The Woman At The Well

Most Jews avoided Samaria, yet John 4:4 records that Jesus "needed to go through Samaria" (NKJV). The necessity was not geographic but divine. He went to seek one particular sinner the world had cast aside. This is sovereign grace, the same grace by which God works "all things according to the counsel of His will" (Ephesians 1:11), reaching the outcast on purpose.

Jesus tells her, "whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life" (John 4:14, NKJV). The living water is the Holy Spirit and the eternal life Christ gives. Unlike Jacob's well, it satisfies the soul forever and wells up to everlasting life.

When she asks for the water, Jesus says, "Go, call your husband" (John 4:16), then reveals, "you have had five husbands" (John 4:18, NKJV). He does not condemn her to crush her but to convict her. Saving faith requires the conviction of sin first. The Westminster Shorter Catechism (Q.87) describes repentance as grief for sin joined with turning to God in Christ.

No. Jesus names her sin plainly before He heals it: "the one whom you now have is not your husband" (John 4:18, NKJV). Grace does not excuse sin; it forgives and transforms the sinner. The Lord seeks her precisely as she is, but He does not leave her as she is, drawing her from sin to living water.

He told her, "we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews" (John 4:22, NKJV). The Samaritans worshiped in ignorance, but the covenant promises, the Scriptures, and the Messiah came through Israel. Salvation is not invented by the worshiper; it comes from God through the line He appointed, fulfilled in Christ alone.

Jesus says, "the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth" (John 4:23, NKJV). Worship is not bound to a mountain or a temple but flows from a renewed heart, by the Spirit, according to God's revealed Word. This is the heart of the Reformed Regulative Principle: God determines how He is to be worshiped.

"God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth" (John 4:24, NKJV). Because God is spirit and not confined to place, true worship must be inward and sincere, not merely external. The Westminster Confession (2.1) confesses God as "a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions."

Only by grace. Jesus tells her "the Father is seeking such to worship Him" (John 4:23, NKJV). She does not climb to God; the Father seeks her and the Son reveals Himself to her. True worship is the fruit of regeneration, "born of the Spirit" (John 3:8), not a work the sinner offers to earn God's favor.

When she mentions the coming Messiah, Jesus answers, "I who speak to you am He" (John 4:26, NKJV). To this Samaritan woman, rarely to the religious leaders, He declares His identity openly. Christ reveals Himself savingly to those the Father gives Him, fulfilling the promise that the Messiah "will tell us all things" (John 4:25).

She leaves her waterpot and tells her town, "Come, see a Man who told me all things that I ever did" (John 4:29, NKJV). True grace overflows in witness. The one who was an outcast becomes the first evangelist to the Samaritans, and "many of the Samaritans of that city believed in Him" (John 4:39).