Back while Carolyn and I were church planting in British Columbia, some of our financial support came from the mid-Southern states. We often went south for reporting trips. One Indiana Sunday afternoon, I described an unusual British Columbia wedding I had recently performed.

    The “wedding chapel” was an old cabin on the side of a mountain in the sagebrush just beyond the timberline. The bride was twenty-seven years old, and the groom was forty-seven. They already had two children, and the bride was seven months pregnant. But they were getting married because, as brand-new Christians, they had come to believe that the Lord wanted them to quit living “common law.”

    Of the handful of wedding guests, five or six were alcoholics, some were drug addicts, and one woman was a prostitute who had often sold herself for a case of beer. Another man was on parole — attempted murder. All except two had recently come to Christ. There were no facades, no proud images to protect. At the end of the ceremony, instead of kissing the groom, the bride shouted, “Where’s my rolling pin? I’ve got a license now!” Tears and hugging had filled the room. One of my favorite weddings.

    But in Indiana when I described those mountain nuptials, one insider asked, “Don’t you ever bring any good Canadian people to Christ?”

    I’ve often wondered since, if Jesus had attended that mountain wedding, what he would have felt. I wonder, too, how this Indiana man would have felt if he’d been sitting on the edge of the Samaritan well with Jesus when the Samaritan woman showed up.

Jesus and the Samaritan Woman (John 4:1-17 NLT)

Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, “Jesus is baptizing and making more disciples than John” (though Jesus himself didn’t baptize them — his disciples did). So he left Judea to return to Galilee.

He had to go through Samaria on the way. Eventually he came to the Samaritan village of Sychar, near the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there; and Jesus, tired from the long walk, sat wearily beside the well about noontime. Soon a Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Please give me a drink.” He was alone at the time because his disciples had gone into the village to buy some food.

The woman was surprised, for Jews refuse to have anything to do with Samaritans. She said to Jesus, “You are a Jew, and I am a Samaritan woman. Why are you asking me for a drink?”

Jesus replied, “If you only knew the gift God has for you and who I am, you would ask me, and I would give you living water.”

“But sir, you don’t have a rope or a bucket,” she said, “and this is a very deep well. Where would you get this living water? And besides, are you greater than our ancestor Jacob who gave us this well? How can you offer better water than he and his sons and his cattle enjoyed?”

Jesus replied, “People soon become thirsty again after drinking this water. But the water I give them takes away thirst altogether. It becomes a perpetual spring within them, giving them eternal life.”

“Please, sir,” the woman said, “give me some of that water! Then I’ll never be thirsty again, and I won’t have to come here to haul water.”

“Go and get your husband,” Jesus told her.

“I don’t have a husband,” the woman replied. Jesus said, “You’re right! You don’t have a husband — for you have had five husbands, and you aren’t even married to the man you’re living with now.”

 

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Excerpted from The Jesus Touch, ©2002, Howard Publishing Company. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Title: "The Abandoned Water Jar, Part 1"
Author: Lynn Anderson
Publication Date: July 17, 2002