Last week in John Chapter 3 we saw how Jesus dealt with the ultimate insider; a guy named Nicodemus.
Nicodemus was well-connected: a member of the Sanhedrin, a Pharisee, the ultimate insider, the ultimate religious professional. And when he comes to Jesus by night, Jesus graciously and carefully deconstructs his entire religious worldview. He tells Nicodemus that the relationship that God seeks is in the heart; not a national, not a surface, not a traditional relationship, but one that radically changes a person and makes them different.
So as we come to Chapter 4 today, Jesus goes from the insider to the ultimate outsider as he goes through Samaria, the equivalent of the slums for the Orthodox Jew in Jesus’s day. And instead of a man imbued with power and cloaked in religious approval, Jesus engages a woman; a scandalous woman with a secret, with a past. He engages her about her need for the kind of water that only God can give.
These two passages illustrate beautifully that Jesus Christ came to change something, not about our behavior, but fundamentally about our existence. To be born again is not just to have a religious agenda, but it’s to receive the greatest gift that God can give a human being. All of this today on Friday Morning Bible Study.