The Chosen + BibleProject | Season 1 Reading PlanSample

Surviving Versus Living

How do we know if we’re alive or dead? Check the vitals! Heart beating, lungs breathing, eyes blinking—these are signs of life. But what if all of our vitals check out while our hearts are filled with fear, anger, or self-loathing? Could we look at two different people who both have physically healthy bodies and say that one is fully alive while the other is barely hanging onto life?

Surviving is not the same as living. And we all share the desire of being made fully alive. Surviving happens when we live only according to our sensory perception—sight, taste, smell, touch, sound, etc. We use our physical senses to avoid harm and pursue health and safety. That’s a good thing, but our senses never tell us the whole story. God built humanity to operate according to physical senses and his instructions together. That’s when we start to truly live.

When we operate according to God’s will and instruction, his own life starts flowing through us. When we join in the current of God’s Spirit, the good fruit from the lush garden of Eden starts to grow within us. The Spirit's living water produces in us love, joy, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control. Those are the ways of God.

When Jesus tells the Samaritan woman that the water she drinks will only make her thirsty for more, he suggests that she’s become content with survival mode. Even worse, the world has harmed her so profoundly that she might think survival is the best she will ever know before death. But Jesus blows that way of thinking apart. He promises her that drinking the kind of water that he gives, by living according to his ways, will produce a “well” within her that springs up into an endless stream of abundant life—a real, full, beautiful, and good life.

The story of the Bible is not about God helping us survive for as long as possible. It’s a story about God intending to make humanity fully alive, by drawing people into his life, which is already endless and beautiful. May we transcend basic survival techniques to embrace life in the way of Jesus.

Reflection Questions

1. In this scene, Jesus ignores major social norms so that he can patiently extend love and hope to the Samaritan woman. As a Jewish man, he was supposed to ignore and avoid her, according to the expectations and values of others. What ethnic or religious groups in our world have we been told to stay away from and why?
2. Jesus identifies true worship of God on the basis of sincerity and faithfulness to his teaching (rooted in Spirit and truth)—not on the basis of where it happens (this mountain or that, in the temple or not, etc.). He’s saying that there is more than one way to worship and live for God, and God loves all worship done sincerely and in God’s Spirit. Does this teach us anything about the best way to approach other God-honoring communities who worship sincerely yet differently than we do?
3. This story reveals a lot about Jesus’ nature and character, his humanity and compassion. What else did you learn about Jesus’ character from the ways he speaks and acts in this story?