416: Dave Jennings - Exhortation - The Unknowns of Unlikelies Chosen by God (John 4)

Automatically transcribed. Accuracy is good but not perfect, and words are sometimes wrong. Trust the audio over the text.

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   Welcome to Good Christadelphian Talks. Thank you for joining us this week. On this podcast, we select one talk a week to help us get the Bible in our daily news feed. Each week, we post a talk that we previewed from suggestions sent in by listeners from around the world. Then we record a short intro beforehand as a personalized recommendation to you on why we are sharing the talk. And now, let's talk more about this week's talk.

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   Hello, and welcome back. This is Brother Chris. For this week, we're listening to an exhortation, which was given earlier this year in April of 2026 by our brother Dave Jennings when he was visiting the Verdugo Hills Ecclesia. And this exhortation is taking a look at the book of John chapter 4, specifically looking at Jesus's interactions with the Samaritan woman and what I really appreciated about Brother Dave's exhortation. And the title was, he was looking at the idea of the unknowns and the unlikely person being who God chooses to work through. And I remember seeing it at the time, it really struck me and reminded me of that not many wise, not many powerful are chosen by God to serve him.

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   And Brother Dave turned it at the end as a reminder to make sure that when we are interacting with people, and it is something here in the Southern California region we've been doing a lot as we've been out pamphleting and talking to people about the outreach effort for the Satan myth effort, to not judge people based on what you assume they believe based on labels, but instead just talk to them, get to know them, get to understand their perspective on things before you attempt to put somebody in a box or assign what you think they know. And I think it's just a really good reminder, not just when it comes to outreach, but also a good reminder for us when it comes to meeting our brothers and sisters and interacting with anybody is our own biases and assumptions and presuppositions going into an interaction can almost cause as much damage, if not more, than what the person on the other side actually says. So I found this to be a really encouraging exhortation and a fun look at the story of the Samaritan woman, and then a reminder of how we're supposed to view and interact with one another. So I hope that you find it to be as encouraging and uplifting as I did.

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   So with that, I will turn it over to our brother Dave Jennings for the exhortation he gave in April of 2026 entitled, The Unknowns and Unlikelies Chosen by God. So today we're going to take most of our words from the encounter that we see in John chapter 4, so you might want to open to John chapter 4. But it is interesting to think about in John chapter 4, this first evangelist that Jesus deploys. It is a woman who is the most unlikely person. And if you think about it, that's not unusual. We are introduced to Simeon, excuse me, to Gideon, who is, he's a son that is secretly threshing in a winepress because of fear of the Midianites. He is afraid for his life, and yet he gets called to be a leader in Israel. Elisha is one member of a group of 12 people, or 12 different groups of oxen that are plowing, and he is called to be the one who gets the double portion of what Elijah had. We have a herdsman from Tekoa, Amos, a cupbearer for the king of Persia in Nehemiah, a young priest from Anathoth, you know, outside of the area of Jerusalem, a family that we don't hear good things about, to be honest, and yet he is called, and his name is Jeremiah, of course.

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   So what God does is he chooses men and women to carry his word, often that are either unknowns or unlikelies. And I think that's a really important message for us. We're going to look at this story from John chapter 4 from several perspectives. Clearly the perspective of the woman, perspective that we see of the community that she goes and preaches to and tells about and witnesses about Jesus. And then we're going to look at what's a, it's not the finest moment, which is for the disciples themselves. And we're going to see and kind of trace through what happens with that. So look, we don't really need to spend a lot of time talking about the Samaritans. The Samaritans, as you probably remember, were people that just didn't have any dealings, the Jews didn't have dealings with them.

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   They didn't believe that Jerusalem was the selected place to worship. They thought it was Mount Gerizim, and they had their evidence for that. But they were also had been part of that northern kingdom, and that northern kingdom that had merged with the Assyrians, not by their choice necessarily, but what had brought, been brought into that was idolatry and some corruption. And so when the Jews thought of the Samaritans, they thought of them as being religiously wayward. I mean, they were messed up when it came to their religion. But they also saw them as being ritually unclean. So they were sort of believers a little bit, but they had a confused religion. And so because of that, they avoided them, and they didn't have any dealings with them. They acknowledged their existence, but they saw them as a corruption of true religion. Now that's going to be important for us to consider, as we eventually hope to apply that into our own lives today. So when we think about this story, the first thing that happens is that, you know, you almost have to connect John chapter 3, which is about Nicodemus. It appears that when Nicodemus comes to him at night, there's the great discussion that we read about about being born, entering again into his mother's womb as the way that Nicodemus saw it, being born of the spirit.

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   And what we hear in that conversation is something that helped Nicodemus to be able to kind of form in his mind something he was resisting or having a hard time accepting, which was that Jesus wasn't just from God, but he was in fact the Son of God. And it's very likely, it's been suggested by a number of writers that he also warned them, warned Jesus, that the Pharisees were out to get him.

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   If you look at chapter 4, verse 1, it says, when therefore the Lord knew how the Pharisees had heard that Jesus had baptized more disciples than John, even though Jesus himself didn't do the baptizing, it says he left Judea and departed again into Galilee. And it says he must needs go through Samaria.

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   And that's an interesting comment because most Jews didn't go through Samaria. They would take a route which would take them over to the Jordan River and they'd go around the whole area of Samaria so that they would avoid dealing with the Samaritans. So whether it was Nicodemus who warned him or not, Jesus recognized the need to leave Judea and to go back up into Galilee.

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    And so then we see that the next thing we see is that he's there in this Sychar, which is in Samaria, and he's sitting next to a well. And it says in verse 6, it's the sixth hour, so right around noon. And where have the disciples gone? Well, the disciples have gone out to get something for the group to eat, which meant they would have gone into a Samaritan village.

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    Why didn't they take Jesus? Did you ever wonder about that? Why is it that they thought it would be okay just to leave him kind of there on his own, without something to draw water with, by the way, while they all went into the town? And I think it was because they probably felt, we don't want to trouble the Lord with the Samaritans.

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    We'll go get food, but we really don't want to interact with the Samaritans. So you can imagine their huge surprise whenever they come back and they see he's talking to the Samaritan woman. So let's just take a look at this interaction. What's the first thing? And I feel like sometimes when we read John chapter 4, it is an introduction to the way that Jesus dealt with and preached to people.

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    Now, look at what he does. How does he start off? He starts off with a connection. Now, if you notice, it says in verse 7, Now, that's what she's called, a woman of Samaria. Now, I want you to notice here that Jesus never calls her, a woman of Samaria. That's not how he deals with her.

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    How does he deal with her? He accepts her as a person, as an individual, even though he knows that her life has been far from what God would want in a person. And he's going to eventually get to that point. And so what he says in verse 10, instead of saying, you know, that's right, we don't have dealings with you, but I'm really thirsty.

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    In verse 10, he says, 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 wouldst have asked of him, and he would have given the living water. Now, it doesn't connect for the woman, but this is what starts off.

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    Jesus deals with her as an individual. No labels. No woman of Samaria. No woman who's had five husbands, and the one she's with is not her husband. He deals with her as a human being, as a person. And the woman then, because she doesn't get the point, says, Sir, in verse 11, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep.

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    From whence then hast thou that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, which gave us the well, and drank thereof himself, and his children, and his cattle? So she's not getting the point. But Jesus answers and says, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again. But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst.

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    But the water that I shall give him shall be in him, a well of water springing up into everlasting life. That's a wonderful, that's a wonderful statement, and one that we can read and take great encouragement from. Because the word of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, offers us living water, and we recognize that when it's in us, it's like a spring that continues to give living water inside of us.

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    But the woman wasn't ready for that yet. She says in verse 15, Well, give me that water so I don't have to come back here and draw in the well. If I can get water where people don't get thirsty again, I don't have to come back here. Now, by the way, she's there by herself and she's there at noon.

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    So what does that tell you about the way that she was viewed in that city? That is not the time that people normally come, that women would normally come to draw water. And they would not usually come by themselves. So that's part of the story. So she says, I don't want to come here anymore.

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    Give me that living water. And Jesus then recognizes once again, she hasn't really gotten the point. And so what he says is he takes the word and he applies it. He says, Call your husband and come hither. And the woman answered and said, I have no husband. Jesus said unto her, That hast well said, I have no husband.

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    For thou hast had five husbands. And he whom thou now hast is not thy husband. In that saidest thou truly. Now, I would suppose at this point that the woman would have said, Well, look, I've kind of heard this stuff before. This is why I'm here at the well by myself. I am kind of an outcast.

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    But it's amazing that this person knows me and he knows my situation, knows my heart. And so she says in verse 19, Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet. So the point registers with her that this is not just any Jew that's standing next to the well with her. This is somebody who not only talks about things that are huge, like living water, not thirsting again, talks about things like how I can, whoever comes to me, I will not thirst again.

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    And then the woman also recognizes not only that, but he knows me. He knows me in a way that he shouldn't ordinarily know me. So what does she do? She almost immediately takes it to a doctrinal question. She says, Our fathers, verse 20, worshipped in this mountain. That's Mount Gerizim. And ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.

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    Jesus hath to her. Well, see, that's a doctrinal question, right? That's a straightforward doctrinal question. She's basically saying the Jews claim it's Jerusalem and we think it's Mount Gerizim. So how is Jesus going to answer this? He says in verse 21, Woman, he says, Woman, believe me, the hour cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem worship the Father.

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    But he goes on to say this, Ye worship, ye know not what. We know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews, but the hour cometh and now is when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father seeketh such to worship him. For God is spirit and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and truth.

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    So what's happened here is she's asked a doctrinal question and Jesus has very clearly answered that question. Salvation is of the Jews. and the worshipping at Jerusalem was the place that God had selected. But he takes it to another level for her and that is to say that there is a time coming where it's not going to be about whether it's at Mount Gerizim, it's not going to be a matter of whether it's in Jerusalem, but the Father calls all people to seek him and to worship him.

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    And then she goes on in verse 25, she goes, I know that Messiah cometh, which is called Christ, when he has come he will tell us all things. Jesus saith unto her. This is the first time that Jesus says this to anyone. He says, I that speak unto thee am he. It's the first time that Jesus declares that.

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    Okay, so this interaction has happened with this woman. It started off with a personal connection. I'm not condemning you. I'm seeing you as a person that I can talk to. I don't label you. It goes through a big picture about what the Lord can offer and she doesn't really get that. Eventually, he connects with her on the issue of her marriages and then finally, doctrinally, he sets it straight, but he talks about a time where the issue of Jerusalem and Gerizim is no longer going to be the issue and so she is told that she's now talking to the Messiah.

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    All right, so that's the interaction and then what happens in verse 27, the disciples come back and it says, now the King James probably is a little bit light on this. It says, and upon this came his disciples and marveled that he talked with the woman. Now, the NET and the NLT both said they were shocked that he talked with this woman.

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    NIV says they were surprised talking to this woman, a woman of Samaria and what we see then is that the woman leaves her water pot and takes off to the city in verse 28 and what she does when she goes back to the city is she starts witnessing this man, the Messiah, who had told her all things that she ever did.

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    Isn't this not the Christ? And so what happens is that the disciples are still kind of surprised by this whole thing and they say to him in verse, well, he says in verse 32, he said to them, I have meat to eat that ye know not of. Therefore, said the disciples, you know, whose problem is something to eat?

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    And Jesus said, my meat is to do the will of him that sent me and to finish his work. And then he looks at the number of Samaritans that are coming in and he says there is like white fields. Samaritans generally wore like white garments and he would look out and he would see the fields which were now filling up with Samaritans coming to hear about him.

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    So, it's interesting that what ends up happening is Jesus spends two days with the Samaritans. Now, this wasn't planned. This was not, at least the disciples didn't know anything about this plan. They were, they were going to spend two days and they would listen to the words of Jesus. Jesus. Now, what happens, and this is a really important thing, is it says in verse 41, many more believe because of his own word and said to the woman, now we believe not because of thy saying, for we have heard him ourselves and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world.

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    So, a couple lessons about that. the first thing is, the woman's job was just to witness and to say, you need to come hear this person. What he has to say is incredible. And when they go and they sit down and listen to him, then it says they believed. Now, I think there's a little bit of a principle here about when we preach the truth, when we teach our own children, and that is, it's good for mom and dad to share their faith.

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    It's good for us to teach them the principles of the truth. But at some point, there has to be a connection where they believe it because they hear it themselves. We have to be able to go from knowledge and witness of somebody else to a relationship to believing themselves. And this is what happens.

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    And so it says, after the two days, they departed. Now, I think this is interesting. There's not any mention here of an intent to baptize. There's no follow-up plan necessarily at this point. They spent two great days where everybody listened to Jesus and then they leave and they go back up to Galilee.

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    Now, what's interesting about this is this is not the only time that we hear about Jesus with the Samaritans. There's another example that shows up and it's a kind of ugly one and it's later on but it's back in Luke chapter 9. So if you go with me over to Luke chapter 9, the disciples have had a really good positive interaction with the Samaritans, the disciples have, and they are probably expecting that this is going to be the same every time.

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    So we get to Luke chapter 9 and we'll look at verse 40. We'll start at verse 49. Well, excuse me, this is not the one I wanted.

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    Sometimes when you cut your notes, you cut out things you shouldn't be doing and that's, I think, what I've done. So there's one time where Jesus comes and, oh, this is it. This is the same chapter. Verse 49. John answered and said, Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name and we forbade him because he followed not with us.

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    And Jesus said unto him, Forbid him not for he that is not against us is for us. And it came to pass when the time was come that he should be received up, he steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem and sent messengers before his face and they went and entered into a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him.

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    All right, so Jesus has been to the Samaritans before. It was a very positive reception but he's now going to Jerusalem. So that's a problem for the Samaritans, right? Because that is not what they believed was the place for worship. And so he sent messengers before his face and they go into the village of the Samaritans to make ready for him.

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    Verse 53, they did not receive him because his face was as though he would go to Jerusalem. Wow, that's a shocker. Before, they listened to his words and they received him and they believed him but now, in this case, they would not even receive him because he was going to go to Jerusalem.

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    Verse 54, what's the disciples' reaction? And when his disciples, James and John, saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven and consume them even as Elias did? But he turned and rebuked them and said, ye know not what manner of spirit you are. That's an interesting thing.

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    So, here was an expectation. The people would hear the word. They didn't hear it. They wouldn't receive Jesus and the disciples' reaction is anger. It's punishment. Let's send down fire from heaven to consume them. And Jesus' answer to that is, you know, you just, you don't know what spirit you are of. That is not the way that the gospel is to work.

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    So, it's not a coincidence that when Jesus talks about the issue where the Levite and the priest would not stop for the man who had been beaten, that it's a Samaritan that he uses to be the one who takes care of that man and takes him to the inn. And it isn't going to be until the time of a young man whose job it was to feed the widows, a man named Philip.

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    He was to feed the widows in Jerusalem, selected for that job, and because of persecution, he was chased out of Jerusalem, and he goes up to Samaria, and he begins to preach, and that's where we read in Acts chapter 8 and in Acts chapter 9 that there is great reception by the Samaritans and baptisms and actually ecclesias that are formed.

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    So, the Jews had their religion correct, Jesus made this clear, but the Samaritans were the ones that actually received his words. And Jesus shows us how we ought to behave towards those who don't always initially say, oh, you're a Christadelphian, I've been waiting to learn exactly what you believe. It was one of great patience, and it was not going to be planned by Philip or by anybody else that they were going to go back to preach in Samaria.

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    Now, why is this, at least in my mind, important? When we were in this ecclesia in 2020 and going through COVID with you all, you remember those days? We had marked off chairs and all those good things. Just about two weeks before the pandemic, we went up to Northern California because it was my wife's uncle's birthday, and he was turning 90, and they had the whole family there, which was a mixture of Catholics and Presbyterians and Evangelicals, and after dinner, they handed out two hymns.

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    One was Great is Thy Faithfulness, which I think you all know, right? We sing that ourselves. The other one, I don't know the name of it, but I wasn't going to sing it because it talked about Christ taking on flesh, and it demonstrated a pretty blurred relationship and misunderstanding of who the Father and the Son were.

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    And my reaction was, here we go. I wasn't going to sing that line of music, but then I watched the family, and the family, they openly proclaimed their love of God as well as his son, the Lord Jesus Christ, though their understanding wasn't quite right, not right at all. They used language that was scriptural, and they quoted references in scripture.

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    They prayed for the food, they spoke of gratitude to God, and there was a very touching dedication that the grandfather, the uncle, did where he held up the children and did a dedication of those two young, newly born great grandchildren. There was really strong expressions of faith and comments about Jesus returning, and I soon began to realize how wrong it would have been for me if I would have isolated myself or condemned these people or standing in judgment because of their error.

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    I don't know if you've ever experienced that before. If you ever have a conversation with a Jehovah's Witness, when you really listen to them, they only believe that Jehovah's Witnesses are going to be saved. repulsive. You speak to them, it's insulting. You know their end game is only one thing. But we don't want to be like that.

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    I just hope in my life that I haven't sent that kind of aura out to a person where I discount them or I give up on them because they have wrong doctrine.

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    So, what is the body of Christ today? Who are the people who make up the body of Christ? Now, it's presumptuous, I feel, for us to define who makes up the ecclesia. The ecclesia is the ecclesia of the Lord Jesus Christ. And I don't think it's done by church membership definitions or labels.

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    what we do is we confess a shared understanding of the gospel and first principles. And based on that, we break bread together. This is our fellowship. But we can't judge whether the Lord considers others outside our formal fellowship to be part of his body or not. Now, our cultural heritage, going back to the 1840s and 50s, captured in books like Christendom Astray by Brother Roberts.

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    It's an identification of a group of people who were pulling out of false teachings. And that's right. And for 170 years, that's been what is part of our fellowship, is being able to discern the difference between error and truth. truth.

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    But what our job is, is to expose incorrect doctrine and to have no part in doctrinal or ecclesiastical corruptions of Christianity. In fact, some Christadelphians will have a hard time calling themselves Christians, right? Some may go as far as to see our denomination as the only legitimate group of believers in the modern era.

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    However, we really have to be circumspect about how we talk about people who are in other churches who are seeking Jesus Christ. I hear sometimes comments that are troubling about what's going on in other churches, what people are doing. Sometimes it's all entertainment, they don't really read the Bible. that's just not really true.

60. 31:40

    What differentiates us is this understanding of the fundamental first principles of truth, and that's why we fellowship together. But there's a surprising number of people that are out there that are Christians who are confused, kind of like that woman at the well of Samaria. There are more than 40 people 40% I should say, of Christians who are now questioning the Trinity.

61. 32:15

    60%, now listen to this one, 60% believe that Satan is merely a symbol of evil. But the problem is 64% believe that a person can be under the influence of a spiritual force such as demons or evil spirits. And there's a whole potpourri of understanding, understanding, partial understanding. Here's the issue. We can't be like the disciples were at that point, which is to be shocked or surprised that we would interact with people who have these wrong understandings.

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    Carrying bias, when we push people away or marginalize them, it limits us and our ability to influence. Isolationism, it's not an agent for evangelism. It's a deterrent. So, what we see as Christadelphians is we're not seeking adversarial relationships with our Christian groups, but we're not seeking assimilation either. Where is the line? What's the danger on either side of the line?

63. 33:28

    And we can see in this record of the life of the Lord Jesus. He was not an isolationist. We're told that we are to come out from them and be separate, but that's about idolatry. So, in Luke chapter 7, we're told that he sat down and he ate with publicans and sinners, winebibbers.

64. 33:47

    Jesus didn't limit his work to those who were lined up perfectly with him and his disciples. The attraction these men and women felt to Jesus is they felt that they were seen as individuals. They weren't labeled and they were listening to his words. They were able to hear him. And I think, brothers and sisters, that really is the message.

65. 34:11

    The message is that for many of us, our knowledge of the truth has, in some cases, been something that we found, we discovered. And in other cases, it is the fortune of being born into a family where they had understood these principles. principles. We need to have compassion, just like that woman at the well of Samaria.

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    There will be a woman at the well of Samaria for each of us. And the question is, will we have the courage to be able to deal with them as an individual, not to label them, but rather to preach the living gospel, to share with them the living water, to be able to offer them the opportunity to serve God in truth.

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    That's our opportunity, and that's what we want to pray that we will have sufficient faith to do when the moment arises. is. Thank you for listening to the Good Christadelphian Talks podcast. We hope this talk helped you in your walk and brightened your day. If you would like to hear more, please subscribe for new episodes.

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