Living Water for Thirsty Souls: Transformational Worship (John 4.12-24)
This sermon was preached on August 31st, 2025
It’s 2,000 years ago. A lonely women in a small town who had a terrible reputation did what she did just about every day: walked to the well outside of our city alone, in the hottest part of the day so she wouldn’t have to hear the whispers.
She had faced a lifetime of rejection, used up by a series of men who married her with promises of faithfulness, then divorced her when she didn’t meet their expectations. We all know what they say about small towns: everybody is in everybody else’s business. And this woman had been married five times. You can imagine the gossip.
Heading to the well, she’s surprised to meet a man there, who seems to be waiting for her. A man who is not from her town, who begins to speak to her about what she’s been looking for her whole life, a deep human desire for life and goodness. She meets Jesus at this well, and their conversation becomes the longest individual conversation that Jesus has with anyone in the gospels. And what do they speak of? Where to find that which is ultimate—God and our identity.
That’s what we’re talking about as we discuss our church’s Core Value of Transformational Worship. Not just some ‘religious’ stuff we do, not worship as a performative thing that we do for God—but how in our encounter with God, we are transformed. We’re talking about reality at its deepest level. How we can find God and thus find ourselves.
12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?” 13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” 16 He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.” 17 “I have no husband,” she replied. Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. 18 The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”
19 “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”
21 “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
Where can God be found? It’s a question that is basic to this conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman. These were two people from two different worlds that were similar but also drastically different from one another. And the difference was a huge one: different answers to the question “where can God be found?”
The Samaritan woman would have lived in a world that was centered on two places she mentions: Jacob’s Well and Mount Gerizim (which is the mountain she refers to). High and low. Let’s look at both of those.
Digging Deep to Find Our Identity
The well was a special place for Samaritans—one basic to their identity and connection to their ancestor Jacob. It was like the statue of liberty or the liberty bell or Plymouth Rock for some Americans: places treated as almost sacred because of their symbolism.
This well was a source of pride and identity for the Samaritan people. “Oh, we get our water from Jacob’s well.” It gave people a sense of connection to significant and deep history...which is one of the ways that human beings have always tried to find significance. It’s why words like ‘my heritage’ carries so much weight.
A well is a source of water—nourishment and life. But Jesus and this woman quickly start talking about more than just a well where you get water. A deeper level of where we go to find our significance and identity. The well that our soul drinks from. What depth do we dig into to find who we are? Is it our ethnic identity or connection to a nation or a background?
The truth is that none of those things can give to us what we seek from them. It’s why there’s so much hand-wringing over seeing the dark spots of our American history—we have so much built on our exceptionalism that when the warts of our forefathers and foremothers start popping up, it can feel like a direct attack that we want to cover up and hide. It’s like a child discovering a deep history of crime in their family after their grandparents and parents have passed away. It can be like an earthquake at the foundation of our identities.
I think this is what Jesus is hitting at when he speaks of this woman’s marriage history. It may seem like a cruel thing to remind her of something that was such a powerful source of shame for her, but I think Jesus is pointing something out: you can’t trust in the heritage and identity that this well has given to you. Look at what people who have this heritage and identity have done to you. How can you take pride in people that have used you up so terribly? People who have rejected you?
Again, it may seem like a cruel thing, but he is not exposing her for more shame. He is bringing it into the light of his presence so that she can be set free. So she can find, finally, a man who is not going to use her up and an identity that will not lead her to shame, but will lead her to freedom and, indeed, eternal life.
The grace of Jesus runs deeper than any well, and runs as far down as we need it to. So that we don’t have to build identities on foundations on pretended histories or build identities on foundations that can crumble, but that we may draw our nourishment from him—finding our spiritual drink and spiritual food in him.
Climbing Mountains to Find God
The conversation then turns in v20 to something similar but different: mountains. She says: “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”
This isn’t digging deep, this is reaching as high as you can. What height do we climb to reach God? After all, he’s up there and we’re down here. I think it’s only natural that mountains can feel like such powerful places. There are mountains all throughout world religions and all throughout the Old Testament, too.
Mount Gerizim, where the Samaritans worshipped, was a famous mountain in the Old Testament. And obviously Mount Zion in Jerusalem is where the temple of Solomon was built. Where God had told his people that he had “placed his name”—where God symbolically resided among his people.
But there’s a problem here, a problem that the Old Testament actually tells us about over and over. Finding God isn’t about climbing a physical mountain. In truth, the distance between God and us is just too far for us cover on our side.
Which is the good news that Mount Zion pointed to, because it was the place where God had declared he would finally and completely work to bring redemption. And ultimately the place where Jesus was crucified, buried, and rose again, exploding God’s grace beyond any mountain to flow to and find us.
Jesus ascended the mountain of God to bring us the goodness that only he could obtain. For it is only he who had clean hands and a pure heart—only he who deserved blessing and received vindication, yet turns to give us all that he deserves by grace. In Christ, we find a God who descends to us. So it is not us who seek God, but he who seeks us.
It is not about finding the right location. The temple and its place in Jerusalem were all temporary, a preparation for what God was going to do there through Jesus. Make his home with us not in a building like a temple or a tent like the tabernacle. But by God becoming one of us to remove every barrier that stands between us and him. And a new time--a new way of life and way of thinking has come in Jesus. It’s what he speaks about in v23: “a time is coming and has now come where the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth.”
To worship God in the Spirit in truth is to know that he has found us and will not leave or forsake us, but has made a place for us with him. And that our worship has to recognize this fact, that God is not limited to “holy” spaces—that his presence is what makes places and people holy. He is spirit, not a physical thing.
So worship of him is not defined by place. It is not any more powerful because it takes place in a certain city or certain location. We don’t need a temple. We don’t need a cathedral. We don’t need some remarkable place to find God. No building can contain him, and he doesn’t need anything from human beings. And I don’t just mean that in the sense of physical buildings.
Stop thinking you need to do something to make God love you. That you need to build something to impress him, or to make him notice you. No, allow him to come in and clean the temple of your heart, tossing out sin like he did the money changers, so that your heart will come alive like it never has before.
When you come to Jesus by faith you are swept up into the work of God, and his Spirit is given to you so that you may know you never walk alone, there is no depth so low that he is not there, there is no darkness so complete that his light will not shine.
Finding Our All in Him
That day at the well, the woman found that where she had built her identity was not something that would last and where she had looked for God was not where he could be found. But that was profound good news because she discovered that God himself had sought her out to find her and give her himself and thus give her herself, too. And that’s what all who have come to faith in him since have found as well.
By faith in Jesus, God is for you, God is with you, God is within you. Father, Son, and Spirit. And this is the reality that our core value of Transformational Worship points to.
It’s why our worship service is ordered the way it is. It’s a conversation. When we are called to worship from Scripture, when we are told of God’s pardoning grace from Scripture, when we hear God speak in the reading and the preaching of his word: these are not just me stringing together verses here and there to inspire us. It is the living God speaking through his living Word. As we sing, as we pray, we are responding to his grace, being pulled out from within ourselves to be oriented and turned toward him.
When we take the bread and cup of the Lord’s Supper, we are being nourished and fed by him from him, receiving spiritual food and drink that deepens our part in being his people. And as the last words of our worship, the benediction, is pronounced upon us, it is a blessing not from me, but from God.
In all of this, God is giving to us himself—and thus giving to us ourselves too. For it is only in Him that we are truly us, truly being formed into all we were created to be.
And that’s why Transformational Worship is a core value of our church. Because the true and living God is not an abstract out there. He is the Holy One in our midst. And it is only in his presence, only with the assurance of his intentions for us, and his salvation being applied to us by him that our shame and guilt can be conquered, which is what the Samaritan woman at the well found.
She had been utterly rejected by man after man and led a life of loneliness and shame. But it is when she encounters Jesus that she flees back to the city she was from: back to the people who had rejected and shamed her, to tell them about Jesus. Not from a place of pride “oh, he saved me...not you.” But from a place of joy: she had found salvation and a love greater than all the shame that they could heap on her and she could heap on herself...and they could find that love too.
So let’s lean into and live out this value of transformational worship, and pray that it does the same kind of work within us that we may go to those are currently far from God in deed and words of truth and grace, to invite them to the only place where they can truly find God and find themselves truly free.