John 4:23-24 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.

1. Jesus and His message is both __________ and __________.

2. __________ - Jesus __________ no one from the __________ to __________.

3. __________ - Jesus is the __________ one we can look to for __________.

Scripture Readings
Exodus 17:1-7
Romans 5:1-8
John 4:5-26

Take It With You!

Here we will offer thoughts and meditations on the message to help us as we contemplate and discuss and wrestle with what we are hearing.

The whole New Testament, if read from the standpoint of the Jews who wrote it, affirms that we must come to recognize Jesus as Lord and Savior if we are to receive life from Him. The early Christians recognized that in Jesus God had opened membership in His people to all nations (e.g., Matthew 28:19) and that He desires to incorporate all, Jew and Gentile alike, into His family (1 Timothy 2:4; Ephesians 2:14-19). Nonetheless, the apostles' thought patterns had been determined by the Old Testament's insistence on a personal relationship in trust and worship with the Creator and by its perception that the people of God were a remnant gathered by God out of the peoples of the earth and indeed out of Israel itself. The poor in the land, those who kept the ancient faith during the times of Hellenistic acculturation in their intertestamental period, believed that God would judge even Jews who had abandoned their worship and service of Yahweh. The earliest Christians, therefore, many of whom came from this kind of Jewish religious culture, had no trouble believing that those who do not recognize and trust in God's revelation of Himself in Jesus of Nazareth will suffer never-ending judgment, in weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 8:12, 22:13, 25:30).

Robert Kolb, Speaking the Gospel Today, pg. 185.