the Samaritans are menstruates from the cradle.”  (I’m pretty sure my mother would have washed my mouth out with soap if I’d used that line to describe anyone as a kid, let alone a woman!) 

So sanctimonious religious teachers of Jesus day would have had a sort of visceral aversion to contact with a Samaritan and particularly a Samaritan woman.  That alone would make any good Jew “religiously unclean”. 

But Jesus was more than a “good Jew.”  I love the fact that Jesus was never shy about contact with “unclean” people.  He hugged lepers, touched dead children, confronted naked demon possessed men and healed women “unclean” from years of continual menstrual bleeding.  Unlike us, Jesus never got soiled by sin-sick people; sin and sickness got cured by touching Him!

Oddity #4:  The racial component.  Jesus, a Jew, is making a very unusual request of her, a Samaritan.  Vs. 9b gives us that important cultural clue though the NIV translation may leave you with the wrong impression. The text says, “(For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)”

             This doesn’t mean that Jews wouldn’t talk with or associate with Samaritans.  The fact that the disciples were going into a Samaritan town to buy Samaritan food from Samaritan shops manned by Samaritans makes that idea absurd. 

            The Greek word here literally means “to have no use with Samaritans.”  (Not to be confused with “to have no use for Samaritans!)  In essence, Jews didn’t share eating utensils or vessels with Samaritans.  It wasn’t a germ thing for them in those days.  It was a both a religious and social taboo that was virtually unthinkable. 

 

Let me try and help you feel the visceral reaction most Jews would have had to this whole encounter Jesus is in.

ILL:  When we first lived in Spain as missionaries some 25 years ago, we started attending a Brethren church with about 200 people in it.  Like most Brethren churches, they celebrated communion every Sunday.  Being the mumbling, bumbling gringos that we were with a squirmy little toddler in tow, we sat in the back of the church and listened…as best we could. 

            Everything went fine until they got to the communion time in the service. Keep in mind that it’s the dead of winter, and about every 2nd or 3rd person has a cold, runny nose or a raging cough fit for a tuberculosis ward!  

            So here we are in the back of the room when they start passing the communion cup…THE…SINGULAR…communion cup.  The good news is that it contained real Spanish wine with a little alcohol content to tackle some of the germs.  The bad news became more apparent by the moment as every person in that church drank from the same cup…sniffling kids, coughing old men without any teeth, sneezing saints who should have stayed home sick from church that day! 

            I think that was the last Sunday we were ever back-row- Baptists in a Brethren church!  From then on we were strictly front-row Brethren, perched on the end of the row where they started the cup!  J

 

Well, what Jesus did in asking this woman for a drink produced the same sort of visceral reaction for most Jews that you might have if someone living on the street asked you to share their tin cup full of stale coffee from the day before.  Just sort of gives you the shivers, doesn’t it? 

 

Not Jesus.  He refused to get hung up on useless religious rules or demeaning social taboos.  He reached right across the gender barrier, the race barrier and the religion barrier into the life of a woman who was already and evidently isolated from her own people for reasons soon to be revealed. 

            And he did it without going out of his way or holding a special evangelistic campaign or anything of the sort.  He did it in the regular flow of life.

 

Here’s where we come to the first point:

We serve people best when…we engage them with the heart of Jesus in the regular flow of their lives, (John 4:1-8).

From the first words out of Jesus’ mouth, this woman knew something was very different about this man. 

He noticed her when others ignored her.

He spoke to her kindly when others gave her the cold shoulder or worse.

He showed her respect where others showed her their prejudice.

He affirmed her dignity as a human being in God’s image.

Even in the midst of his own need, Jesus found a way to give to her what she needed most—respect, attention, value and kindness.

 

Serving people with the heart of Jesus doesn’t always require that we develop a new program or engage in some inconvenient activity.  The most powerful encounters people ever had with Jesus were as they were going about the normal routines of their lives and Jesus was doing the same with his. 

 

APP:  On the other hand, sometimes our regular routines need to be changed up a bit so that we are regularly putting ourselves, as Jesus did, in contact with people we wouldn’t normally hang out with.  (Challenge to downtown ministry.)

  • Challenge to join a POUR/SERVE TEAM
  • Sign-up for 1st Covenant’s Street Wise ministry.
  • Sign-up for Love Feast serving on Bloomsday Weekend.
  • Host or lead a small group in your home?
  • Join us Mondays as we walk the streets and talk with people (nice weather now). 

This little well outside the city of Sycar was the ancient world’s equivalent of the modern day Starbucks…or lunch room coffee pot or the office water cooler or school cafeteria. 

            Using something everyone needed daily, Jesus opened a conversation for something everyone needs eternally.  And it wasn’t even his quick thinking and catchy conversation starter about “living water” that really caught this woman’s attention.  It was Jesus’ other-focus in the midst of a mundane “chance” encounter that touched and changed her life forever.

 

The heart of Jesus in every one of us who have the Spirit of God residing in us wants to roll right over the phony barriers and inhibitions that so often keep us at arms length from people needing a touch of his love and grace. 

 

APP:

  • Just try it walking down the street this week or the hall at work or school with His heart for people.
  • Just try it in the lunch room…or at the bus stop…or with your boss, your parents or that troublesome coworker no one else enjoys hanging around either.    
  • We serve people best when we engage them with the heart of Jesus in the regular flow of their lives. 

APP:  So here is my take-away question for every one of us today: 

Are you willing to offer God every human encounter of every day of your life as something he is free to use for His purposes in their lives? 

Are you willing to let him give you His eyes to see people as he sees them? 

Willing to let him use you at the grocery story or on the airplane or in the lunch room to act and speak in ways that reflect God’s passionate heart to love people? 

Willing to change your routine a bit to include intentionally connecting with people you wouldn’t normally for the sake of the Gospel? 

IF SO…would you raise your hand as I pray asking God to do this with us?   [PRAY…with hands lifted up to God.]

 

The remainder of Jesus’ conversation with this woman that day was primarily about one thing, I think.  Here was a woman who, like most of us, was really good at covering over the gaping wounds of her life.  She’s going to try to put on a really strong “tough-girl” front that she hopes will give her the upper hand with Jesus.  As we’re going to see, she’s probably had it with people in general and men in particular.  She’s in no mood to open her life up for any more pain.  

            So, she will do what most of us do when we’re frustrated with life:  she is going to try desperately to keep the discussion away from the heart-issues that are eating away at her.  You see, she’s learned to survive on her on, to do life on her own two feet, to live without the normal friendship of others and to live with deadening isolation from others. 

 

But Jesus is, well, Jesus.  So he picks up the conversation right where she is, in the moment, in the middle of the daily grind of life that is colliding with her human need for something simple:  just water. 

            Jesus offers her the gift of “living water” (vs. 10). 

She responds with seeming ridicule and derision.  She treats him like some macho male who is promising far more than he can deliver.

Vs. 11--“Sir, you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep.  Where can you get this living water?  Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?”  (Her question clearly supposes an uncontested, “NO!” with overtones that he is a pigmy in this land of historic national giants.)

 

Jesus is SO different from me, it’s embarrassing.  Rather than take offense or shoot back with some withering reply, he offers her more than any man had ever offered her.  He offers to give where others have taken, to fill up her life where others have shot holes that have drained her heart of hope and love and kindness.    Rather than trot out some miraculous demonstration of pulling up water from this 100+foot-deep well, Jesus chooses to look past her porcupine attitude and press in to her thirsty soul. 

 

Vss. 13-14

 

The offer is made.  What does she have to lose.  Maybe she even thought she would call Jesus’ bluff and take him up on his absurd and certainly strange offer of “living water.” 

 

Vs. 15

 

Then Jesus sets the hook with a statement that seems to come out of left field (vs. 16).  “He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.””

Like the crack of a bat at home plate that has just hit a home run, that question floated out into the center field of this woman’s heart. 

We’re not told how long the silence lasted. 

We’re not told how stunned her look was. 

We’re not told what tone of voice she answered with. 

We can only surmise.  I’m guessing she answered more slowly…more quietly…even a bit sadly—Vs. 17-- “I have no husband.” 

 

Jesus had touched the most sensitive nerve in her soul but in a way that neither made her retreat in shame nor lash out in pain.  Using what must have been a “word from God” about the wounds of this woman, Jesus took the lid off the one area of her life she was running hardest from.  He did so, not to shame her or silence her but to heal her and help her.  Until she faced the darkest parts of her history… and let Jesus deal with it, she wouldn’t find the life God wanted to give her. 

            Jesus actually commends her for what little truth there was in her response.  Unlike most of us who would probably have shouted, “That’s hardly the truth of the matter!” Jesus takes pains to reinforce the crack in the door of truth she has opened ever so reluctantly to him.

Vss. 17-18

You see, Jesus knows something we don’t want to readily acknowledge:  Jesus wants to deal with the most difficult and wounded parts of our lives first. 

 

            You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to appreciate the level of pain 5 former husbands and a live-in boyfriend had inflicted upon the heart of this woman.  John doesn’t tell us if she had waded through 5 divorces…or 5 deaths…or a combination of both.  From the tone of things, she had been deeply rejected…officially… by 5 different men and was now simply settling for the best she thought she could get as “damaged merchandise.” 

            Her abandonment issues, the cynicism about marriage, the mountains of unresolved hurt that must have worn on her day after day after day…are all right there under the surface…and Jesus just pealed back the dead skin of her defenses in order to expose what was festering to the fresh air of his grace and love.   

 

APP:  Before any of us can hope to help rescue others, we’ve got to experience what it’s like to be rescued from our own junk, our own sin. 

We’ve all been victims to a greater or lesser degree of the sinful imperfections of people around us and the pain of the sinful world we live in as well as the devastation our own sin brings. 

It may have been as traumatic as sexual abuse by someone you trusted as a kid or as seemingly innocuous as a mom or dad who kept their distance emotionally or wounded you by bailing out of their marriage.  Fact is, everyone carries wounds that only Jesus can really heal.  Because only Jesus knows everything about your past…even the stuff you’ve forgotten…and has just the right ability to hold up the mirror of truth while at the same time putting his arm of loving, accepting grace tightly around you. 

 

This woman was obviously in an unhealthy cycle of some sort.  You don’t go through 5 husbands and decide you’re not worth anything more than a live-in relationship without being deeply wounded as well as wounding those around you. 

 

Unless we let God speak to us about the truth of our own condition AND open our hearts to receive Jesus and his gracious work in our life, we will never experience the “living water” he offers to every human soul.  And we certainly won’t be able to serve other people in a redeeming, saving sort of way. 

 

So here’s the “take-away” on this point:

Some of you have been running from God when really what your soul is longing for is only found in God.  Maybe you are here today because someone you love or respect invited you here…and all of a sudden you are sensing the Spirit of God poking around in your heart…telling you, just like Jesus told this woman, that he wants to give you “living water” that will satisfy the life-long thirst of your soul. 

Are you ready to tell Jesus just as this woman did, “Jesus, will you please give me this living water?”  Like with that woman, Jesus is going to ask you to face the simple reality that you’re not perfect, that you’ve got skeletons in your closet and that you need Him to come in and clean house, repaint and heal the wounds and holes in your heart.

[Lead in Sinner’s Prayer.]

            If you prayed that prayer, please tell someone you trust about that, someone you know can help you learn to grow in knowing Jesus, the God you just entrusted your life to.  Pick up a New Testament as you leave and start reading, from front to back. 

 

Here’s another take-away:

Maybe you’re already a believer in Jesus, but you’re finding that the older you get or the longer you are in a close relationship or marriage or parenting your kids, the deeper the wounds and hurt you experience and inflict on others are.  The only way that is going to turn around is if we learn to call our own “stuff” what it is and learn to experience what it is to let Jesus begin to clean it up and heal us in the process. 

For some of us that may mean getting honest about secret sin we’ve been trying to keep the lid on for a long time.  Jesus is asking you to find a trusted and mature spiritual mentor and bring that truth into the light with them so its power is broken.

For some it might mean facing the shame of something in your past or present and getting it out in your small group or with a Christian counselor or spiritual leader who can help you experience the grace and healing of Christ in that memory or experience. 

APP:  Here’s what I want us to do right now if you find God’s Spirit nudging you in this area.  [PRAY with hands cupped, lifting up to God the hurt and shame of your life, asking Him to show you how he wants it healed and shower you with his healing love.]

 

Recap #2:  Jesus wants to deal with the most difficult and wounded parts of our lives first. 

WHEN this woman at the well did that, what had been a hole of shame became a platform for impact. 

 

Here’s the 3rd major lesson of this passage:  We serve people best when we share God’s power that has changed us personally, (4:9-26, 39-42).

 

Vss. 28-30; 39-42.

Not only was her life redeemed from the trash heap of disappointment; her whole town was rocked by the power of her testimony and the person of Jesus Christ.  What a great example of what God wants to keep doing with our stories as we relate to other people. 

 

We all have a less-than-perfect-past that God wants to redeem and use as a very powerful pulpit for speaking hope and grace into other people’s lives. 

Do you believe that bout YOUR life?  Do you really believe that about whatever weakness or abuse or shameful stuff you’d like to keep hidden in your past?  ONLY Jesus can do that…and ONLY YOU can let him. 

 

Video from Unmasked conference.

 

#4.  We serve people best when…we exchange our prejudices for real-live people.  (4:27-38)

            When the disciples returned from finding lunch in this little town, their prejudices are sticking out all over.  Vs. 27—the questions.  One aimed at the woman, the other at Jesus? 

            Could you imagine what they would have done if they had really asked Jesus what they were thinking.  If they had asked, “Why are you talking with her?”, I’ll bet Jesus would have told them, “Oh, I was just asking her…the Samaritan…woman... if I could drink from her cup!”  They would have all chocked on their kosher lunches and we’d have had “The 6 Disciples” instead of “The 12.” J

            Thinking Jesus must be suffering from sun-stroke or something, the disciples start pressing him to eat, to which Jesus responds (vs. 32 & 34)…

            “I have food to eat that you know nothing about….My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.”

You see, the truth of life is that there is nothing that fills the human soul better than doing God’s will.  Bringing eternal life and present healing to this woman was just what God wanted Jesus to do that day.  And when he did, even the power of human hunger didn’t hold a candle to the felling of being used by God.  (That’s a real miracle when you’re talking lunchtime and a hungry man!)

 

That’s why serving people is so central to a satisfying life with Jesus. 

            That will require a maturing process for the rest of our lives, just as it was with the disciples here.  They had so many preconceptions and prejudices about WHO they would serve and WHAT kind of serving they would do that it required a two-day stopover living with all these Samaritans to get them to exchange their preconceptions and prejudices for actually doing God’s will of bringing Jesus to people.  

            Can you imagine the horror in the disciples’ eyes when they heard Jesus talking to them about “the harvest” of ready people they were about to enter into in that little town?  As the towns-people streamed towards them, led by this woman they’d seen talking with Jesus, they must have sensed that this wasn’t going to be a normal overnighter. 

That’s the way it is when you partner with Jesus.  He has no “prejudices”.  He is no “respecter of persons” when it comes to people.  He’s just as comfortable mixing it up with rich tax-collectors as poor beggars. He’s just as likely to spend time with stuffy religious leaders as with wine-drinking party animals.  It doesn’t matter to him if it’s a woman or a man, a child or a senior, a prostitute or a publicist. 

            For Jesus…and any of us who really want to ride with him…everyone all the time is a ripe harvest just waiting for one of his followers to step forward and bring into the Kingdom of God. 

 

Let’s face it:  we’ve all got prejudices and preconceptions about certain people that God just wants to BLOW UP!  This thing about following him and becoming fishermen of people is messy business.  It’s unpredictable.  And it’s sometimes downright shocking.  But it’s the most amazing serving you and I will ever do…and it will fill our hearts and rock our world when we do. 

 

Do you consider yourself a follower of Jesus?  A disciple? 

Then guess what?  God wants you in on some surprising, some shocking, some prejudice-breaking spiritual encounters with people all around you in life. 

 

Are YOU willing to follow Jesus into the lives of people needing his love, forgiveness and grace?

Willing to let him mess with your prejudices, put you around people he loves…but you probably don’t right now?  Willing to love the poor if you are middle-class?  Love the white if you are black?  Love the young if you are older, the sexually immoral if you are sexually pure?  The profane if you are religious?  The business professional if you are blue-collar?  The foster kid if you are an adult?  The homosexual if you are straight?

Are you willing to serve God and people by stepping into relationship with people you meet every day, on the way, in life?

 

If you are, I want you to close this service by doing something symbolic.  I want to invite you to close your eyes and lift up your hands to heaven.  You won’t be able to see anyone around you and how different or similar they are to you. That’s as it should be. 

            By lifting your hands, you are saying to God, “Here’s my life.  You can use me anytime, anywhere, with anyone from any walk of life to share the gift of ‘living water’ with them.  I’m available to serve you, Jesus, by serving people--people you will put in my life in the regular flow of life AND people I will go out of my way to engage with who I know have needs.   

 

Who is God bringing to mind?

Where is God asking you to serve regularly?

 

PRAY