This is Episode #309 and today we’ll read John chapters 3&4 together. John 3:16 – the one-verse Gospel. Everything else is detail.
Joy: You’re listening to Season 2 of the Lifting Her Voice podcast. This is Episode #309 and today we’ll read John chapters 3&4 together. John 3:16 – the one-verse Gospel. Everything else is detail.
Welcome
Welcome to the Lifting Her Voice podcast, Season 2! I’m your host, Joy Miller, and I invite you to grab your Bible and join me – from the beginning – simply reading God’s word together. We built some spiritual muscles in 2020 with just the New Testament. But this year we’re going all out, cover-to-cover, Old Testament and New. So, whether with your first cup in the morning, your commute to work, or as the last thing on your mind before sleep, God’s Word will equip you for every good work. I’m really glad you’re here!
John Chapter 3
Jesus and Nicodemus
There was a man from the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to him at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one could perform these signs you do unless God were with him.”
Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, unless someone is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
“How can anyone be born when he is old?” Nicodemus asked him. “Can he enter his mother’s womb a second time and be born?”
Jesus answered, “Truly I tell you, unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. Whatever is born of the flesh is flesh, and whatever is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed that I told you that you must be born again. The wind blows where it pleases, and you hear its sound, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
“How can these things be?” asked Nicodemus.
“Are you a teacher of Israel and don’t know these things?” Jesus replied. “Truly I tell you, we speak what we know and we testify to what we have seen, but you do not accept our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you don’t believe, how will you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven — the Son of Man.
His One and Only Son
“Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. For God loved the world in this way: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Anyone who believes in him is not condemned, but anyone who does not believe is already condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the one and only Son of God.
This is the judgment: The light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light and avoids it, so that his deeds may not be exposed. But anyone who lives by the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be shown to be accomplished by God.”
Jesus and John the Baptist
After this, Jesus and his disciples went to the Judean countryside, where he spent time with them and baptized.
John also was baptizing in Aenon near Salim, because there was plenty of water there. People were coming and being baptized, since John had not yet been thrown into prison.
Then a dispute arose between John’s disciples and a Jew about purification. So they came to John and told him, “Rabbi, the one you testified about, and who was with you across the Jordan, is baptizing — and everyone is going to him.”
John responded, “No one can receive anything unless it has been given to him from heaven. You yourselves can testify that I said, ‘I am not the Messiah, but I’ve been sent ahead of him.’ He who has the bride is the groom. But the groom’s friend, who stands by and listens for him, rejoices greatly at the groom’s voice. So this joy of mine is complete. He must increase, but I must decrease.”
The One from Heaven
The one who comes from above is above all. The one who is from the earth is earthly and speaks in earthly terms. The one who comes from heaven is above all. He testifies to what he has seen and heard, and yet no one accepts his testimony. The one who has accepted his testimony has affirmed that God is true. For the one whom God sent speaks God’s words, since he gives the Spirit without measure. The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hands. The one who believes in the Son has eternal life, but the one who rejects the Son will not see life; instead, the wrath of God remains on him.
John Chapter 4
Jesus and the Samaritan Woman
When Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard he was making and baptizing more disciples than John (though Jesus himself was not baptizing, but his disciples were), he left Judea and went again to Galilee. He had to travel through Samaria; so he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar near the property that Jacob had given his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, worn out from his journey, sat down at the well. It was about noon.
A woman of Samaria came to draw water.
“Give me a drink,” Jesus said to her, because his disciples had gone into town to buy food.
“How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” she asked him. For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.
Jesus answered, “If you knew the gift of God, and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would ask him, and he would give you living water.”
“Sir,” said the woman, “you don’t even have a bucket, and the well is deep. So where do you get this ‘living water’? You aren’t greater than our father Jacob, are you? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and livestock.”
Jesus said, “Everyone who drinks from this water will get thirsty again. But whoever drinks from the water that I will give him will never get thirsty again. In fact, the water I will give him will become a well of water springing up in him for eternal life.”
“Sir,” the woman said to him, “give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and come here to draw water.”
Worship in Spirit and in Truth
“Go call your husband,” he told her, “and come back here.”
“I don’t have a husband,” she answered.
“You have correctly said, ‘I don’t have a husband,’” Jesus said. “For you’ve had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.”
“Sir,” the woman replied, “I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews say that the place to worship is in Jerusalem.”
Jesus told her, “Believe me, woman, an hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know. We worship what we do know, because salvation is from the Jews. But an hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth. Yes, the Father wants such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and in truth.”
The woman said to him, “I know that the Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”
Jesus told her, “I, the one speaking to you, am he.”
The Ripened Harvest
Just then his disciples arrived, and they were amazed that he was talking with a woman. Yet no one said, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?”
Then the woman left her water jar, went into town, and told the people, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” They left the town and made their way to him.
In the meantime the disciples kept urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.”
But he said, “I have food to eat that you don’t know about.”
The disciples said to one another, “Could someone have brought him something to eat?”
“My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work,” Jesus told them. “Don’t you say, ‘There are still four more months, and then comes the harvest’? Listen to what I’m telling you: Open your eyes and look at the fields, because they are ready for harvest. The reaper is already receiving pay and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that the sower and reaper can rejoice together. For in this case the saying is true: ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap what you didn’t labor for; others have labored, and you have benefited from their labor.”
The Savior of the World
Now many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of what the woman said when she testified, “He told me everything I ever did.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. Many more believed because of what he said. And they told the woman, “We no longer believe because of what you said, since we have heard for ourselves and know that this really is the Savior of the world.”
A Galilean Welcome
After two days he left there for Galilee. (Jesus himself had testified that a prophet has no honor in his own country.) When they entered Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him because they had seen everything he did in Jerusalem during the festival. For they also had gone to the festival.
The Second Sign: Healing an Official’s Son
He went again to Cana of Galilee, where he had turned the water into wine. There was a certain royal official whose son was ill at Capernaum. When this man heard that Jesus had come from Judea into Galilee, he went to him and pleaded with him to come down and heal his son, since he was about to die.
Jesus told him, “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will not believe.”
“Sir,” the official said to him, “come down before my boy dies.”
“Go,” Jesus told him, “your son will live.” The man believed what Jesus said to him and departed.
While he was still going down, his servants met him saying that his boy was alive. He asked them at what time he got better. “Yesterday at one in the afternoon the fever left him,” they answered. The father realized this was the very hour at which Jesus had told him, “Your son will live.” So he himself believed, along with his whole household.
Now this was also the second sign Jesus performed after he came from Judea to Galilee.
Close
John 4:35-38 is an interesting monologue. It took me a couple of times reading it – okay…three or six times! – to follow what Jesus was talking about. First, we all know that crops are ready to be harvested in the spring, but that was apparently four months away. He wanted His disciples – and us – to look and see the ‘other’ crop. Those who were ready to be harvested into the Kingdom of God. Prophets and believers had been sowing all along, pointing people toward the coming Messiah. Answering this call to evangelism holds the promise of rewards or ‘wages’.
The text goes on to confirm for us that some will sow and some will reap. In a few weeks, we will read how Paul talks about the same kind of partnership. In 1 Corinthians 3:6, he says, I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. We must accept that we may have to harvest when someone else has planted the seeds of salvation in a person. Or we may witness to someone very dear, wanting so badly to bring them to Christ, but someone else may ‘harvest’ where we have labored. It’s all a divine partnership with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit to bring the lost to salvation
Prayer
Let’s pray. Holy Spirit, please equip us with insight and words to accomplish this command to reach the lost. I pray an extra blessing on those who have spent this year reading Your word systematically. They are better prepared to share Your heart. Help us not to forget the simple completeness of the John 3:16 passage. Regardless of approach or methodology, Lord, I pray, that when our Savior returns, we will be found faithful and doing the work for which we have been called. Amen.
What is your favorite? Sowing or reaping? Planting and watering or harvesting the crops? Loading the bases or hitting the Grand Slam? Let me know at Lifting Her Voice.com, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
Thank you for joining me here today. I pray that by spending time in His Word every day, you will be changed. Visit me at Lifting Her Voice.com with your comments and questions. And don’t forget to visit the Blog page while you’re there. If you like the podcast, it would be great if you’d give it a five-star review and share it with everyone you know. Don’t forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. See you tomorrow!
Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Christian Standard Bible(r), Copyright (c) 2017 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission. Christian Standard Bible(r) and CSB(r) are federally registered trademarks of Holman Bible Publishers.
Show Notes
- Awesome Video of Solomon’s Temple
- These will help! Overview videos of all books of the Bible
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