Sermons by the Monday Club John 4:1-42 When therefore the LORD knew how the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John,… How immense the distance between "Give Me to drink" and "I am He." I. AN OBJECT-LESSON IN THE ART OF RELIGIOUS CONVERSATION. 1. No duty more difficult than that of opening out a conversation on the things of the soul. This an art, because we must learn it by practice through mistakes and discouragement. Jesus left few discourses, because His teaching was mostly conversational, suggested by passing things. Beginning here with human thirst and eliciting questions, He gradually and naturally led up and on to the highest truths. 2. Notice the skill with which Jesus avoids a plain answer to a plain question, and so replies that He becomes the questioner and arouses deepening curiosity and interest. 3. The use He made of the woman's moral intuitions and the truths she already knew. This was the favourite method of His dialectics. 4. Here do we need our lesson from Christ. (1) How perfectly He entered into human need! (2) He had infinite patience with the narrow and dull and earthbound. (3) With all this went an equal faith in that hidden but immortal power to which He appealed. II. THE TRUTHS OF THIS DISCOURSE. 1. Living water. (1) The comparison of spiritual blessings to water familiar in Scripture. (2) The characteristic of this water is that it is a gift. Men do not have to fetch, buy, nor earn salvation, but receive it. (3) This water of life is not Christ, for He gives it, but the whole truth and grace which make for salvation. 2. True worship. (1) The vital inward power brings one into the true attitude of worship. The heart first, form afterwards. (2) True worship must be an inward secret thing. Ritual, music, etc., only aid the silent movements of the soul towards God. (3) True worship must be true to God's requirements and our own moral wants, not merely honest and sincere, although misguided, but in accordance with the reality of things. (4) The Father seeks such worship. 3. Jesus the Messiah. Salvation was of the Jews, but Christ was the fulfilment of hopes as old as the race. (Sermons by the Monday Club.) Parallel Verses KJV: When therefore the Lord knew how the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John, |
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