Pastor Jerry Zepnick's sermon 'A Divine Appointment' focuses on the interaction between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well, as recounted in John chapter 4. He emphasizes that the purpose of the Gospel of John is to affirm that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing in Him grants eternal life. The sermon contrasts Nicodemus, a religious elite, with the Samaritan woman, a social outcast, to illustrate that Jesus' message of salvation is universal, transcending social and cultural barriers. Pastor Zepnick highlights the importance of evangelism, urging Christians to share their faith actively. He stresses that divine appointments, like Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman, demonstrate God's pursuit of individuals and the transformative power of His love and grace. The sermon calls for believers to be open to God's leading in sharing the Gospel and to recognize their own spiritual journey in the story of the Samaritan woman.

Morning, family. So this morning, we are going to continue in the book of John. We are gonna crack into chapter four, and we have another amazing account here. And so instead of talk about it, I'm just gonna read it. I'm gonna be in chapter four verses one through nine today.

Not really going to cover the whole thing, but we'll be going back and forth as we move on with it. But it's another amazing account of a dialogue that Christ has with someone. And so let's start, if you want to follow along, chapter 4, verses 1 through 9. Therefore, when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John, though Jesus Himself did not baptize, but His disciples. He left Judea and departed again to Galilee, but He needed to go through Samaria.

So He came to a city of Samaria, which is called Sychor, near the plot of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Now Jacob's well was there. Jesus therefore being wearied from his journey, sat thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour. A woman of Samaria came to draw water.

Jesus said to her, Give me a drink. For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food. Then the woman of Samaria said to him, How is it that you, being a Jew, ask a drink from me, a Samaritan woman? For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. Let's pray.

Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you for your word, as powerful as it is, Lord God. Pray for it to open and work in My heart, Lord God, and those who hear, Lord. Thank you for this excellent example that you've preserved, Lord, for us to go through. Just pray for your spirit to do work today, in Jesus' name, Amen.

So, this is another amazing account. And while we're talking about the Samaritan woman and she comes to the well, or Jesus comes to the well, and I don't wanna bog us down and get us away from the focus of this, which is chapter 20, verse 31, where the reality and the purpose of the book of John is this, but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, not believing you may have life in His name. And so when we go through this text today and for the next couple of weeks, we're gonna see this, what would appear to be a focus on what would be evangelism outgoing, or the woman's conversion. That is not the focus right here. It is main.

It is big. It is right there. But the main focus is that John is trying to have us understand that Jesus is the Christ, that he is the author and finisher of your faith. And without that, we have nothing else. And so that's why this is written.

I want to lay that out right away, but there are some amazing things in here. And what we see In recapping where we've come so far, so many amazing things, and it comes down to 3.16 in a lot of ways, for God loved, for God so loved. He gave us His son, Jesus Christ. This is the gospel of Jesus Christ. And if we miss that, we've missed the focus, the point.

And that's wrong. That's a crime. And so we learn a couple of things right away. And that is who Jesus is. And aside from that, the salvation that he offers.

And we can't get outside of these parameters without starting to make our own gospel. We need to stay within the parameters of the reality of the Word of God. And so today we're going to see also what evangelism looks like. And as we go through this, I started to think as I studied through it, what percent of Christians today or professing Christians actually evangelize? Actually give the word of God out to other people because it is so big in the text today, it just, it came up with me.

What can we assume is the average percentage of Christians that actually go out and evangelize, that go out and share their faith with other people. And off of that, what percentage of those that do not share the gospel with other people have trouble in their Christian walk consistently. Because I really see that faith in us and the ability to give the gospel to other people, inspires us to live a functional Christian life. And if you're not able to give that gospel of Jesus Christ to the lost, It's gotta affect our Christian walk on the other side of it. I don't see how we can really function as Christians in and across life without giving that gospel out.

And so today we do see a perfect picture of evangelism in Jesus. And this is something that Brother Gary, in talking with us about the persecuted church today too, how important that is to meet people where they're at. But In this text today, well, I'm going to go back a couple weeks ago, we had a guy by the name of Nicodemus. And when we talked about Nicodemus, we saw the profile of the man. The profile of the man was right up here.

Okay, he was a social elite. He was a religious zealot. He was right on top of that Pharisee food chain, I'll say. Everybody came to him for answers. He was looked up to.

He dressed right. He walked right. He talked right. He had the proper education from a child. And he was likely an extremely intelligent man.

And yet, he came to Christ. He still came to Christ. And so, that childlike faith had to be in there somewhere for Him to actually come to Christ. And so today in the text, we have what is the polar opposite. And so we have a woman, not a man, a woman.

Now that's offensive when I say it from the pulpit today, but back then it was different. Okay, Women didn't go in public a lot, and when they did, men couldn't talk to them. I'll get into that later. And so Nicodemus came to talk theology with Jesus, and he wanted to hammer that out. This woman, she was just there.

She just came to the well in the middle of the day. And so she was the opposite. She was an outcast. She was a sinner. She was morally bankrupt.

And you know what? The answer was still the same. It was the same with Nicodemus as it was with this low life, this scum of the earth. Not these perfect people up here, but the scum of the earth down here. And so, the answer was the same.

You must be born again. Behold the Lamb of God. To behold, to be born again, unless one is born again, you cannot see the Kingdom of God. So that stays the same across the board right there. And so Jesus came to save sinners and He saved sinners that are elites and He saved sinners that are not.

And He saves everybody in between. And so I can't imagine a person at a higher elite scale than Nicodemus, or a person on a lower scale than what this woman, this nameless woman at the well. That's how she goes down into Bible history. Woman, hey woman, woman at the well. You know what?

Her faith was in the end a testimony to others, but In the text, what we see is that he cared for both of them the same. The Gospel is straight across the board. Six feet of dirt make all men equal. Who said that? Spurgeon?

Okay, so it really didn't matter. So in the text today, Jesus has a huge ministry. He's got a popular ministry. It's growing like crazy. It seems to have drawn more people than what John the Baptist's ministry is, and more people are being baptized by Jesus than John.

And so what happens, there's a little turmoil going on between the two ministries maybe, but then with the Pharisees seeing what Jesus is teaching. It's contrary to this works base, you gotta pay a lot of money type of gig that the Pharisees had going on at the time. And so Jesus had a repent and be saved. And so this was the ministry of Jesus and it clashed with what the Pharisees had taught. They saw competition there.

And Jesus in His divinity knew the hearts of men, like it says in chapter 2, verses 24 and 5. He knows the hearts of men. And He knew the heart of Nicodemus. He knows the heart of this woman at the well. He knew the hearts of the Pharisees and he just skipped out of there.

He left. So he moved on to a very important divine appointment that he had, a divine appointment that he had. And that divine appointment was for one person. It was for one person. And so Jesus has this huge popular ministry and everything was dropped for that one person, for that one single person.

This doesn't match the way that we think in ministry today. Some people, praise God, it does, and I'm encouraged by that, but Jesus came to save sinners. And so if you're here today and you're a sinner, you qualify. And so this is the work of, that's his business. And so in this text, This is who he came for.

And I'm gonna read just on the back of this a little bit, chapter nine, Matthew chapter nine, verses 12 and 13. I'm gonna start at verse nine. As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax office and he said to him, follow me, so he rose and followed him. Now it happened as Jesus sat at the table in the house that behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples. And here's where we, not yet.

And when the Pharisees saw it, they said to his disciples, why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners? And here's where we pick up. When Jesus heard that, He said to them, those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. But go and learn what this means. I desire mercy, not sacrifice.

For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. This is the point. I've got four points in my message today and I'm already going to start the first one right now. That first one is that divine appointment. That divine appointment.

That's verses one through four where Jesus leaves Judea because of this growing conflict that's going on there. But he has this divine purpose to pass through Samaria and it's not just geographical. So Samaria was a place that Jews did not want to pass through And it took three days to go from where he was to where he was going. And now if he took and went and crossed the Jordan and took another path, which is what a lot of Jews did, because they didn't want to pass through Samaria. They didn't want to have that blight on their record.

They could get to their destination and say, I came the long way. And they get a pat on the back. And so this is how horrible that relationship was between Jews and Samaritans. But his mission was knocking down walls. His mission was to go the shortest direction, the quickest way.

He ended up going through Samaria to this well and there he met this woman at the well. Now, where he left, and the people he was teaching would have probably gotten their feathers ruffled if they would have known that he was talking to a Samaritan woman. If they'd have known that he was maybe even that he was going down through there. And you know that God's doing a work in this whole situation, because in the text it says, for his disciples had gone into town to buy food. You See, Jews didn't even go into Samaria.

God is already at work knocking down walls here. And so this is a mission that He's on to reach one specific soul. This is not the only place that this happens. See, the Christian life is full of surprises. And I think if you've been a Christian for long, you understand this, and you've been surprised.

You can plot your path and you can say, here's where I'm going, and this is how I'm going to get there. And then next thing you know, you're standing at a pulpit talking. And so this is a life that's full of surprises, but the reality is that His love is for all of humanity, and that's our job as His children to not have barriers up. And so this other example, I remember when we were working our way through the book of Mark, chapter 5, actually chapter 4, when Jesus was preaching and He said, well, it was getting too busy, the crowd was too pressing, He said, let's get in a boat and go to the other side. And so, all the disciples piled into the boat, They're going across the Sea of Galilee.

Jesus falls asleep in the back of the boat. You remember the account, right? Okay, a storm rolls up. They all are fearing for their dear lives and Jesus is still sleeping in the back of the boat, they wake him up, ye of little faith. Calms the storm, they get to the other side and the point I remember of that message was that He promises to get us to the other side.

Not the ride there to be one of comfort and joy. And too often, we as Christians, we think, well, this is just gonna be a cruise, you know? This can be easy. And we know that's not the case. Jesus is standing at a well, sweaty, stinky, dirty, tired.

It's not an easy situation. Why should we have an easier trip than our Savior? And so finally, they got to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gardenians. And when he had come out of the boat, immediately there met him. Out of the tombs, a man with an unclean spirit who had his dwelling among the tombs and no one could bind him, not even with chains.

This is the welcome that you get as soon as you get out of the boat. You're scared to death, your eyes are big, you're soaking wet and cold. And this maniac, demon possessed man came running up to them and Jesus cast the demons out of Him. They go into the pigs. The pigs all drown.

And then the people that lived there, they didn't want Him there. They wanted him to leave. The disciples get back in the boat. And Jesus is in the boat. And then verses 18-20, it says, And when he had got into the boat, he who had been demon possessed begged Him that He might be with him.

However, Jesus did not permit him, but said to him, Go home to your friends and tell them what great things the Lord has done for you and how He has had compassion on you. And he departed and began to proclaim in Decapolis all that Jesus had done for him and all marveled." And so, This just got real. Okay? When Jesus did that for us, I remember when I was demon possessed, when I was living for the devil, when I was of the world, and Christ saved me, I wanted to tell everyone I could not be held down. It was something that I could not keep within myself.

And so this becomes real when we put ourselves in this picture. When we put ourselves in these stories, and if it's the woman at the well or if it's this man, we have to realistically, we're given these pictures because we're stupid, okay? We're given these stories, these accounts, because just given words, it's hard for us to understand. And so we can take these accounts and we can say, oh, this is me. This was me at one time.

I understand this now. And so that's how it is. And we also have an example where we see that Chase read this morning about God's relentless, endless love for us. He leaves the 99 to search for the 1. And so in Matthew 18, this is a different account than what Chase read, but 12 through 14.

What do you think if a man has a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray, does he not leave the 99 and go to the mountains to seek the one that is straying. And if he should find it, assuredly I say to you, he rejoices more over that sheep than over the 99 that did not go astray. Even so, it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish. It's not God's will that one should perish, but that all should come. And that is the account that we're talking about today.

Jesus walked away from the 99 for the one. The one appointment that He had. So Jesus does all of this in His love and His grace and His mercy to come down and scoop up one more lost sheep. Isn't that it? That's what He did with me.

He used many resources, many people, a lot of prayer power, and by God's grace and that alone, came down and picked up one more. And that's what it is with every one of us. It is a victim of God's love and grace and mercy to come down and take one more. And that's what we need to pray when we look at this account. I have a mother who's lost.

I have a brother who's lost. I have friends that are lost. Maybe there's those here that don't know Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior that He would just come down and just scoop up just one more. In His perfect plan, in his mercy to humanity, that he would just come and just take one more. See, this is how important one's soul is to Jesus, to take 12 people and himself and go traipsing through the desert, down the road, three days' journey.

And it's not like he was saving a king. He was saving a wretch, just like us. That's how important this is. It also shows us how this is his work. It's his work.

Jesus initiated this encounter. Beyond that, he goes where others refuse to go. Do you go where others refuse to go? Do we spend time? Do we go the extra mile?

And others just won't? See, this shows that that's God's move. That He's the one that draws. That it's His love and mercy and grace that draws us unto repentance in the first place. And so He goes where others will not.

He draws us, even when we're not looking for him. Even when we have no interest in him at all, he moves. And I was thinking about how he moved with Nicodemus because it would seem that it was Nicodemus that came to Jesus in that account. Jesus was in the temple. He was in the face of the Pharisees and those around.

Nicodemus heard Jesus how many times. And it was that love and grace and power that Christ has that drew Nicodemus to Him. And John 15, 16a says, You did not choose me, but I chose you, and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit. That's pretty blunt, isn't it? That's it in a nutshell.

I didn't choose him, he chose me. And he has chosen me and appointed me that I should go and bear fruit. So, okay, if you've been chosen, you need to be bearing fruit. There is no option right there. And so we look at this divine appointment.

The question has got to be, can you relate? Can you relate? I hear people telling me accounts of God put people in their ways and in their walks. And I had a few in the last, and this is not my doing. I'm not trying to say, look what I did.

I'm trying to tell you what God did, how God works. I was in Michigan a week ago and I had to run to Home Depot and I get done and I come outside and I'm loading my lumber into the back of my truck. And a woman that works there came out and asked me if I could give her a ride to a place down the road about a mile. I said, sure. And so I took out a gospel tract and I started asking her if she goes to church.

I gave her a gospel message and she sat and listened. And listened and listened. And I gave her that tract, Told her I'll pray for her and that I'll be back up to talk with her And so this is this is divine appointment these things god god orchestrates not me and so There was when when bonnie and I were were gone on on our vacation for anniversary there was a a couple from he was from Israel and she was from California. And they had two beautiful little girls, and God ordained our meeting there. And then the little girl dropped her sandal into the fish pond, and I had to get a stick and fish it out for her, and thus began a conversation.

God put that sandal in the pond. Not me, not her. And the conversation and the witness went on for an hour. It was just an unbelievable opportunity. And then last night as I'm looking at these notes, trying to figure out what I'm going to say today, the doorbell rings.

And I'm thinking, I didn't know, and nobody was supposed to visit. And so I looked at Bonnie and she's holding Burke and she said, no, I don't. So I went and opened the door And there's a young gal standing at the door. And she said, have you seen a lost dog? This little chihuahua, it's about the size of a rabbit.

I haven't. Maybe an owl or a coyote has seen it. I don't know. But We talked for a little while, but we asked her in the house, gave her the gospel message, and gave her a ride back to the house. And it was such a blessing to have God give us the opportunity.

We don't have to per se go out of our way. We do with eternal life, outreach ministries, we go to the fairs, we have events, or we go hand out gospel tracts. But our lights are supposed to be shining lights. We're supposed to be Christians, we're little Christ, and this is Christ going out of His way to give the Gospel to this woman that nobody would want to talk to. And so, this is just so many accounts.

And a waiter in North Dakota who was gay, who we were able to give the gospel message to for a long time. He kept coming back to talk. It was just a work of God. And so Christianity is, it's personal, it's relational, it's inconvenient at best. You can say, no that's beyond inconvenient, what I got to do.

No, it's inconvenient at best And we should be open to God using us at any time, at any time and all the time. Look for these personal encounters and not just conform to a sort of like a religiosity. You know what, I go to church, I go to my studies, I do this, I do that. Yeah, that's great to have these things structured in your life. But if you're cutting out what is a work of God through you to go beyond what your comfort zone is, you're not living the text though.

So you're a chosen people. And that's what the text reads. It says, You did not choose me, I chose you. You're chosen! You are the chosen!

You are one of the chosen. By God! By God! Not by me, not by man of any kind, but by God. And you're appointed.

You're chosen, you're appointed. That you should go and bear fruit. That you should go and bear fruit. That you should go and bear fruit. There's a message right there.

But the fact is that We miss that sometimes. I think we miss that. We miss our opportunities. We miss... I just had to get another truck, and the first thing I did is put a pack of gospel tracts right in the door, right there.

It's an opportunity. Pockets, coat pockets, gospel tracts, Opportunities to witness. Right at the end of your tongue, have something ready to say. Be ready. Give the Gospel.

So The second point is that this human Savior, as I poked through this, I was like, this is just amazing stuff. He's a human Savior. Jesus is tired and thirsty, and it's hot. He sits at Jacob's well. It's the sixth hour.

Their days went from 6 a.m. To 6 p.m. And so the sixth hour is at noon. It's the hottest it's going to be. It's at noon.

And so we see Jesus showing His full humanity. His full humanity. And we've seen that when we've read John 1, 14, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." The point is that He's not a distant deity. He is not this God, this deity that lives off in a place that we don't know and we can't relate to Him. He's not a king that sits on a throne with his harem around Him and people peeling grapes for Him and fanning Him.

It's not our deity. That is not our God. So we see Jesus showing His full humanity. He is not a distant. But He came to earth and He suffered.

He lived a life with us and the lowest of the sort. He is not a distant man. Hebrews 4.15 tells us, For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weakness, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Yet without sin. See, He can sympathize with our weaknesses.

That's plural, that you can't say. I can say I have a weakness, and you can say, yeah, you got more than one. I have weakness as I think everybody does. And so he understands our weaknesses and our exhaustion. When we come to him, he will not only hear us, he'll also sympathize with us because he was here.

He suffered. He can sympathize with us. And He does. He answers our prayer. He'll sympathize.

God feels sorrow for us in our infirmities. He has compassion. And the question is, what should this reality do to our lives? Because we talk about it. It's like, okay great He loves us.

He came down for us. He he suffered for us He went he went talked to Nicodemus. He talked to this woman Okay, he was human What do we What does that mean to us? You know what it really needs to do to us? It needs to change us.

It needs to change our prayer life. It needs to open our eyes and say, you know what? I've got another view. I've got a higher view of God than I've had before. You know what?

A lower view of myself because I complain too much about my body aches and about my little problems. So now I have a higher view of God. It should change our outreach to other people because our God is higher. We should have a higher view and we should want to tell other people about Him even more. It should change our tithing, our worship and our praise.

Worship is not something we come and do on Sunday. Worship is something we live all week long. Sunday is the outpouring of it. Our testimony's at work. The way that we put love over one another.

The way that we care for one another. And you know what? This chapter is gold. Philippians 2. I just love it.

Philippians 2, 7 and 8 says, What made himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bond-servant, and coming in the likeness of men, and being found in appearance as man, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross, the worst kind of all." And We read in John 11.35 that Jesus wept. And ultimately, he ended up on the cross. He suffered for us. Luke 22.44, he sweat drops of blood. See, he was human and he suffered.

He lived a life like you and I live, but without sin. He sweat drops of blood in the garden and his soul anguished. And today we find him sweaty, dirty, tired, exhausted. But why? Why would he come to this place?

Isaiah 53, five, he was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our inequities. The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. By His stripes we are healed. He came that we might be healed.

He came that we might have eternal life. That is the purpose. And I don't want to forget the reality or miss this point that the text today is taking place at Jacob's Well. And so this is a place of deep history. Very historical place for the Jews, right?

Jacob's Well. There's churches named after it today. There's some exercise machine, Jacob's Ladder, named after it now. But maybe that's something else. But there's this deep history that goes with Jacob's well.

And today, it becomes a place of New Covenant grace, of Christ meeting with a Samaritan woman and giving her living water. Today, it becomes that place. And it will never be the same again. The third point is the broken woman. This woman, the Samaritan woman, is a social outcast.

So she's the opposite of Nicodemus. Luke 19, 10 says, "'For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost." And that is this broken woman. This text can assure us individually that no one is outside the scope of the affections of Jesus Christ. When you see who this woman is, what she has done, the life that she's lived, and that Jesus went out of His way physically to take her, We have to be encouraged by that. The people that you pray for now that are lost, the people that you love that are going to hell unless God intervenes, be encouraged because there is no one outside of that scope of the affections of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Nobody has done so much bad. And if you're here today and you think, you know what, I'd love to come to Jesus, but I just got to fix a couple things in my life. There's just a few things I got to tune up. I got to quit this bad habit, and I got to quit doing that bad habit, and I got to start doing this. No, you don't.

You do not. You need to surrender your life as you are to the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He gets all the glory. And so, first of all, this woman comes to the well at noon. And this is just showing her social shame.

She can't be out there at the time that others are there. And the fact that she's at this well, it's outside of town, like, I don't know, more than a half a mile geographically. It's outside. There's a community well that's in town, but she can't be there. She's gotta be out here.

And she can't even be out here unless it's noon. And so she's out there at noon, the hottest time of the day. And this indicates that she's avoiding the community. She just can't be around other people. And it's likely because of her tarnished reputation.

She's been married five times and the man that she's living with now is not her husband. And Jesus knows the hearts of all people and he knew this just looking at her he knew. And yet he knew this before he ever left to go on this trip, to save her. Yet Jesus seeks her out. And so Matthew 9.13 challenges us, but go and learn what this means.

I desire mercy and not sacrifice, for I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. We've talked about that already, but the thing is how do we lay this over our lives? How do we take this text and lay it over the top of our lives? And how do we how do we relate? How do we identify with this?

Because here I am talking about Nicodemus. I'm talking about Christ's love and his salvation and and his deity. And how do we identify? How do we take our lives and lay it over the top of this situation and say, okay, what do I need to do? Or how does this apply to me?

You know how it applies to you? It's the same way it applies to me. I was this woman. I was this person. I was this lost.

I was this bound for hell. I was no better a person and neither were you. I don't care how good you were. You were bound for the same hell that this woman was bound for. And so this is how we identify with it.

Isaiah 53, 6 tells us that, all we like sheep have gone astray. Now, some of us like sheep have gone astray. Okay, I'm gonna say, okay, which of you have been saved and which of you were good enough to not have to get saved? Okay, there's your answer. We all have sinned.

All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to His own way. And the Lord has laid on Him, on Jesus Christ, the iniquity of us all. There's this need for wholeness. The Samaritan woman represents a very real spiritual thirst plus social isolation.

And maybe we can relate to that. She has spent her life looking for validation. She's looking for something. She's going through men like M&Ms. Just popping along, and now the man she's living with is not her husband.

And she's just looking, and she's craving for something in her life. There's this hallowness. And she's looking for it in all the wrong places. And I know people that have done this, that for all that the world has to offer. Luke 5, 12, and 13 reads, And it happened when He was in a certain city, that behold, a man who was full of leprosy saw Jesus, and he fell on his face and implored Him, saying, Lord, if You're willing, You can make me clean." Then he put out his hand and touched him, saying, I am willing, be cleansed.

Immediately, the leprosy left him. The compassion of Jesus for this woman at the well, for this leper. You didn't go near lepers. Jesus didn't only go near, He touched. See, there's a time when I was touched.

When I was pulled from the gutter of puke and set up to be used by God. There is that time. And I can identify with that. And this woman is about to learn. And Luke, I'm sorry, Jesus touched this man.

And this is the same Jesus performs even greater miracles today. See, the point is that Jesus touched this man and the leprosy left him immediately. Jesus called out, Lazarus, rise and walk. And Lazarus came forth. This is no smaller a miracle than when He saves a human being today who is dead and brings them to life.

It is the same thing. From death to eternal life. He could take a human being and take Ezekiel 36, 26, a heart of stone, and turn it to a heart of flesh. And the question is, has He touched you? Has He taken away this fatal disease?

Just like we read a little while ago with the case where they talk about Moses in the desert and holding up this bronze serpent. And everyone that looked at him was healed. The poison going through their veins, they would be healed from it. And it's no different from us. That fatal disease of sin that's in our veins, that runs through us, we can be healed from that.

The fourth point is tearing down walls. Ephesians 2.14. This is a powerful text. I'm not going to be able to finish this today. I'm sorry to say, but the fact is, I will finish this next week.

And so, the tearing down the walls that Jesus does is what we can look at and we can do in our own hearts and lives too. And so, I will stop at the three points today. And I have more notes and I talked longer than I thought I would. But the point I think of the message today is that we were called. We were born again.

We were saved. And it's not our work, it's a work of God. It's not something that we've done. And as much as this Samaritan woman was an outcast, we need to identify with her. We need to put our lives and lay our lives on top of this text and realize that we're no less a sinner than she was or had been, and that We too need Jesus.

And so, the Christian life as we see it is something that we are called and that we are commissioned to go out and give this Gospel that we've been saved by to other people. And we cannot build walls. We cannot exclude people. You know why? Because We were all there.

We were all no better. We were all no better than this woman was. We were the same exact outcast, the same exact morally bankrupt human being. And today, We've been born again by the blood of Jesus Christ. And if you don't know that joy, if you do not know that peace that you can have in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, talk to me after service today.

I'd love to talk to you about Jesus. Let's close. Father, we thank you for today. Thank you for your love and your grace, Lord God, on us that while we were yet sinners, you died for us. Lord God, no greater love has anyone ever shown.

Father, I just thank you for this day. And I pray for your will to be done, Lord. Your love to be on us as we go forward, Lord. I pray for your peace in our hearts and in our lives that we might know you and be reconciled to you. In Jesus' name, Amen.

We will celebrate your supper today. We will celebrate the Lord's Supper today. And so in doing so, I want us to remember that sacrifice that Christ had for us and the broken body. I think it's time to move us into a deeper and greater walk with Him. As we go through this, I want to remind us that the Lord's Supper is for those who are born again.

It tells us in the Word of God not to take it unworthily and that's a a very serious charge. And so if you're a born-again believer, feel free to to take part in this and again if you do not know Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior, please talk to me after service today. Father God, we thank you for today and I pray for our hearts and life Lord God as we come to the Lord's table which you have told us Lord God to remember. I just pray for our hearts this morning to be bold in you and to never forget that sacrifice in Jesus name. Amen.

I wish that it was I wish that it was I deliver to you first of all that which I also received that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures That he's buried and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures and that he was seen by Cephas then by the 12th After that he was seen by over 500 brethren at once, of whom the greater part remained to the present, but some had fallen asleep. After that, he was seen by James, then by all the apostles. Then last of all, he was seen by me also, as by one born, both of you, all right? Father, I thank you for this broken body, Lord God. Thank you for that sacrifice, and I pray that our hearts and our lives, Lord God, will be changed because we love you.

Lord, help us to have more faith as we walk through this life, Lord God, to not forget the price that you paid for your broken body. For your broken body and your shed blood. Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin. Help our lives to reflect in gratitude, Lord, in the deepest ways for your body, protect your shed blood in Jesus name. Thank you.

Father, we thank you for love. Thank you for the book of John never going through. You've done a great job, Lord. Just lay down your life for a friend and a father. We thank you for setting your son, Jesus, to die for our sins, Lord.

Then we might have righteousness in you. Thank you for this and I pray for a golden says we walk forward from this building today to proclaim that in Jesus name. Amen.