NIV Application Bible Podcast: Episode 24 (John 4)

• This woman who was castigated goes to her town, tells them about Jesus, and because of her story, many are saved. How cool is that? [Music] Welcome back to the NIV Application Bible podcast. I’m so excited because we’re in John 4 for this podcast. And I need to confess to you when we get to glory, one of the first people I want to make a beline for is the Samaritan woman at the well because I’ve grown to not only love her story more and more and more as the decades have passed.
• I’ve been walking with Jesus for 50 years now. Um, but I identify more and more and more with her story. Um, before we dive into her story, let me tell you one of my own. My parents divorced when I was little. Um, we lived in a small town and so the rumors abounded when my parents divorced. I was too little to know just how ugly some of the rumors were.
• And I didn’t realize how much those rumors had had sullied my reputation until I was about I was probably five and a half. I don’t think I had started uh first grade yet, but I was in my backyard with a a neighbor kid and we were playing on the jungle gym. Some of y’all probably any of y’all under 40 don’t know what that is because of litigation, but we used to have these metal contraptions.
• We would climb in our backyards when I was growing up. And I was playing on this jungle gym with this neighbor child who was my age. and her mother walked to our backyard and I can remember this like it was yesterday. I can remember the loud Bermuda shorts she was wearing. Grew up in Central Florida and she just bellowed over the back fence for her daughter to climb down from the jungle gym and come home because that little girl, speaking of me, is white trash.
• And I can remember just thinking, I’m quite trash because my dad had left my mom. Um, that stuck with me for a long time. And at first, I didn’t want to be identified with the woman at the well because she’s branded as trash by a lot of people, too. good hasn’t been until my second goround in seminary that I found out she probably wasn’t sleazy.
• Most of us have walked away with that impression from from sermons or Bible studies because she was married five times. But if you actually study culture during the first century um when Jesus had his earthly ministry uh to have a certificate of marriage denoted all kinds of legal issues including property dispersement. And so for a woman to be legally married five times actually implies just the opposite about the woman at the well.