The Missing Name

They were saying to the woman, "It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves and know that this One is indeed the Savior of the world." (John 4:42)

I am starting to see that this verse exposes one of the greatest weaknesses in the experience of most Christians. And I have to include myself in that category.

The woman who met Jesus out at the well has never been identified with a name, so we have to use descriptive labels like 'the woman at the well' or 'the woman of Samaria'. Why is this? Did she not get enough respect to be identified by name simply because she was a woman and came from the wrong lineage? Or maybe there is another reason.

As I reflect back on the reading for today from My Utmost for His Highest I realize a very important principle here. Many of us spend a great deal of our focus on our own religious experience and we talk and testify about our feelings, our problems and how much better we feel when Jesus comes near. I don't want to discount that because many times God uses one person's experience to resonate in another person's heart to attract them into a deeper relationship with His own heart.

But there is serious danger of allowing our relationship with God to stagnate at the emotional level and never really drop into the vital area that may feel too threatening to us. Anything that feels threatening about getting close to God is always due to some resistance inside of us, some lie about God that we firmly believe is true and that we cling to above what God says is true. Our heart, though it still contains a lot of original wiring and design created there by God, is corrupted by sin and the effects that sin has permanently caused which taints and distorts every desire and every attempt to help salvage ourselves. No matter how much we may crave to be free from sin and its effects or how much we strive to be a good person to avoid the consequences of bad behavior, selfishness remains as the subtle poison that neutralizes every decision that we make and compromises our noblest thoughts and deeds.

Sin is far more diabolical than almost anyone can begin to imagine and extremely more deceptive than we can conceive. Deception by its very nature cloaks itself as fact so a person who is deceived cannot realize they are deceived unless it is revealed to them by divine intervention. Until we are exposed to the true light that flows from heaven through the presence of Jesus and was revealed to this world through His life and death, we are living in the light of sparks of our own making and will remain blind to what is really true and cannot experience true salvation.

So, what does this have to do with the identity of this woman that met Jesus and suddenly became a highly successful evangelist? I think it may have a lot to do with it. You see, what was really taking place in this story was the awakening of faith in the hearts of many people (the least of which was the disciples evidently). But faith came wide awake in the heart of this woman and true faith is always highly contagious. She raced back into town with her faith all ablaze and began to ignite other hearts with faith that were craving to to be warmed all over town in just a few short minutes until a crowd was running out to the well to find the source of all this fire for themselves.

What is one of the most important truths that can be seen in all of this? It is this – that faith, saving faith is never focused on myself but must always be intensely focused on God and who God is and what He is really like as revealed in Jesus no matter what I have felt before or believed or learned from religion. If faith is not seen obsessed with knowing Jesus for myself personally, compelled to get deeper into His mind and heart and being transformed in the process, then it is something other than saving faith.

I have lived far too long with the version of faith that is seen in religious circles. We know almost nothing of the Bible definition of true faith even though we can quote texts to prove that we do. We often speak of faith as something that maybe we must somehow work up on our own as if it was something we can generate with our minds. I can remember as a child immersed in this human view of faith derived from all the talk about faith that I heard and concluded that faith must be the absence of any trace of unbelief – that if I could somehow eliminate any thought from crossing my mind that something I prayed for would not happen then I would finally have real faith.

Now I see that that view of faith is the sister of the same fallacy that I was learned relating to righteousness. Many of us feel and believe in our heart that to be truly righteous we must eliminate every sinful habit and action and thought from our life and then we might be righteous. But creating a more intense vacuum in our heart does not induce righteousness to flourish there, it only sets us up to suddenly be filled with frustration and rage when we realize too late that we have been duped by a counterfeit version of religion that used Scriptures and religious jargon to keep us busy all of our lives trying to get right with God and appeasing religious people around us.

True faith is always spontaneous and saving faith is like the electricity that flows through an unimpeded circuit from one source to another outlet. As Oswald Chambers puts it in the passage for today, Never nourish an experience which has not God as its Source, and faith in God as its result. If you do, your experience is anti-Christian, no matter what visions you may have had.

So I come back to the potential reason that we still don't know the name of this woman who was such a compelling example of both conversion and evangelism. Why could such a successful one be brushed aside by the Bible writers as almost insignificant when her example is such a powerful model for us to emulate? Again I defer to Oswald Chamber's most helpful insights from today's reading.

When I am born again, the Spirit of God takes me right out of myself and my experiences, and identifies me with Jesus Christ. If I am left with my experiences, my experiences have not been produced by Redemption. The proof that they are produced by Redemption is that I am led out of myself all the time; I no longer pay any attention to my experiences as the ground of Reality, but only to the Reality which produced the experiences. My experiences are not worth anything unless they keep me at the Source, Jesus Christ. (Chambers, Oswald: My Utmost for His Highest December 21)

The very fact that this woman did not even get named in the Bible is actually evidence that she was far more effective and closer to the real model for a true witness than nearly everyone else. She was so passionately focused on Jesus exclusively that everything she did and said after her encounter with Him was to draw attention to Him alone and not to herself. She had received the same spirit that motivated John the Baptist as he told his disciples, He must increase but I must decrease. This was not some sort of self-flagellating martyrdom complex to make himself look pious but was the evidence that God's own self-forgetful, other-centered passionate love was motivating and filling his own heart.

How much of this spirit is seen in the lives of our popular public evangelists today? How much of the open humility seen in the deference to Jesus by this woman and by John the Baptist is evident in the spirit and words and actions of those claiming to represent Jesus to the world now? We may be bringing thousands of people into an apparent belief in Jesus and accruing a long list of achievements for 'the kingdom', but I sometimes wonder just what kingdom we are really working for – God's selfless kingdom of real love or our own kingdoms of religion or denominations?

The progression seen in the final verses of this story verify the kind of spirit that was at work here. First of all the woman encounters Jesus and a selfless love that she had never knew was possible to experience. She was so animated by this passionate love that she could not contain it within herself and compulsively ran to those who had previously scorned and shamed her to entice them to encounter this love for themselves. Her very spontaneous and concise testimony was so effective that many flocked out to see for themselves this thing that sounded too good to be true. But they could not catch what she had experienced as quickly as she had so they insisted that Jesus stay with them so they could have more time to check Him out and see if He was for real.

As they allowed the presence of Jesus to be exposed to their own hearts and others that had not initially gone out to meet Him, many more lives were warmed and converted by their own personal exposure to the true light that had come into the world to light up all of our lives. The evangelism initiated by an obscure woman's encounter with a man like no other in her life resulted in two days of some of the most successful evangelism ever seen in history. And it all happened because people were exposed to and received without resistance the real truth about God as shown in the kindness, love and grace of the One sent to reveal the heart of the Father.

As these new converts reflected on how they came into such an encounter of belief, they confirmed the method that the woman had used to introduce them to Jesus initially. She had not tried to convince them of anything whatsoever; she had simply posed a question and displayed unmistakable evidence of a transformation that every human desires deep in their soul. Given the selfless nature of her total focus on drawing people's attention to Jesus alone they told her later that it was indeed their own encounter with Him that really made the difference, not just her words.

This is so important but so easy to overlook. We think far too much of our carefully assembled presentations and logical arrangement of arguments and proof texts and elaborate extravaganzas for soul-winning. But where is the radiating authentic joy emanating from faces of people who have encountered a man like no man ever met before? Doctrines are about as compelling to falling in love with Jesus as a skeleton can induce someone to fall in love. While bones may be very necessary for the existence of a body, they were never intended to be the main feature of attraction. Just so, the beauty that is supposed to connect us to our only hope and Source of life for eternity cannot be found in intellectual discourses or even compelling, irrefutable arguments. Insisting that we must keep the law of God before we have had our hearts ravished by the ultimate lover will never produce the kind of saving faith that is needed for a meaningful and transformational relationship with God.

I will be the first to quickly confess that I need this kind of encounter myself as much as anyone needs it. It is one thing to see these truths with the mind but another altogether to have the face lit up with that kind of joy. But this woman did not scour the world looking for God and finally discovered Him standing at a well; God knew she was going to be there and He arranged all the circumstances to cause this story to unfold. If God does not take the initiative to reveal Himself to each of us we can never find Him by searching ourselves. On the other hand, if we resist His revelations to our heart in deference to the prejudices and preconceived ideas of religion we may miss experiencing the only thing our hearts were designed for.

Father, show me Your face today, Your beautiful face of compassion and love and grace.