I won't take it personal as the kids leave. And John, where are you? I vote yes. Although I guess I don't have a vote. Great to be with you today. I've heard all kinds of wonderful things about this church, and thank you for your participation in the Bridgeport Rescue Mission. Thank you for the coat drive. Just two weeks ago, we gave away to 630 families almost 2,000 coats. And we're going to be doing this again in December. And thank you for your participation. I also want to thank you for just your ongoing involvement with the Bridgeport Rescue Mission. I'll be talking a little bit about that in a bit. And thank you for the invitation to have me here this morning. I know that Pastor Dave has been kind of your interim pastor. Pastor Dave and I went to seminary together about 100 years ago. And we had a professor named Dr. Nicole. Dr. Nicole taught systematic theology. And so you had to go to this class. And I remember the day, honestly, I was there when Dr. Nicole, about 70 or 80 students in his class, mentioned on a Friday that he was preaching at a church, a local church, and he said he was a little bit nervous about it. He did a lot of preaching, but he was just nervous about it. So he asked us to pray for it. So Monday came, the class was convened again, and one of the students raised their hand and said, Dr. Nicole, how did it go? Did it go well in the service? And Roger Nicole, in his very French accent, said, oh, it went very well, very well. He said, especially when I was at the back of the door of the sanctuary, greeting people as they were leaving, and the elderly lady bringing her husband along took my hand and said, Dr. Nicole, your sermons have meant so much to my husband since he lost his mind. So after I preach, you may be saying, Anna, on behalf of the missions board, and Dave mentioning that I'm his friend, you might say, have you lost your mind? That guy was weird. And that's true. I am weird, but I'm weird for Jesus. And I wanted to talk a little bit, start with a little bit of talk about the rescue mission itself, if I can figure out how to make this thing work. Do I have it on? I must have it on. Help me, help me. There we go. Okay, so the Rescue Mission has five different ministries. First of all, we have a ministry to addicted men and women, and we call this our Life Change Program. Men and women from the community or from outside of Connecticut can come and enroll in this program. They go through an interview process and they come and they can stay with us from four months to a year. And it's kind of have two aspects of this. We have one called life change. And that's for the person who's been actually addicted to either drugs or alcohol. And then we have what we also call the abundant life. And that's for the person who has been through a series of events that caused him to come to the point where he just feels like, or she feels like giving up. And so you notice that we have, I think this says 20 men and 24 women, but actually we right now have 22 men and 27 women that are part of this ministry. It's all free of charge and they come and we provide them room and board. And we have a very complete program that introduces them to the gospel, introduces them to the Bible, also helps them in their recovery program. So that's been very successful. The second ministry that we have is the women's ministry that is for homeless mothers. And the homeless, we just started this about four months ago, and they can come, mothers that don't have any place to stay, I'll be giving you an illustration of this in a little bit, but they can come and live with us with their kids. Right now we have 10 mothers and 22 kids living with us. And so if you were to come to the rescue mission in the evening, you'd see all kinds of commotion on the second floor. We actually have 13 mothers who are on a waiting list to come and be with us, but we don't have the facility right now to allow them to come and be with us. The fourth aspect is our food program where we, and you're involved in this, I understand also, where we provide food for our community. That number up there is correct. This past month, we gave over 95,000 pounds of food to people. And it's an amazing ministry if you come down on a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, either in the morning at 10 o'clock or in the afternoon at 1.15, you'll find a long line of people all the way out and around the corner down one block that come to get food for them. And we allow them to take 50 pounds of food, We limit it to 50 pounds because the government tells us that with a family of a single mother or a father and four kids, 50 pounds of food will be sufficient for one week of nutrition. And so we know we can, we actually plot exactly how much food they do take. And it's amazing the ministry that we have with that. The final thing we have, we have a health care center that takes care of people who have health needs. Now, we don't do open heart surgery or things like that, but they can come in and get a EKG. They can have a physical. They can have blood work. We have a dentist that comes in. We have a gynecologist. We have an internist. And they can come in and actually get that ministry while at the Bridgeport Rescue Mission. So you're involved in that and so thank you very much. It's a wonderful ministry and I must admit when I started a year and a half ago I didn't realize the expanse of the ministry and it's pretty amazing. I'd love to take many of you on a tour. If you'd ever love to like to come down just shoot me an email. I'll work my schedule around yours and and we'll give you a tour of the facility. It's at 725 Park Avenue. It's a brand new facility. We've opened it two years ago. It's an amazing facility. I'd love to give you a tour so you could see what's going on with it. So that's my spiel for the mission, but the spiel is really a thank you for you for what you have done in helping us. Today, I'd like to look at, there we go, The story of the woman at the well. Now, some of you may know this story. Others of you, it may be brand new, but it's an amazing story of God's work in a person's life. And so, kind of to set the scene here, it's John the fourth chapter, and Jesus is in the northern part of Israel. He's in the Galilee, and he's gonna make his way down to Jerusalem. And in the course of that, he's had a long day. It's mid-afternoon. He sends his disciples into a place called Sakar to get food. But let's pick up the story from the Bible, John, the fourth chapter. We'll pick it up in verse seven. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, will you please give me a drink? The disciples had gone into the town to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him, you are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? For Jews are not associated with Samaritans. Jesus answered her, if you knew the gift of God and who it is that asked you for the drink, you would ask him and he would give you living water. Sir, the woman said, you have nothing to drown with. And the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than your father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his son and his livestock? Jesus answered, everyone who drinks this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks the water I give will never thirst again. So as we look at this text, I'd like to have us really kind of answer four questions. Mayday, there we go. Three questions. Shrunk because the thing didn't work. What's the big deal about the Samaritan woman at the well outside the city of Saqqara? Secondly, what caused the woman to go to the well at noon? Thirdly, what's the meaning of that strange comment made by Jesus about living water? First question then. What's the big deal about the Samaritan woman at the well? What's going on here? Jesus is in the northern part of Palestine, and there are two ways to get down to Jerusalem. One is that you proceed south with the Jordan River on your right and the desert on your left. Now, if you go that way, it means you have to cross the Jordan River twice. You cross it in the north, and then you proceed south, then you cross it again right before Jerusalem. That's what we call the West Bank today. Now, all Orthodox Jews, that's the way they would go. But the other option, and actually it's the closer option, is that you proceed directly south, with the Mediterranean on your right and the Jordan River on your left. Why did most Jews, Orthodox Jews, not go the shortest route? It's because of the people that lived by the Jordan River. and by the Mediterranean. They were called Samaritans. They were half-breeds. They were people that were not accepted by the Jewish nation, especially by the rabbis and by the religious people. Well, what happened? Let's do a little bit of a deep dive into history here. Where did the Samaritans come from? And I don't want to oversimplify this, but basically what happened was this. In 722, the Assyrians, which were warlike people, descended upon Israel. And they conquered the northern 10 tribes in 722. And their modus operandi was to take the conquered people and to kill all the men. to allow the women to stay in the region, but to eradicate the men, especially the men of fighting age, and that's what the Assyrians did. And then they allowed, if they conquered an area or their own army wanted to settle in the area where the women were there, that was permissible to them. And so, unlike what we see today, in order to be a Jew in modern Israel, your mother has to be Jewish. It's passed through the mother in modern Israel. At this time, the mothers may have been Jewish by blood, but they weren't acceptable because their husbands were not Jewish. And that's where the Samaritans came from. Well, in 587, 86, The Babylonians came to power, they overcame the Assyrians, and they descended upon Jerusalem. In 586, Jerusalem fell. But the Babylonians had a different mode of operandi in dealing with a conquered nation. And what they did, they didn't slay all the men, they took the intelligentsia, the scholars, the rabbis, the well-to-do merchants, and they would transport their families to Babylon. And so that's where we get that plea that we find in Psalm 137. By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and cried when we remembered Zion. For you see, the nation basically had been transported to Babylon. Well, Cyrus the Great comes along, the Persian, and he conquers the Babylonians. And so In 539, Cyrus the Great allows the Jews who are now living in Babylon to return to Jerusalem. And so when they return, they look north and they see these Samaritans, these half-breeds, these people that they do not allow to even go into the environment of the great Temple of Herod. They are unwelcome because they are goyim, they are unclean. And so that's where the Samaritans come from. And Jesus, instead of crossing the Jordan twice, heads directly south. And so he passes through Samaria. So when the Samaritan woman comes, he starts to deal with her. And this is amazing in two ways. First of all, it's a Jew talking to a Samaritan. To the point where she says in verse nine, how is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman? But then she says, and a Samaritan. So he's talking to a woman which a scholarly Jew would never do all by himself. And secondly, she's a Samaritan, unwelcomed in Jerusalem. Many of us have been through a time of prejudice, maybe because the way we dress or the way we act or the fact that we're from Texas. But many of you in the congregation have been through prejudice, but not like you will find at the Bridgeport Rescue Mission with our clients. they have experienced it in a very personal, dramatic way. And if you have a problem with drugs and alcohol, you would probably not be accepted in many of the circles that we run in. Unfortunately, sometimes they're not even accepted in the churches that we go to. Now, I'm sure that's not the case here, but I've been in churches where if I was to bring some of our clients with us, They would say, I'm not so sure about this. Not so sure about this. They've been thrust out of society, the people that I work with. Alcohol and drugs has caused them to not be accepted. And sometimes they've almost lost hope. They just feel like giving up. Mother Teresa has a quote that I like. I think it's up there right now. It goes like this. We think sometimes that poverty is only about being hungry and naked and homeless, but the poverty of being unwanted, unloved, uncared for is the greatest poverty. That sense that no one accepts them, that they're different, unacceptable. not welcome at our Thanksgiving feast. And that happens to the people at the Bridgeport Rescue Mission. But that's why I'm committed to church. And that's why this church is important. Because as you open your doors to the people of the Rescue Mission, or people in this community that are not like you, You give them hope. You give them a sense that God loves and cares for them. And that's why I'm first and foremost a churchman. People have said to me, why don't you have communion at the rescue mission? My answer to that is we're not a church. We're a ministry. This is the church. This is where people from the rescue mission ought to come and partake of communion. They have to come and be baptized. We're not gonna baptize people at the Bridgeport Rescue Mission. That's the church's job. That's your job. Are there people outside of this or in this community but outside the church that need to be part of this wonderful church? I've really been impressed with your singing and with the worship time and with my time with the Sunday school class downstairs. You need to be willing to share that with other people. So, the answer to the first question. Again, what caused, what is the whole story of the Samaritan woman? It's the fact that she was not cared for, that she was not accepted. To the second question then, what caused the woman to go to the well at high noon? No one in their right mind, if you've been to Palestine, goes out during the heat of the day. It's crazy how hot it is. I can think of two reasons why she goes to the well 12 o'clock. First of all, She's a Samaritan woman. And that's the only time she could go there without ridicule, without being chastised because she's unclean by the standards of the Jews. But I think there's a second reason. And that we find in verse 16 when Jesus asks her to go to her husband. Go call your husband to come here. The woman answered him, I have no husband. Jesus said to her, you are right, you have no husband. You have had five husbands and one of them you have now is not your husband. Now, let's give the Samaritan woman the benefit of the doubt. She's had five husbands. Let's say that one of them, they got married when they were very young, one died when they were young. Let's say that one went off to war and that person died. Let's say that the disease was prevalent and the third husband died. And the fourth husband died at childbirth. No, no, no, no. Men don't die at childbirth. No, she had had multiple husbands. And the one that she was living with now was not her husband. She had transgressed the law of God. and therefore she has to go to the well at high noon when it's hot and dusty. Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount said, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God. People throughout history have tried to be important, to be remembered in history, kings and queens and warlords or whoever it might be. We don't know their names at all, but we know the story of the Samaritan woman simply because in the heat of the day, she went to the well and she meets Jesus in the midst of all the rejections in her life. Matter of fact, verse 39 says, many Samaritans in the town believed in him. believed in Jesus because of the woman's testimony. This woman had a lasting impact on her community. What caused the woman to go to the well? The sins of others and the sins in her own life. She had had multiple husbands, multiple fallings. The story of the rescue mission is full of wonderful, wonderful stories of the way God reaches out to people in the midst of the extremities of their life, where they just feel like they cannot go on. Let me give you a quick illustration. There are two stories I'm going to tell here, I was going to tell here, but I told the one downstairs at the Sunday school class. I don't want to tell that one again, so I'll just tell the second one. This is about our women's ministry. So if we can flick on to that second one. Thank you. Since I seem to be a slow learner with this thing. Okay. So this is a story of this family. A mother with five kids. About two months ago, we got a call from a sister agency. the Family Justice Ministry, Family Center for Justice. And they called us and said, would you take this family of five kids and a mother? And our policy at that point was we wouldn't take any families with more than three kids. And when they first called me, I said, nah, sorry, we just can't do it. But they persisted and they called some of my staff, maybe a little bit kinder hearted than I am. And they came to me and said, Larry, we gotta help this family. And I said, you're right. Let's move people around. We have two adjoining apartments with a bathroom between them. We'll put the family in that. We'll put five kids and the mother together. And so we did that. But then the ministry that called us, the Family Justice Ministry, they gave us a second call and they said, let me give you the backstory of what was going on with this. That mother and those five kids were living in a car, a single car for the last three months. And they came to us and you were the last place we were going to call. We had called every other agency we could find in Bridgeport and no one would take this family. And so if you had said no, then our next call was going to be to the Department of Family, Children and Family, DCF. And they, by law, would have had to come and take the kids and put them, divide them up and put them in the foster homes. And you gave that family their last opportunity to be together as a family. And if you were to come down to the Bridgeport Rescue Mission today, at eight o'clock in the morning, often when I go into work, they'll be coming out getting ready to go to school. She has a job. All those kids are dressed impeccably. We have given them the clothing. And they are the sweetest kids. It's amazing because our clients are men and women on the third and fourth floor. They love that family because they're just unbelievably different. Simply because we said yes. And we could say yes because of your support, the support you've given the mission. Because we don't charge anyone anything, it's all free. And so that five, those five kids and that mother have hope. because of the hope we can give them at the Bridgeport Rescue Mission. And that story occurs over and over again. I mentioned downstairs another situation where sometimes we'll have a woman who's going into our women's program, and this just happened three or four weeks ago, the end of the story. But the beginning of the story was maybe six months before that. This woman, I interviewed her, and she was tough. I mean, she was a big woman. And if I had a sword fight with her, she would have destroyed me. I mean, she was like, wow, tough. About six weeks after I interviewed her, I was in chapel, and we had a choir come up to sing our choir. And she stood there, and I turned to the person next to me, and I said, is that the same woman that I interviewed? Because she had changed so much. Her countenance, her face, her love of Jesus had just blossomed. And that's what we get to experience at the Bridgeport Rescue Mission. I've been a pastor for 45 years in two very large churches. And I think I've seen more life transformation in the last year and a half at the Bridgeport Rescue Mission than I've seen in any of my years of ministry. It's amazing what you can do by giving people a sense of hope. letting them know that they're cared and loved, giving them three meals a day, putting them through a program that requires them to go to chapel, to learn about Jesus, to read their Bible. It's transformational, and we see it again and again. Third question then. What's the meaning of the strange comment by Jesus about living water? He says in verse 10, if you know the gift of God and who is saying this to you, give me a drink. You would ask him and he would give you living water. Living water is a metaphor of our living relationship with Jesus Christ. How do we know that? Can you think of a time when Jesus said he was thirsty? On the cross. Remember Jesus said, I thirst. I thirst. Jesus, knowing that everything had now been finished and everything had been fulfilled, Jesus said in John 19, I am thirsty. But then he follows that after he received that drink. He says what we have in our Bible, the translation of a Greek word. We have it translated, it is finished. The Greek word is the word tetelestai. Tetelestai is a legal term. It's something you'd use as a document verification. It was as if you'd write out on a potsherd or a manuscript a bill of sale and you'd stamp on it. to Telestai, paid in full. And that's what Jesus did for us on the cross. He looked at our lives. And there's a great chasm between us and God, our sins and our lack of obedience. And in the midst of all of that, Jesus on the cross takes a stamp. and stamps in your soul and in my soul, tetelestai, paid in full. And that's what we offer to the people, people at Bridgeport Rescue Mission. We've seen lives change in miraculous ways. And I would venture to say in this church, there's been lives changed in miraculous ways. as you acknowledge that Christ's death on the cross paid the penalty for your sin. Who pays the penalty? Do you try to get there by works, by being a good guy or a good woman, good person? Or is it the realization Christ died on the cross to give us eternal life, to give us eternal water. Thank you, church, for your involvement in the Bridgeport Rescue Mission. Keep the lights burning here. I'll pray for the next pastor that will come here. That person will be the right person at the right time. So this church will prosper and grow. And then come and visit us, the Bridgeport Rescue Mission. Let me pray. Father, thank you for your goodness. Thank you, Father, for this church. Thank you, Father, for the way you've used this church to touch multiple lives, that the way you've used this church and their contributions through coats and through giving and through food drives to make a difference at the Bridgeport Rescue Mission. Father, we're not perfect at the rescue mission, the church is not perfect, but we pray that when people come here, they would sense the hope of the gospel, and they would find He who gives eternal life. And we ask this in Jesus' name, amen.