Drinking from the Well

What is genuine worship?  Genuine worship is when we enter into intimacy with Almighty God.  It is not in the type of worship (traditional or contemporary . . . it’s not whether or not we are gathered in an ornate sanctuary or a room with a few folding chairs), because Christians around the world worship in so many different ways.  Even, here in Waynesboro, there are many different ways people worship.  It is not the form that makes genuine worship.  It is the introduction of intimacy with Jesus Christ that worship is all about.  It is when the spirit, our immortal, invisible part meets with God who is immortal and invisible.

When we explore Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, this woman was overwhelmed by this conversation.  She had set out, a woman of ill repute, to gather some water at the well.  She did this every day, and she never expected that on this particular day, something like this would happen.  And then, when she says in verse 25, I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ).  When he comes, he will tell us all things.”  Jesus astonishes her in verse 26, I who speak to you am he.  In the Greek text, the words are eigo eimi . . . I AM HE!!

Imagine the amazement in this woman’s mind as she experienced Jesus’s life-giving waters that unforgettable day by Jacob’s well.  Indeed, in the excitement of discovery, she probably forgot her water jar and ran off to Sychar to tell everybody, come, come, come, see a man who told me everything about myself.  Could this be the Messiah?  They came and they believed.

Friends, when we encounter Jesus, it is then we discover genuine worship.  So, really the question that remains is this: What are we going to do about it now that we know?  What are we going to do with this man who proclaims, “I WHO SPEAK TO YOU AM HE” . . . What are we going to do with this man who has living water for our deepest thirst?

This water is ours for the asking.  And as we read in John 4:14, “whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again.  The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”  So, bottom line, will you drink from the well?  It is when we drink from the water that Jesus gives that we genuinely worship!