Living Water (eBook)

Studies in John 4

Martyn Lloyd-Jones (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2009 | 1. Auflage
736 Seiten
Crossway (Verlag)
978-1-4335-5202-1 (ISBN)

Infos

This substantial volume includes more than fifty never-before-published expository sermons on John 4 from one of the twentieth century's greatest preachers. It was just a conversation between two people by the side of a well in Samaria. One, a local woman, came to perform her daily task of drawing water. Another, a Jewish man tired from traveling, sat down for a drink. But he wasn't just any Jewish man, and this wasn't just any conversation. The man, Jesus, revealed himself as the Messiah, leading to the conversion of not only the Samaritan woman but many from her town. Now, for the first time, fifty-six sermons by Martyn Lloyd-Jones on this passage of Scripture are available in Living Water. Lloyd-Jones, known for his ability to clearly communicate profound theological concepts, digs into this familiar passage from the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John, exposing fresh layers of truth. His perceptive analysis is helpful for all who thirst for the living water that only Jesus can provide.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899-1981), minister of Westminster Chapel in London for thirty years, was one of the foremost preachers of his day. His many books have brought profound spiritual encouragement to millions around the world.

Textauszug

1

The Possibilities of the Christian Life

Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. (John 4:13–14)

I would like to consider with you the famous story of our Lord’s meeting with the woman of Samaria, which is found in the fourth chapter of John’s Gospel. It is difficult to think of any particular text from that chapter because I want to consider the story with you in general, but perhaps it is only right that we should isolate verses 13–14. I am not proposing to expound these verses now. I want merely to introduce the subject.

For some time now we have been studying John’s Gospel [Editor’s note: in earlier sermons), and we have been doing this in a particular manner.1 Our concern has not been so much to go through the Gospel verse by verse as to expound and illustrate its great central theme. And I have been suggesting that the theme, in many ways, is to be found in the sixteenth verse of the first chapter where we read, “And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.” In other words, the theme of this Gospel is the fullness of the Lord Jesus Christ available for his people; or, to put it another way, the theme of this Gospel is eternal life.

In John 10 we read that our Lord said, “The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (v. 10), and we see that same emphasis here in John 4. So we are picking out that theme because this is, after all, what Christianity means, this is the Christian offer, the Christian possibility. Our whole trouble, surely, is that we fail to realize this: we are ever reducing the gospel, making something small out of it, something that we do, our practice of religion. The tragedy is that we think of our own selves and our busyness and our own activity instead of realizing that there is the wonderful possibility of receiving his fullness and more and more of it, “grace for [or upon] grace,” “springing up into everlasting life.” And this failure, it seems to me, is the greatest tragedy of all.

In the church today the tendency is to look at the world all the time and to see the tragedy of the world. That is perfectly right, of course; the church is to be evangelistic. But the question is, how is the church to be evangelistic? And I contend that what the New Testament itself tells us, and what the history of the church tells us, is that the church is most successful evangelistically when she herself is as she ought to be. Why are the masses of the people outside the church? I do not hesitate to say that the reason is that they fail to see in us anything that attracts them, anything that creates within them a desire to receive what we have, or anything that rebukes them and condemns them for their way of living. Not that we should necessarily put that into words, but it should be seen.

It was by the quality of its life that the church conquered the ancient world, and that is how she has always conquered during times of reformation and revival. It is revival that has been the greatest means of evangelism, and revival means Christian people, members of the Christian church, suddenly being awakened by the power and the enlightenment of the Spirit to the possibilities of the Christian life. And there is no doubt, I repeat, that the trouble at the present time is that we are living so far short of what is offered to us and of what is possible to us.

Have we received our Lord’s fullness? Are we receiving it progressively? These are the all-important questions. If this well of water is not within us, we are not only robbing ourselves of the riches of his grace, but we also become unworthy representatives of the gospel, and the world outside remains in ignorance and in darkness. So the high road to revival and to evangelism is a church that realizes what she ought to be, what she can be. And when I say, “church,” I mean, of course, every one of us as individuals. The church consists of a number of believers. It is not something theoretical, on paper. It is you, it is I, it is all of us. And so we face this great theme together.

Now the fullness of life available to us is, I repeat, the theme of John’s Gospel. Sometimes the message is explicit and direct, as we have it here, and sometimes the Gospel puts it in terms of an anecdote, a story, an illustration—how our Lord called certain men, or how he behaved at the marriage feast in Cana of Galilee or in the Temple in Jerusalem, or how he dealt with a man called Nicodemus (the great theme of the third chapter of John). So it is direct and indirect, explicit and implicit. But it is always there. The wonderful thing about the Gospels is that they present their teaching to us in such an interesting variety of ways. Further, the teaching is most instructive with regard to the hindrances that block our receiving this fullness. The Gospels are of great value to us because humanity does not change, we are all still the same. So here, in these pictures, we see how people stumbled and what it was that held them back from this blessing, and this remains true today. So we take up this theme of the fullness of life offered by our Lord, and we take it up in terms of this great old familiar story of our Lord’s dealings with the woman of Samaria.

Now it is customary to take this incident, this story, in an evangelistic sense. The woman is an unbeliever, and we are shown here how she is brought to belief. But though that is true, the message is as applicable to us as believers as it is to an unbeliever. For the astounding thing is that even when we have come into the Christian life, we tend to go on repeating the same old mistakes and carry over with us certain characteristics and habits. The apostle Paul makes this very point in dealing with the members of the church at Corinth. They had believed the gospel, they were Christian people, and he writes to them as a church, but this is what he says to them: “I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able” (1 Cor. 3:2). “And I still have to do that,” he says in effect, “because of your condition. Though you are now Christians, you are reverting to the old way of thinking, and I must get you out of that. The principles of the gospel are still the same.” That was the essence of the primary problem at Corinth. They were tending to introduce their old worldly wisdom even into the message concerning the cross. So Paul had to go back to first principles, and he constantly had to repeat them all the way through the epistle.

It is the simplest thing in the world for me to show you that the way in which our Lord handles this woman of Samaria is not only applicable to the handling of an unbeliever but also of believers who for some reason or another have not known much about this fullness and “grace for grace,” who have known very little about this condition in which we “never thirst.” So let us look at this story from this standpoint—it is put before us in a dramatic manner. For now I just want to introduce it to you because there are many general lessons here that we neglect at our peril. Indeed, some of these general lessons are, I think we will agree, among the most encouraging and moving aspects of this whole doctrine.

There are just two people to consider—the woman of Samaria and our blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Let us look at this woman for a moment. What do we learn from her as we consider her in general? The first thing, surely—and this is wonderful—is that the great and glorious blessing of the Christian gospel is offered to all types of people. This is what I have sometimes described as the romantic element in the gospel, and in these Scriptures you cannot help being struck by it. Take, for instance, the third chapter of John, which is mainly given over to that great man Nicodemus, a ruler of Israel, an erudite man, an important man in every respect. You cannot imagine a greater contrast than that between Nicodemus and the woman of Samaria; yet the same Lord deals with the two people, and he is concerned about precisely the same message.

Look at the contrast: man—woman; Jew—Samaritan. These are not just empty terms. In verse 9 of John 4 we are told in passing that Jews had no dealings with Samaritans. We will have to come to the specific meaning of that later. But there was an old feud, an old trouble, between them, so that in the ancient world Nicodemus, a Jew, and the woman, a Samaritan, presented a remarkable contrast. There was also, of course, the contrast, between men and women. Whatever else Christianity may have done, it has been the overriding power that has liberated woman and given her a standing that she had never had before. In the ancient world women were despised, and it was felt that certain things were not possible to them at all. But one of the central themes of the gospel is that in Christ Jesus, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28)—which means that from the standpoint of salvation, from the standpoint of obtaining these great and glorious blessings, the distinction between male and female is gone. This is a misunderstanding that should never have come about...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 14.1.2009
• Verlagsort: Wheaton
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Christentum
• Schlagworte: Ancient World • Apostle • Bible • Bible story • Bible study • Biblical • Book of John • Christian • Christian History • Christianity • Christian Life • christian living • easy to understand • expository • Forgiveness • gods word • Gospel • Holy Book • Jesus • Literary Analysis • Messiah • never before published • new publications • Pastor • Prayer • Preacher • Preaching • Prophet • Redemption • Religion • Religious Studies • Salvation • Scripture • scripture study • Sermon • Spiritual
• ISBN-10: 1-4335-5202-7 / 1433552027
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4335-5202-1 / 9781433552021