2/11/07 Worlds In Collision Pt. 6

JOH 4:31-38 In the meanwhile the disciples were requesting Him, saying, "Rabbi, eat." But He said to them, "I have food to eat that you do not know about." The disciples therefore were saying to one another, "No one brought Him anything to eat, did he?" Jesus said to them, "My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to accomplish His work. Do you not say, 'There are yet four months, and then comes the harvest'? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes, and look on the fields, that they are white for harvest. Already he who reaps is receiving wages, and is gathering fruit for life eternal; that he who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together. For in this case the saying is true, 'One sows, and another reaps.' I sent you to reap that for which you have not labored; others have labored, and you have entered into their labor."

We have almost but not quite finished with our study of the woman at the well.

By now we’ve already worked our way through

the events that took place between Jesus and the woman,

but we skipped over what happened between Jesus and His men.

You’ll remember that this whole conversation between Jesus and the woman

took place because His disciples took off in search of food

and left Jesus sitting by Himself at the well.

But immediately following Jesus’ confirmation to this woman

that He was in fact the Messiah promised by God,

the One for whom the entire nation had been waiting for hundreds of years,

at that point the disciples came storming back onto the scene,

blundering in as they so often did,

utterly clueless as to what had just happened,

concerned about just one thing...LUNCH!

They found Jesus and the woman obviously involved in some sort of intense conversation,

had no idea what to do with such a huge breach in social etiquette,

and a few seconds of painful silence followed

until the woman headed back to town to tell her friends what had just happened.

Clearly the disciples were relieved to see her go

because the next thing they said was, “Let’s eat!”

Well, that’s a loose translation,

but it pretty well captures what happened.

JOH 4:31 In the meanwhile the disciples were requesting Him, saying, "Rabbi, eat."

And in truth

I don’t think they were worried about Him eating

so much as they were worried about chowing down themselves

and it just felt a little awkward to eat unless He joined in.

And the exchange that takes place next between Jesus and His men

contains a principle of our life with our Lord

that, once I saw it,

has impacted the course of my life

as much as any other truth I’ve ever learned.

OK, the first thing He does with them

is something we’ve just seen Him doing with this woman.

He says,

JOH 4:32 ... "I have food to eat that you do not know about."

Do you remember what He said to the woman?

JOH 4:10 Jesus ...said to her, "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, 'Give Me a drink,' you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water."

He had something that He very much wanted to communicate to this woman,

something about the most crucial aspect of her life,

something about what she was really searching for, longing for in life.

He wanted to talk with her

about that hunger deep within her spirit

for her God.

But He needed a bridge to get there.

He needed some way to take her

from where she was,

immersed in the endless trivia and routines of life,

and bring her into the truth about life and about Himself that He knew she so desperately hungered for.

So He started just where she was,

with something she understood perfectly - water.

And now here He is doing it again with His disciples.

There was something He very much wanted them to know,

a truth He wanted to communicate to them,

a truth that, if they could get it,

would revolutionize their lives

and open them up to a level of fulfillment in life

unlike anything they’d ever known.

But right now all they were interested in was food.

So He starts right where they’re at

and uses food

as His bridge to take them into the truth He wants them to have.

Do you ever find yourself frustrated in your efforts

to communicate some important truth to your kids?

Sometimes the best thing we can do

is the same thing Jesus did so often - begin with something they understand.

I remember a conversation I was involved in a number of years ago

with a boy who was making some potentially disastrous choices in his life,

choices that could have devastating consequences in the years ahead,

and he couldn’t see any of it coming.

I asked him if he’d ever been involved in one of those paint ball games

where everyone is armed with paint ball guns

and they’re sneaking around trying to shoot one another.

He said he had and then told me how fun it was.

Then I told him I wanted him to imagine himself involved in one of those games,

but there were some things about this particular game

that he didn’t know.

What he didn’t know

was that the people who had invited him to play

weren’t just playing for fun.

In fact, they had invited him into the game for just one reason,

because they hated him with a vicious hatred

and had put together the game

for the one purpose of destroying him.

When the game started

they handed him a gun

that was loaded with just regular paint balls.

But their guns were loaded with something very different.

They looked like normal paint balls

but each one contained a special kind of deadly poison.

It was a poison that penetrated through his his protective clothing,

and then through his skin,

a poison that would seep into his system with no immediate affect.

But months or years later

the drugs would have devastating, even potentially lethal results in his life.

And the sad thing is that the whole time

the boy just kept thinking it was a harmless game

when the truth was that he was literally in a battle for his life,

a battle he could not win because he didn’t even know he was under attack.

Then I told him

that right now in his own life he was under vicious attack.

I told him that there were forces

whose one goal was to destroy him and his future at all costs.

But those forces had tricked him into believing that it was all just a game,

just a harmless game,

and that the stuff he was getting into didn’t really matter at all.

And what he would not realize until it was too late

was that the whole thing was a carefully designed plan to destroy his life.

Sometimes if we can begin where they are,

with something they understand,

it helps to get them to the truth we want them to see.

And so with Jesus and His disciples

He began with something they understood perfectly - food.

JOH 4:32 But He said to them, "I have food to eat that you do not know about."

Their response was exactly what we would have expected.

JOH 4:33 The disciples therefore were saying to one another, "No one brought Him anything to eat, did he?"

They, of course,

kept their attention on what they understood,

and didn’t have a clue as to what Jesus was talking about.

And then, in one line Jesus took them to the truth He wanted them to know.

JOH 4:34 Jesus said to them, "My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to accomplish His work.”

Now, He went on to give an explanation of what He was saying,

but before we look at the rest of this passage

I want to be sure we have heard correctly

what it is that Jesus is really saying in this remarkable sentence.

You see, it is this statement right here

that has had such a powerful impact on my own life.

It is this statement

that has given me an insight

into the difference between religion

and the life of Christ within me

as few other passages have done.

It is this statement that has given me the ability

to understand the will of God in my life

with a clarity I never had before I saw what Jesus was saying right here.

And let me see if I can put it into words

in a way that will make sense.

Now, we’ve seen already

that Jesus is once again using a physical experience

as a tool with which to illustrate a spirit or soul principle.

He’s taking the physical body

and that daily need we have for food

and then telling us that, just as our bodies grow hungry

and then find satisfaction, fulfillment through eating,

so our spirits also grow hungry with a hunger that needs to be fed, satisfied.

And before I say any more about that hunger,

I just want to be sure we see the contrast Jesus reveals to us

through the two different illustrations He uses here - water and food.

You remember the way in which He used the water

to illustrate the thirst of our spirits for our God.

And how he told the woman

that once we took the water He was offering,

we would never thirst again.

In fact, not only would our spirits never thirst again,

but we would find within ourselves

a well springing up forever.

And we saw that through that illustration

He was describing for us

what happens within our spirits

when we allow Christ into our lives.

Simply stated, He satisfies.

He fills that God-shaped vacuum within us

that we have been trying to fill with religion,

or with things,

or with ego gratification,

or with any of the other God-substitutes in human experience.

And not only does He satisfy,

but His presence within us

becomes a never ending life source in our spirits,

literally a whole new reason for facing each day.

Because He IS,

our lives make sense,

have purpose,

have significance as never before.

And of course there is so much more, as well.

He teaches us how to love,

and creates within us a hunger and thirst for righteousness,

and on and on.

But my point here

is that, with the water illustration

Jesus is telling us that when He enters our lives

something huge within our spirits is satisfied forever.

But then, when we come to the food illustration,

we see something else entirely.

Through this food illustration

He’s telling us

that even though our spirits no longer feel the emptiness

that we knew before our God entered our lives,

yet there is still a hunger within us,

and in fact a hunger that is intensified

as a direct result of God’s presence with us,

a hunger that needs to be met on a daily basis

just as the hunger of our physical bodies must be met on a daily basis.

Now, I really do hope I’m not making the simple complicated,

but there is something I very much want us to see here.

When Jesus told His disciples,

"My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to accomplish His work.”,

He was telling them that doing what our God gives us to do

feeds our souls.

And I need to be very careful with what I say right now

because this whole business of God’s will and God’s work and DOING

has been so abused by the religious world around us.

There is within each of us

a hunger for a life that really matters,

a life that, in the truest sense fulfills the purposes for which God placed us on this earth.

Even if we have been deeply abused by others,

even if they may have told us

that our life doesn’t really matter,

that our being here is no great thing,

still deep within our spirits we know the truth.

Even if all the world may have passed us by without a glance,

as if we didn’t even exists,

yet deep within us

each of us knows we have within us the ability to accomplish what no one else can accomplish.

We know we are unique creative works of God,

brought into this world by Him

because we have both a purpose and a destiny that we alone can fulfill.

Simply put, there are reasons why we are here,

reasons designed into us by God Himself.

There are things that we alone can do,

things that we alone can fulfill on this earth.

There is an image of God Himself

that this world can only see

when they see it reflected in us.

And when that happens,

when we find ourselves fulfilling those purposes for which God placed us on this earth,

it feeds our spirits, our souls as nothing else can do

because it allows us to make sense of our own lives as nothing else can do.

This is what Jesus is talking about

when He says, My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to accomplish His work.

Now Jesus’ work, obviously,

was to save the world,

to become the means of salvation for the entire human race,

and to provide us with an absolute accurate image of God Himself.

But there is also a redemptive work

that God seeks to do through each of us,

a tiny reproduction of Himself

that we alone can accomplish.

And as we begin to see what He’s doing

and how He is seeking to do it through us

we will find our own growing sense of fulfillment.

And how do we find it?

How do we know what it is He’s seeking to do through us?

Well, let me say first of all

that this is very much of an ongoing daily discovery process in our lives.

And then let me say, too,

that it has nothing whatsoever to do

with the perpetuation of any religious system or organization.

It does, however, have everything to do

with bringing redemption and healing

into the lives of those that God has entrusted into our care.

If we took the time to read the rest of this passage,

we’d see that is exactly where Jesus goes with this

in His conversation with His men.

In effect He says, “Just look around you! Look at the people God has placed around you!”

But the real discovery for me here,

and the one that I want to share with you as I close

is that in this statement, "My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to accomplish His work”,

Jesus is giving us an incredible insight

into how we can recognize both where we fit and where we do not.

He was telling us

that we can recognize where we fit

because when we find it

we will discover that if feeds our souls.

And when I realized this

I suddenly realized, too,

how much I was choosing to do in life

that my God never gave me to do.

There are, of course, a whole bunch of duties in life

given to us by our God

that we simply must fulfill,

obligations that come with the life He’s given us.

A lot of them come under the category of stewardship -

taking good care of the people, and the things, and the gifts

that our God has entrusted into our care.

Some of them are the basic obligations of responsible living.

This Samaritan woman had to go to the well to get water.

We are called by our God to assume a responsible approach to life,

not because we get some huge emotional high from it,

but because it comes with assuming responsibility for the life God has given us.

In Paul’s instructions to Timothy he says rather bluntly,

1TI 5:8 But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever.

But that’s just the foundation

upon which God then begins to reveal to us

those special redemptive works He has just for us,

things He seeks to do through us

that will literally alter the course of life for good

in those He has placed into our care.

And here’s the way this thing works.

As we grow in our ability to hear His voice,

we will discover that He will begin to give us eyes to see needs in the lives of those around us

that no one else seems to see,

needs that we are uniquely equipped to meet.

I know that when the word “need” comes up

we are conditioned to think in terms of financial need,

and certainly there are times when that’s what He shows us.

I remember many, many years ago,

long before this fellowship even existed,

at a time in our lives when our car was literally held together with Campbell’s soup cans,

the Spirit of God made Sandee and me aware of a financial need in another family.

When they were gone for a few hours

we snuck into their house and put a hundred dollar bill on their kitchen table.

They never knew who did it,

and we didn’t want them to.

But most of the time the redemptive work God has for us

has nothing whatsoever to do with money.

It has everything to do with our communicating to another person

the truth about themselves

and the truth about their God.

And how in the world do we do that?

Every time we relate to another person

in a way that is consistent with the way God relates to them

we accomplish the work of God in their lives.

Every time we treat them with respect, with dignity,

every time we show them grace and kindness rather than condemnation,

every time we create for them

a truly safe, protected environment in which they can heal, or grow, or hurt without fear

we accomplish the work of God in this world.

And right here is the thing I’ve been aiming at since I started -

God has equipped each one of us

with the ability to do those things

in certain, specific ways that affect certain specific lives.

And when we recognize those places, those lives,

and then fulfill that calling,

it feeds our spirits as nothing else can do.

It literally feeds our souls.

And if you’ve experienced that feeding process in your own life

you know exactly what I’m saying.

And you understand what Christ was saying

when He said, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to accomplish His work.”

And once we begin to understand what God is actually doing in this process

it will transform our lives dramatically

because our lives take on a sense of purpose and fulfillment

unlike anything we’ve ever experienced before.

The problem we so often run into, however,

is that there are also a whole spectrum of things we pack into our lives

that God never intended for us to have,

things that don’t feed our spirits,

things that simply clutter up our lives.

And if you want to know what God has for you,

and where he wants you to invest yourself

my advice is simple.

Look to what feeds you.

Look to what brings you some level of satisfaction and fulfillment at the soul level.

And when you do

you may be very surprised at what you see.

But whatever it is,

embrace it as God’s unique gift and unique calling to you, His precious child.

And then actively, aggressively seek to remove the clutter

that interferes with those things that truly feed your soul.