Open your eyes!

Hi there,

Today's passage has two neat and exciting halves as the encounter comes to its crescendo, "this man is the Savior of the world."

The first half is Jesus' revelation to his disciples that the harvest has already begun..." open your eyes and look at the fields!", and the second is the unexpected revival that erupts among the Samaritans...immediately proving that declaration.

The urgency is as palpable in the first half, as the conclusion is definitive in the second.

Both Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman and his teaching of the disciples began with a request for everyday sustenance and ended with the gift of eternal salvation.

Jesus meets us where we are, but never fails to take us where we need to go.

Today's text is John 4:34-42

The Disciples Rejoin Jesus

³⁴ “My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.

³⁵ Don’t you have a saying, ‘It’s still four months until harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest.

³⁶ Even now the one who reaps draws a wage and harvests a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together. ³⁷ Thus the saying ‘One sows and another reaps’ is true.

³⁸ I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor.”

Many Samaritans Believe

³⁹ Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” ⁴⁰ So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. ⁴¹ And because of his words many more became believers.

⁴² They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”

Encouragement

God doesn’t change us in order to love us. He loves us in order to change us.

R.C. Sproul​
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Andy

I published an overview of all Jesus' quoted words from the New Testament on my substack. If you'd like to learn a little bit more about the origin of the red letter Bible and how many of Jesus' words are captured in each Gospel, then you can read about it here.