Grace Is GreaterSample

Take a few minutes to read John 4:1-42. Let’s get a fuller experience of Paul’s words on grace through Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well.

Imagine yourself as a bystander during Jesus’ conversation with this Samaritan woman. You know that Galileans like Jesus and Samaritans like this woman don’t get along. You know it is against tradition for a man and a woman to have a casual conversation like this. You know that it is highly unorthodox for a spiritual and religious teacher to build a relationship with a sinful, divorced woman. 

As the Samaritan woman is waiting at the well, Jesus approaches, sits down, and asks her for a drink. But the conversation doesn’t remain casual for long, as Jesus quickly proclaims: If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water. (John 4:10)

It’s a very unusual statement, and when the woman asks if Jesus is talking about real water, he intensifies his claim: Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life. (John 4:13)

Realizing Jesus is identifying a great spiritual thirst within her, the Samaritan woman responds, “Sir, give me this water”. This woman, like many of us, wants spiritual life and healing but on her own terms.

We all want the benefits of Jesus’s offer here and now, without a collision of his holiness and our own brokenness. 

Jesus continues, “Go, call your husband. … you are right when you say that you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband.” (John 4:16, 18)

Jesus goes straight for her heart, but when Jesus confronts our sin, he does so not to intensify our shame but to remove it. Although the woman tries to change the subject to an impersonal religious question, Jesus keeps the focus on her heart.

We are just like the Samaritan woman at the well. We want our mistakes to remain hidden. We want our past to be just that — the past. We are broken people apart from Christ — and that brokenness remains with us even after salvation. To fully embrace God’s grace is to fully embrace our own need for that grace.

God pursues you. He chases you down. He waits for you at the well. He knows your every failure, your every need.

Jesus didn’t pick this woman because she was the most moral or the most salvation-ready. She was needy and lost — “dead in transgressions” in Paul’s language. But Jesus focused his love on her precisely because of her need and thirst. Jesus drew this woman back to God to demonstrate the beautiful reality that it is by grace you have been saved!