Please turn with me in your Bibles today to John chapter four. And this will be our last message on the Bible and gender. And the topic today is witnessing to sinners, witnessing to those who need the gospel of Jesus Christ. And so we're going to see how our savior, the Lord Jesus Christ did it. We're going to begin at verse 3 and read through verse 42. So let's give our attention now to the Word of God. He, that is Jesus, left Judea and departed again into Galilee, and he must needs go through Samaria. Then cometh he to a city of Samaria, which is called Sychar, near to the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Now Jacob's well was there. Jesus, therefore, being wearied with his journey, sat thus on the well, and it was about the sixth hour. There cometh a woman of Samaria to draw water. Jesus saith unto her, Give me to drink. For his disciples were gone away unto the city to buy meat. Then saith the woman of Samaria unto him, How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me, which am a woman of Samaria? For the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans. Jesus answered and said unto her, If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink, thou wouldest have asked of him. and he would have given thee living water. The woman saith unto him, Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. From whence then hast thou that living water? Art thou greater than our father Jacob, which gave us the well, and drank thereof himself, and his children, and his cattle? Jesus answered and said unto her, whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again. But whoso 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. The woman saith unto him, Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw. And Jesus saith unto her, Go, call thy husband, and come hither. The woman answered and said, I have no husband. Jesus said unto her, Thou hast well said, I have no husband, for thou hast had five husbands, and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband, and that saidst thou truly. The woman saith unto him, Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet. Our fathers worshipped in this mountain, and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, the hour cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem worship the Father. Ye worship ye know not what. We worship what we know, for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour cometh and now is when the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father seeketh such to worship him. God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. The woman saith unto him, I know that Messiah cometh, which is called Christ. When he is come, he will tell us all things. And Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he. And upon this came his disciples and marveled that he talked with the woman. Yet no man said, what seekest thou or why talkest thou with her? The woman then left her water pot and went her way into the city and saith to the man, come see a man which told me all things that ever I did, is not this the Christ? Then they went out of the city and came unto him. In the meanwhile, his disciples prayed him, saying, Master, eat. But he said unto them, I have meat to eat that ye know not of. Therefore said the disciples one to another, hath any man brought him ought to eat? Jesus saith unto them, my meat is to do the will of him that sent me and to finish his work. Say not ye, there are yet four months, and then cometh harvest. Behold, I say unto you, lift up your eyes, and look on the fields, for they are white already to harvest. And he that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal, that both he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together. And herein is that saying true, one soweth and another reapeth. I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labor, other men labored, and ye are entered into their labors. And many of the Samaritans of that city believed on him for the saying of the woman, which testified, he told me all that ever I did. So when the Samaritans were come unto him, they besought him that he would tarry with them, and he abode there two days. and many more believed because of his own word and said unto the woman, now we believe, not because of thy saying, for we have heard him ourselves and we know that this is indeed the Christ, the savior of the world. And thus far we have the reading of God's holy and inspired word and we look to the spirit of God to give us understanding of it and to apply it to us. As I said a minute ago, we're at the end today of our series on the Bible and gender and what the Bible says on this topic. Without a doubt, I could have said an awful lot more, but my goal wasn't to say everything that the Bible says, it was to lay a foundation that would help us, especially the young people in our church, understand these difficult issues from a biblical perspective. But there is one matter that I think we have to consider on this topic, and that's what we're talking about today. We need to know how to talk to those who are enslaved to modern gender confusion, or who are at least open to the idea of changing from one gender to the other, or anything like that. And this topic can be extremely tricky Because first of all, the subject itself, it makes us uncomfortable. I've been uncomfortable addressing these matters for the last however many weeks. But also, those who hold wrong views on this particular topic are very often and usually intolerant of anyone who would say other than what they say. And so it can be very difficult just to get a hearing. Now, what does this mean for us? Does it mean that we can't talk to people that are enslaved to this gender nonsense? Does it mean we shouldn't talk to them? Well, of course not. The Bible commands every single one of us, from the pastor down to the youngest child here, from the oldest to the youngest, to be salt and light in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation. And if we're not salt and light to those who have embraced extremely dark ideas, then we're failing miserably at being salt and light. But the Bible also tells us very clearly that we need to know exactly how we're doing this. Because so many people get it wrong and our Lord gives us some instructions on this in Matthew chapter 10 when He tells us to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. We need to be very careful about what we say and we need to say the right things. So to understand what this might look like as we talk to people who are enslaved to gender confusion, we turn now to the Gospel of John chapter four, and in particular to our Lord's conversation with the woman at the well. Now to be sure, her sin was not homosexuality, it was not transgenderism, but it was sexual in nature. And in this passage, we see our Lord Jesus Christ meeting this woman's needs and some ways that she could never have imagined before it happened. It probably never crossed her mind that she would be standing at the well talking with the water of life himself. Now the background leading up to this conversation is pretty straightforward in our text. In the previous chapter, Jesus had been ministering down in the south, probably in the area where John the Baptist had been ministering. He left there, he traveled up into Samaria and came to this city named Sychar. And this happened to be the same place where the patriarch Jacob had built a well some 2,000 years before this. And when Jesus arrived in this town and came to this particular well, John tells us that he was tired. Well, that's understandable because depending upon the exact location where he was preaching down in the south and where he was when he came up to this city, he and his disciples walked somewhere between about 30 and 50 miles that day. And this was over some pretty rough terrain. So we can just imagine how tired they all would have been. And John tells us that they arrived at Jacob's well at the sixth hour. Now, depending upon how you count that, that would either have been noon if John is using a Jewish method of counting time, or it would have been 6 p.m. if he used a Roman system of counting time. But when he arrived there, He went to the well and he asked a woman for a drink. Now, we don't really have to go any further than this. We could almost stop right here and we can see that something's not right already. Something's not right here. And why is that? It's because we get the sense that this woman came to the well alone. That's not how women drew water in the ancient world. They went to the well in groups. They did it early in the morning when the sun was just coming up. They did it later in the day when the sun was going down. But they did it in groups. And here we see this woman coming to the well alone. And I will say at this point that I think that slightly favors but doesn't require the idea that John is using a Jewish system of counting here. Because the sixth hour would have been noon when there would have been no other women at the well. But the important thing here is not the time. It's the fact that the woman was alone. Why was she alone? She was alone because she was an outcast. and we'll see why she was an outcast in just a minute. Now, when Jesus asked this woman for a drink of water, she was taken aback by this. She didn't know what to make of it, because this is not the expected behavior of a Jewish man toward a woman in that day. And so look at what she says to Jesus. She says, how is it that thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me, which am a Samaritan? for the Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. Wow. Something really strange is happening here. Now this woman didn't mean that the Jews and the Samaritans never did business with each other. That obviously is not what happened. In fact, even in this very chapter, we see that Jesus' disciples went into town where they conducted business with the Samaritans by buying food for the day. So it's not that they had no business interactions with the Samaritans. Instead, what we see here and what this woman is saying is that the Jews and the Samaritans do not share eating utensils. And that's exactly what Jesus asked for. He didn't have any way to get water. And so he's asking the woman to share her cup with him so that she can drink out of his, out of her cup, or he can drink out of her cup. Strange in her eyes. She probably also wondered why he spoke to her at all. since it was obvious that she had been excluded from the fellowship of other Samaritan women. Even the disciples are puzzled by all of this when they get back. They don't know what to make of it. How can this be? Yet John tells us that they didn't even say a word. They didn't ask a question. They were puzzled, but they didn't do anything. Now at this point, notice what our Lord Jesus did. He used this woman's observation to go right to the heart of her problem. He said, if thou knewest the gift of God and who it is that saith to thee, give me to drink, thou wouldest have asked of him and he would have given thee living water. He told this woman that she needed salvation. But he did this in such an amazingly powerful and yet disarming way. And there are four things that stand out in what Jesus said here. First of all, he presented salvation to this woman, but he didn't use the word salvation. Instead, he spoke of salvation as living water. This is a phrase that we see several times in the Old Testament, and when it's used, it refers to the blessings of the gospel. For example, in Jeremiah chapter two, verse 13, Jeremiah says, for my people have committed two great evils. They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water. God is the fountain of living waters. He's the source of gospel blessings. And likewise, in Jeremiah chapter 14, where the prophet there is describing how the gospel of Jesus Christ would literally go out into all the world after the fall of Jerusalem. He says this, and it shall be in that day that living waters shall go forth out of Jerusalem, half of them toward the former sea and half of them toward the hinder sea. In summer and in winter shall it be. The blessings of the gospel of Jesus Christ are going to go out from Jerusalem. Then we have to ask ourselves a question. And that is, would this woman of Samaria have understood that this is what Jesus was talking about? And we ask this question because the Samaritan Bible was not the same as the Jews Bible. The Samaritan Bible consisted of only the five books of Moses. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. So how could this woman possibly have known what Jeremiah the prophet wrote? How could she have known what Zechariah the prophet wrote? Well, the answer to that is very simple. And that is because Moses also wrote about God sending forth the blessings of the gospel. It's in Exodus chapter 17, where God commanded Moses to strike the rock to give the people water. It was to be flowing water, living water. The Israelites were thirsty, and here God says, I will provide your need for you. Another thing that stands out in what Jesus said to the woman at the well is that he not only spoke of salvation as living water, but also as God's gift. What an amazing thing. Because you see, gifts are never earned, they're not deserved. When people give you a birthday present, you don't earn it or deserve it. When you get Christmas presents, they're not earned or deserved. Gifts are always the result of the generosity of the person who gives them. And God's gift to us is the greatest gift of all. It came in the person and work of our Savior, Jesus Christ. In the previous chapter, when our Lord talked to Nicodemus, when Nicodemus came to Him by night, what did Jesus say? For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. That's the gift. All the blessings of the gospel come through our Savior and His work. There's a third thing to see in what Jesus said. He made it clear to the woman at the well that if she were to receive this gift, she had to receive it through him. That's the only way. And so instead of him asking her for a drink, Jesus said, what you need to do is you need to ask me for a drink, because that's the only way you're going to get it. And then fourth, we see in what Jesus said here, the fact that he proclaims salvation to this woman. made it very clear to her that she needed salvation. She needed God's gift. She needed this living water that Jesus offered her. And she knew she needed it. Because remember, she went out to the well alone. She was an outcast. She was out of fellowship with her own community. She was morally bankrupt. She had no life in her soul, just an emptiness that she tried to satisfy with marriage and sex. Because you see, that's where our sin takes us, isn't it? It promises everything and it gives us nothing. It assures us that we'll be happy and fulfilled if only we engage in it, but it never delivers. Isn't that what we read in Ecclesiastes? All is vanity. There's nothing but vanity in a world that's governed by sin and doesn't know the grace of God and the love of God. And not only does sin promise and not deliver, it also becomes addictive. Because we always hope when we're engaged in sin that the next sin that we commit will get us to that place where we find that happiness and where we find meaning and purpose. And yet no matter how many times we deceive ourselves and think that that next sin is going to do it, it never works that way. The Samaritan woman didn't know what Jesus was talking about. Just like Nicodemus who wondered how he could crawl back into his mother's womb and be born a second time, this woman could not figure out how Jesus could give her living water when he didn't even have a pail to draw it up in. And so Jesus encouraged her to think about a different kind of water. Think about a different kind of water that can't be drawn up in a bucket. that when a person drinks of it, he'll never thirst again because it so completely satisfies all his needs. Jesus spoke of that in verses 13 and 14. Look at what he says there. Whoso drinketh of this water shall thirst again, referring to the water that the woman drew up in her bucket. But whoso 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. Now here we see this part of the conversation sort of comes to an end at verse 15 with this woman sort of acknowledging that she wants this living water. She wants to have something meaningful again, something important, something that really works. but she's still not quite there yet. So at this point, our Lord zeroed in even more on the Samaritan woman's needs. He already knew her marital status. And so he told her, he said, go find your husband and bring him here and we'll talk about this. And she responded, well, I have no husband. She wasn't married, she said. But technically she was right because the man she was living with was not her husband. But you see this is just the tip of the iceberg here. It's just a little wedge that Jesus used to go in and explore things. Now I suppose it's possible that this woman who had five husbands, all of her husbands died, leaving her free to marry again, but I don't really think that's the point that Jesus is making here. I think what Jesus is telling this woman is that she had such an extremely low view of marriage and its divine origin that she entered and exited marriages without giving it much thought. And so she married one and divorced, married another, divorced. Her marriages essentially comprised one adulterous relationship after another. That's what Jesus said in Matthew chapter 19. He said, whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery. And whoso marrieth her which is put away, doth commit adultery. I think this woman's life bears a striking resemblance in that sense to what we see in most Hollywood marriages these days. Consider, for example, the Gabor sisters, especially the older folks here know who the Gabor sisters were. There were three of them. And between the three sisters, they were married 20 times, 20 times. Magda was married six times, Zsa Zsa was married nine times, and Eva was married five times. And even worse than that, one of the husbands, a man named George Sanders, married both Magda and Zsa Zsa at different times. Wow. The absolute depravity of this family. Why is this important, that this woman be married five times? because multiple marriages are often a sign of the emptiness that we spoke of a little while ago. Actually, most persistent sin is especially sexual sin. And here when I say sexual sin, I'm talking about everything from self-pleasure to outright adultery, to homosexuality, to transgenderism, you name it. It's all a cry for something more. Something lasting, something meaningful. Multiple marriages are a sign of emptiness because it shows that the person who goes in and out of marriages so freely is never satisfied. That's the way sin is. Proverbs 27 verse 20. Hell and destruction are never full, so the eyes of man are never satisfied. If you covet something, and you get it, that only means you're going to covet something greater, and then you'll get that, and you're not going to be satisfied with that, and you covet something more, and it just keeps going on and on. But what I find so fascinating is that when the Bible talks about a godly man, it talks about him being satisfied. Remember, it was just a few weeks ago we looked at Proverbs chapter 5, where Solomon spoke very freely about a godly man's satisfaction in his wife, particularly in the area of intimacy. And not only that, but the Bible also requires that same kind of satisfaction in church officers. One of the qualifications is that a man be the husband of one wife, that is a man who is satisfied with just one woman and isn't always out looking for someone new. The woman at the well responded to Jesus by telling her about her marriages and recognizing that he's a prophet. We see that in verse 19. He says, Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet. That's true, of course, that her observation is right. Jesus was a prophet. He still is a prophet. He taught the way of salvation while he was here on earth. But that's not enough. It would be much better if she had said that Jesus was the prophet, that is the ultimate prophet that Moses spoke of in the book of Deuteronomy. In fact, that may be what she meant, but even that's not enough. She needed more. Now here, I find it interesting that the commentators don't know quite what to do with what follows. many of them, suppose that this woman at this time after having her marriages exposed became embarrassed by all her moral failures and started to think of Jesus as maybe getting a little too personal and mentioning all of these things to her and so she tried to distract him. Jesus was talking about her marriages and she all of a sudden says, �No, let�s talk about worship instead.� Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, Mount Gerizim. You say that Jerusalem is the place to worship. That's where the Jews worshiped. It was a distraction, they say, that she was just trying to sidestep the evangelism, to get out of it some way. I don't think that's what we see here at all. I think what we see is this woman saw her need for the first time, but she didn't know quite what to do with it. Just like the 3,000 on the day of Pentecost asked the apostles what they needed to do. Just like the Philippian jailer asked, what do I need to do? This woman is asking Jesus, what do I need to do? Because you see, there were two competing ideas about how sinners can approach God. One of those ways was recommended by the Samaritans. They have this mountain up in the north where they worship. And the Samaritans were guided, as I said a little while ago, solely by the books of Moses. They had their own temple, at least they did until about 160 years before Jesus talked to the woman at the well, but 160 years prior to this, the Jews destroyed their temple. But the Jews had a different idea. They worshiped in Jerusalem, where the temple stood. where Solomon constructed that magnificent edifice, which was later destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar and later rebuilt. And then just shortly before the start of the New Testament, Herod the Great started to rebuild it and enlarge it and make it very great. And this woman is saying, which one's right? They can't both be right. This woman wanted to know how to go before God as a sinner. And Jesus' answer to her must have been quite a shock. It was certainly not what she expected, because what's Jesus' answer to the woman? His answer is that the place is not what's important. His answer is that neither system that they're looking at was the final answer. The Samaritan system obviously wasn't of much help because the temple had been destroyed and God had not authorized it in the first place. And the Samaritans didn't even know who God was. That's what Jesus said, ye worship what ye know not. But the Jewish temple wasn't that much better because it wasn't going to last long. It was never designed to last forever. it would soon be destroyed. But at least the Jews knew the right God to worship. And so Jesus said, we worship, or we know what we worship. And because God had made special promises to Abraham, the Jews had been the recipients of that special favor for many, many, many generations. And so Jesus said, salvation is of the Jews. But look at what Jesus said to her after this. He said, but the hour is coming when all of this is going to change. And look carefully at this in verse 21. He says, the hour cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain nor yet in Jerusalem worship the Father. This is, Jesus is talking here specifically to this Samaritan woman and to her people. The hour comes when ye shall neither worship in this mountain nor in Jerusalem. The time is coming when the Samaritans would worship the true and living God wherever they may be. And the fulfillment of this came just a few short years later in the book of Acts, Acts chapter eight to be exact, when the disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ were scattered after the martyrdom of Stephen and they went up north and they took the gospel with them wherever they went and preached the Lord Jesus Christ. But yet there's still another hour, because Jesus speaks of two different hours here. He speaks of this hour that's coming in verse 21, but then in verse 23, he speaks of an hour that is coming and already is. And that hour that's coming and already is is the hour when those who worship God will worship him in spirit and in truth. And what is that hour? Well, that's the hour in which God's grand purpose of redemption gives sinners direct access to the Father through the Lord Jesus Christ. And this hour had arrived because Jesus, the giver of life, was standing there in front of this Samaritan woman, offering her living water. And as a result of that, what happened? She went back into town. She told all the men what had happened to her. They believed her word. They came out to see for themselves. And then they heard Jesus Christ speak to them directly. There's no difference between Jewish believers and Samaritan believers. The Jewish council decreed concerning Gentile converts in Acts chapter 15 that God put no difference between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith. The Samaritan woman could have the blessings of salvation just as much as anybody else could. She could have them despite this boatload of sins that she was saddled with. And she didn't need a mountain to handle it. She didn't need a temple on Mount Gerizim. Jesus simply told her, worship the Father through me. And that's your answer. And I believe this is where the Samaritan woman began to realize that Jesus was talking about himself and what he was saying. Let's look at what she says in verse 25. She says that she knows that when the Messiah comes, he's going to teach people everything they need to know in order to be right with God. Could it be that this man who stood there right in front of her, who had told her her whole life story, could this person be that Messiah that she had been waiting for? The answer to that of course is yes. And that's what Jesus affirmed very clearly and directly in verse 26. He said, I that speak unto thee am he. And upon hearing this, the woman went out and told others about Jesus. The thing I find so fascinating here is that she became a more effective witness to the power of the gospel than the twelve disciples were. They went into town and all they brought back was a little bit of bread. This woman of Samaria went back and she brought back a whole bunch of converts who wanted to know the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, this morning, congregation, we've only considered the very basic points of this chapter. Obviously, it's a long chapter. There's a lot of things we could have said. But how did Jesus evangelize this woman who was caught up in a life of sexual sin? Well, first, and I think probably the most important thing, is that he didn't begin with her sin. He brought it in later, but he didn't start there. He wasn't pointing fingers. He began with an offer of salvation, the free gift of God, living waters. That's where it started. Second, when Jesus did address this woman's sin, he did it in a very roundabout way. He didn't accuse her. He simply stated what had happened, that this woman spoke truly when she said she didn't have a husband because the man she was living with was not her husband. He knew all about her marital status. Why did he bring this in? He brought her sin into the conversation because he wanted her to see and to acknowledge the emptiness and the vanity of everything that she had ever done in her entire life to find meaning and purpose. And that was so that she could find real meaning and purpose in Jesus. He addressed her need. And finally, when this woman saw that Jesus had what she needed and asked him how to get it, Jesus told her. He said, the Father wants worshipers. He wants you to worship him. He wants you to come to him through his greatest gift, the Lord Jesus Christ. Now too often we keep the focus of evangelism on the sin. We can't avoid sin altogether because without sin the gospel doesn't have a lot of meaning. But really our focus has to be on Jesus. It has to be on what He accomplished for everyone who believes in Him. We need to make sure that unbelievers know that God has done great things for His people. The specific sin that we confront in that sense doesn't really matter. Could be any sin. And that's another reason why I haven't spent an awful lot of time going through every single verse in the Bible on sexual sins of different kinds. Homosexuality, transvestitism, transgenderism and so forth. We didn't look at everything. It's because regardless of our sin, Jesus is the answer, and we need to lead sinners to Him. Winning arguments doesn't help. Making disciples does. Amen.