Their Word - His Word

From that city many of the Samaritans believed in Him because of the word of the woman who testified.... Many more believed because of His word; (John 4:39-41)

I never cease to be amazed at the infinite flow of new insights that God can bring out of any passage. I am amazed over and over – but no longer surprised very often. Since I first started the practice of reading God's Word inductively I have learned that there is no bottom to the depth of His wisdom and no limit to what the Spirit is willing to impart. The limitations that we so often perceive in our study of the Word is usually due to our lack of patience, our lack of willingness to stay put long enough to perceive more, our unwillingness to lay aside preconceived opinions and our dullness of heart that prevents us from hearing the voice of the Spirit more clearly.

Over the past few years I have been learning to meditate more intentionally and to expect the unexpected, to be easily challenged about my own preconceptions and beliefs. I realize that if I am in the Word and have asked God to surround me with His Spirit and presence that I am in a safe place and do not need to worry about being misled. If I am willing and desire to be mentored by Him, He is faithful and even eager to share more about Himself with me, to train me with ideas unfamiliar to me from my previous training and to reshape the way I perceive reality and the way I see God.

As I came back again to this passage the first thing that I noticed was the connection between these two verses and that there is likely something important here that I should take time to ponder and to listen. If I am willing to listen then God is willing to reveal a little more of Himself and in the process advance my heart in the process of healing and restoration.

This verse says that many believed because of the testimony of this woman.

I hear a lot about our need to testify, to speak openly about God, to share what God has done and is doing in our lives. There are hundreds of programs and seminars and all sorts of materials centered around soul-winning through witnessing and testifying. It used to be popular to have what was called “testimony meetings” where it was supposed that people could get up and tell what God was doing in their lives that week. But as I recall most of what was talked about seemed more centered on the good fortunes of that person or the misfortunes that befell them with only sometimes a tagline near the end mentioning God or asking others to pray for them.

I have been baffled by the various uses of the word “testimony” over the years and have even become rather leery of those who are quick to promote programs of this nature. I was forced as a child to go out and hand out literature or collect donations from mostly unwilling townspeople in the name of witnessing that left a very bad taste in my memories. It all seemed so staged, so shallow and even hypocritical most of the time. It never involved speaking out what was in the heart even though those words may have been used as part of the training process. It was always along the line of memorizing some key phrases or methodically color coding our Bibles and pasting a chain of proof texts into the back of our Bibles to prove some unique doctrine that we were supposed to convince someone else to embrace.

Yet through all the years that I have lived and observed people using these techniques to bring more people into the church, I have seldom sensed the passion and love and warmth that emanates from someone like what must have taken place as a result of what this woman did to attract a whole city to come out and meet Jesus for themselves.

It is undeniable that whatever it was this woman did, it produced unprecedented success as far as our measurements of evangelistic success goes. Many people would give nearly anything to have the kind of response that this woman had in her very first efforts, yet she had no training, no theology coaching, no memorized speech or anything of the sort. Clearly she must have understood something or did something that made her efforts far more effective in returns that the millions of dollars many today spend each year trying to impress the world to change their minds about some particular brand of religion.

On the other hand, in our quest for discovering just the right formula for “success” we can fall easily into the trap of trying to zero in on whatever it takes to wow people, to excite them and gravitate toward whatever produces the greatest reactions. This can create problems of its own as we end up copying what seems to be working for others and studying their methods to see how we can imitate their techniques in order to catch more “fish” like they are doing. But often in the process we end up compromising or seeking to supply power and efficiency that God would do far better at providing if we were more dependent on Him than on our own grandiose plans.

Clearly this woman did not spend any money on her evangelistic campaign that I can see in this story. She did not mount a strategy of conducting Torah studies ahead of her public announcements about the Messiah waiting outside town and she did not even outline a series of beliefs that people needed to embrace in order to conform to the truth. The simplicity of her testifying strikes us so strongly that we are tempted to believe that her enormous success may have just been 'the luck of the draw', that maybe she just accidentally did the right thing and got lucky like pulling the lever of a slot machine at just the right time. That sounds a bit crass when it is put that way, but then we sometimes feel the need to justify why we are willing to pour thousands of dollars again and again into meetings, programs, seminars ad naseum without seeing any significant results year after year.

Why can't we see results even half as effective as this woman had within minutes? What is wrong with our formulas? Are we not saying the right words? Not enthusiastic enough? Not smart enough? Not socially connected enough? Not holding our mouth right...?

Why are we so dull and stymied to the point that we can't even perceive where our problem might be? Where to even begin to look for what is preventing our efforts from having the effect on other lives that this woman's efforts obviously produced? Is there anything we can glean from this woman's techniques that might increase the returns on our investments?

A few years ago during a heated political campaign a phrase became very popular promoted by one party trying to discredit the opposition. People began to hear everywhere they went, “It's the economy, stupid!” After awhile it got to be a joke until it died away not long after the elections.

What made me think of this was a phrase that we might well benefit from in trying to figure out why many of our efforts produce such little lasting results. It might be well for us to say to ourselves on a regular basis, “It's the heart, stupid!” when trying to understand why we seem so ineffective in reaching out to others.

Over the past few years and especially quite recently I am becoming more and more keenly aware of how dull and damaged and confused my own heart is about reality and my ability to perceive God correctly. The more I see what is inside of me the more sick I feel emotionally. I remind myself that this may be a good sign; that the worse I see the truth about what is inside of me the more likely it is that that very awareness is evidence that the light of God is getting closer to me exposing all of this. That well may be true, but I feel an intense need to see God's goodness and power far more clearly if it is ever to overcome the power of sin that I am starting to see inside of me and all around me. I very much need to have a much larger and compelling vision of a great God that outstrips the ability of sin to manipulate me and control me. I need to come across Jesus personally at the heart level just as this woman did because I am becoming more and more aware of my own sick condition that this woman felt before she met Jesus.

Maybe I am like one of the people in town on the receiving end of this woman's announcement that Jesus is waiting to see me out by the well. I do know that my heart is increasingly hungry for something much better and more effective and powerful that the left-brain form of religion I see all around me. That is not to say that a lot of religion is not emotional. But emotional religion does not equate to genuine heart-based spiritual encounters with the living God. I have been getting tastes of these encounters with God which has greatly increased my desires for Him, but it also exposes more clearly the magnitude of my own thirst and hunger.

Maybe I am like the townspeople who believed because of this woman's testimony. I am moving into belief, I am encountering God for myself or at least am approaching Him. Many of the people in this town said to the woman later that they had believed initially because of her words to them, but after they spent several days with Jesus themselves their level of belief transitioned from dependence on her testimony to a solid foundation of their own encounters with Him personally.

Maybe that is the transition that I am craving and longing for right now. I feel dissatisfied with the heart-level of my religion yet at this point. I feel an increasing pressure to move past some major internal obstacles to break into a far deeper level of spiritual transformation in God's plan for me. It is hard for me to even identity what those obstacles are but I am getting impatient with them and seeking for God to expose them and remove them so I can see His face much more clearly. I want what this woman had just as her 'friends' wanted whatever it was they saw in her face and body language when she came rushing into town that day. I want to find Jesus at the well for myself and to have Him come home with me and spend more intense personal time with me.

There is a difference between the kind of belief that comes from someone else's testimony about Jesus, as important and vital as that is, and the kind of belief that comes from personal encounters and tutoring by Jesus Himself. That is what I am seeing in this passage this morning. I hear other's testimonies on Christian television programs that move my heart. I occasionally hear testimonies from people in person that make me long to experience God like they seem to be doing. All of these are important drawing influences for me that God uses to attract me closer to Himself.

But these is another whole level, a dimension beyond what most of us ever experience that I strive to experience for myself. There is something I desire that I cannot even describe at this point because I have not been there yet fully to know what it is like. I have heard descriptions of it from others who appear to be there but until a person experiences something for themselves it does no good to parrot the symptoms as seen in the lives of others. I want my life to be a fountain of living water springing up from a transformed heart full of the passion and love of the Father dwelling in me. I want my life to be full of spontaneous love, not forced religion.

I am becoming aware of some key areas in my life that I believe are going to be strongly affected when I encounter what I want God to do in me. These are core areas of thinking and feeling that I watch as indicators and that I believe cannot stay the same if I experience what I see in the lives of people like the woman in this story. I am going to feel love for certain people that right now is sadly missing in my emotional bank at this point. I am praying for that deeper level of conversion, that personal face to face shock of transformation when I finally see Jesus in a far more dramatic encounter that eclipses the attraction induced in my by the testimonies of others.

Father, give me that experience with Jesus now.