Lent 3 Sermon - BMT - March 8, 2026

Scripture Readings: Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 95; Romans 1:16-32; John 4:5-26, 39-42

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

This season of Lent is intended to be a season of self-examination. This is on Ash Wednesday, if you remember the invitation that we gave for fasting and vigil and almsgiving, but it's a season of penitence where we examine ourselves, our interior life, where we look interiorly, sincerely and humbly and honestly, in order to move with the Spirit into sanctity. And this invitation, the invitation to be self-aware, to examine in our lives those areas of sin that need to be uprooted, or vices that need to be uprooted, passions that need to be ordered, wounds that need to be healed, that invitation to examine yourself and look inwardly can often be extremely anxiety-producing. I think this is especially true for those of us who have experienced great emotional, mental, spiritual pain, who have been through great suffering, who have been through seasons of what looking back they would call looking inwardly and finding all the evidence for self-hatred or shame, guilt, worthlessness, feeling like an imposter, a fraud, or a failure, or whatever it may be. And often this experience of suffering, of looking inward, of examining ourselves, uh, when you're in it, it has a sticky quality to it. You feel stuck. It feels like Velcro, it feels like you're like walking around in a tar pit and you can't get your feet out, you have no handles to grab onto and pull yourself up. It feels like it's going to go on indefinitely. Feel stuck in the pain, in the suffering. And it often this suffering is accompanied by a kind of rigidity of thinking, a kind of a one-track mind, one interpretation. You know, we look inwardly at all this evidence for whatever it might be, and there's only one interpretation. You know, I'm a failure, I'm a fraud, I'm an imposter, I'm, you know, name it. And so, for good reason, an invitation by anybody to say, hey, you know, let's look inwardly and examine ourselves. Let's find uh passions and vices that need to be uprooted. It's understandable that that invitation can sound an awful lot like somebody saying, you know, hey, come over here, step on this little slope here. It is very slippery, and at the bottom, there's a tar pit. It's gonna be really hard to get out. But just put your feet right here. This invitation to examine ourselves can often feel like that. And with the invitation, we may have this feeling in us of just resistance, of a big no, a big hand from the gut in the heart that is just like no, thank you. Better to live in ignorance, let sleeping dogs lie. I want to submit if this is an experience, if we experience this kind of resistance to the invitation to look inwardly to examine ourselves, I want to submit that that is evidence that there's something in us that has not yet been perfected by the love of God. It is the memory of pain in us, which expresses itself as fear, and in proportion to that fear, we're resisting the love of God. First John tells us that perfect love casts out all fear, fear of punishment. The father doesn't guilt his children, the father doesn't shame his daughters or sons, the father doesn't condemn. Paul says in Romans, right, there is therefore now no condemnation right now for those who are in Messiah. The father doesn't guilt or shame or condemn, but the father by the Spirit lovingly convicts. Lovingly convicts. What is this conviction? What is the experience of conviction? If it's not despairing and self-degradating rumination, what in the world is it? It is the mingling of God's total and full knowledge of you and the unconditional love of God for you. In many ways, conviction is simply seeing our life, seeing our habits, our patterns of thinking, feeling, believing, and behaving from the perspective of God. Or of what Paul says, right? Those we know the thoughts of God by the Spirit of God. We have the mind of God, we have the mind of Christ by virtue of the indwelling of the Spirit. Conviction, then, is as it were, the Spirit seizing our eyes and God perceiving with us and in us and by us and through us. It's to see well. But the fruit of it is not condemnation or shame or despair. The fruit of it is the flowering of a joyful repentance. It's the joy with which this Samaritan woman runs back to the city. This mingling of knowledge and love. Tim Keller speaks to this in his book on marriage. It's fantastic. But what it is is we have these ancient existential, like the bones of our soul need. We most deeply desire to be fully known. And we deeply desire to be fully loved. And Keller goes on to say that if we are loved without knowledge, that's superficial. It's not transformative, it's not liberation. And to be known, fully known, and not loved is our deepest fear. But to be fully known and fully loved is our greatest desire and hope and need. It's just a roundabout way of our deepest desire is God. And this, the mingling of perfect knowledge and perfect love is what we see Christ encountering this woman at the well. This woman at the well has all kinds of evidence for guilt and shame, where we tend to hide things, right? This is what shame does. Shame wants to hide and bring your husband. Well, I don't have a husband. And instead, Jesus, fully aware, fully knowledgeable of this Samaritan woman, moves towards her with great intimacy. Jesus' movement towards this Samaritan woman is not naive. It's not based on ignorance. I uh joke around all the time, although I don't really think it's a joke, that when Crystal first met me, uh, you know, her desire for me was totally born of ignorance. And I say, I tell people, I say, I deceived her all the way to the altar. It's like, you said I do. Okay, all right, let me let me let's pull back the curtain here. This is not Jesus' movement towards this woman. Jesus is fully informed about her, her pain, her past, her sin, her hurts, her history. Is full knowledge, and it's on the basis of this knowledge that he moves towards her with great intimacy. Scholars and uh Bible commentators note this this allusion to the well. In fact, John tells us it's Jacob's well. And this imagery in the Bible is often alluding to like marital and sexual illusions, principally what we see in the Songs of Solomon. But here, right, if you recall, this is when Jacob sees Rachel, and he is goo-goo and just infatuated with her, and he'll do anything for her, right? He goes to Rachel's dad lave, and you know, how can I have her? And he says, You gotta work seven years, and he doesn't mind at all. I'll do it. We see that this Samaritan woman, this is the spiritual Rachel Christ, the god of Jacob, moving towards her with great intimacy. And in the way that Jacob is speaking to Laban, we can see like Christ looking at us, like, what do I need to do for you to be mine?

SPEAKER_00 11:40

He's holding mercy in his hand, forgiveness, love, compassion, intimacy.

SPEAKER_01 11:47

Jesus looking at what do I need to do to make you mine. Fully knowledgeable of us, fully loving us. It is the fruit of this encounter with Christ that is where repentance is born out of. When we can see ourselves with Christ, Christ seeing us through us, as it were, the Spirit seeing us through us, through the Spirit, the mind of God, able to perceive our lives in the presence of the one who refuses to disown us, in the presence of one who refuses to look down his nose at us, but moves towards us with great intimacy. This is how good self-examining conviction works. It's entirely in union with the presence of this Christ that we see present with this woman at the well. And you say, Well, there's nothing but ashes in here, there's nothing but burnt bridges, failures, uh, you know, if a whole bunch of if-onies in my life. And this is, I think, the messianic principle. Just as Christ, who is the true rock, that which was a stumbling stone for the people of Israel, becomes the cornerstone, becomes ground zero, the place of new beginning. That just for us, these rocks that trip us up in our life, the things that feel like the obstacle to our experiencing melting in the love of God, in the joy of the Spirit, that these are just uh evidence of obstacles, these rocks that we trip over and at times keep us down. There's nothing in these rocks, only reasons, evidence for despair, guilt, shame, you know, you name it. And we see in Exodus that it's this grumbling people who need water, and surprisingly, but after Christ, we can say unsurprisingly, we see God provide water for a grumbling people out of a rock. And I love that. The rock is the last place where you expect to find the water. Your sin, your pain, your tragedy, your wounds, your hurts, your history, right now feels like precisely the thing that keeps us from the joy that the Samaritan woman experiences of leaving her bucket of water because she's found the living water. It is precisely in those places where this Christ, who is the true rock, is determined to bring living water. It is precisely there. This is the Christ who moves towards us, a Christ who is deeply knowledgeable of us, and a Christ who loves us eternally. It is on this basis that we can engage in any kind of self-examination, right? We're examining things in our life that God already knows. And God knows more things in us than we will ever know. But this is the beautiful thing because the knowledge of us doesn't occasion, uh, in proportion to that knowledge, a lack of love or a gradation of love. As wild as it may sound, God cannot love you anymore. Then when you're in the throes of sin and the muck in the mire, God loves you. Whether you're on the heights of praise and prayer and sanctity, God loves you. It's this steady, eternal brimming over the love of God in our life that gives us the courage to vanquish fear, to know that this perfect love casts it out. And that it is this Christ standing with us, we, the Rachel, the spiritual Rachel, we, this woman at the well. And he seeks the purity of his bride, not looking down his nose at her, but intimately moving towards her. This is our Christ, this is our Lord. May we continue with a new resolve as we continue this Lent to examine ourselves, to ask questions, to be curious about ourselves, uh, compassionately curious, the compassion of Christ, and that as we journey with Christ into Jerusalem, that we would journey with him in the same way that this Samaritan woman journeyed with him, that what we would think would be evidence for shame, guilt, failure, whatever, becomes evidence of praise and the goodness of God. She runs back, right? Imagine this. Come, hear about this man who told me everything I've ever done.

unknown 18:11

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 18:12

Wow. This is the paradox of repentance and conviction under the knowledge and the love of this Christ. Amen.