Vineyard Church of North Grand Rapids

 

Of all the pick up lines in the world, I think the one with the most staying power has to be Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire: “you complete me?” Were old enough to remember that on the big screen? After its mid-90’s premiere, the cheesy line became universal pop culture declaration of love for about 5 years. I know because I was about 16 at the time, and I tried it on every girl that would listen.

 

Our culture has a love/hate relationship with this sort of thing: the romance scenes, the heroes journey to save the captive princess – everytime we see a movie like this we know what’s coming, and we keep lining up to see it anyway.

 

I noticed this week that Avatar is the second-highest grossing movie of all time, and among other things Avatar is a predictable love story. Nevermind that its romance between a man and a computer-generated blue alien (which is a step up from Tom Hanks and a volleyball), the story is captivating (or maddening) audiences everywhere. And its got one of those lines: “I see you.” (it helps if you say it with a crazy look in your eye.) Top-grossing film of all time: ’97 film Titanic, which as you know really wasn’t really about the boat. Its about the way Kate Winslett looks at Leonardo DiCaprio and the way it makes us feel.

 

The highest-grossing films of all time are all about one of two things: adventurous conquest over evil, or romance or both. Star Wars, Spiderman, Twilight, the Shrek franchise.

 

Now, this week we’re starting our series on sexuality: Smart Sexuality in a sex-crazed world. And what a sex-crazed culture it is. You flip on any television station today and the images would make your grandmother faint. Any good advertiser can tell you, we’re crazy about sex, sex sells. But at least at the movies, romance outsells sex. Romance is big business than sex.

 

We can’t we get enough of these movies, can we? They’re just so universally appealing?

 

Today we’re talking about where the appeal comes from; according to the Bible we have a universal need for love. We’re hard-wired for it. We can deny it, we can revolt at the thought, but we need love. We can’t live without it.

 

And believe it or not our sexuality may have something to do with love. Our sexuality starts there.

 

According to the Bible, the need for love goes all the way back to the beginning, when God created humans in his image. That means you bear striking resemblance to God in every way.

 

Just like God you exist for love. The Bible tells us that God loves and is love. He is love. He exists as a three-way relationship of perfect love: Father, spirit and son, loving each other all the time.

 

And so its in our genes. The God that created us has left us with a need that can only be met by perfect love. The Greeks said we were crammed full of the “madness of the gods.” And they got it partly right, because our quest for love looks a lot like madness.

 

This is evident right away in the Bible: we read about the creation of the first human, Adam, we’re told right away that God noticed that it wasn’t good for man to be alone: there is love. He would be incomplete without another person to love. Enter woman. Boy meets girl, take 1.

 

But we also are told that those first people ignored God’s instructions about how life works, they went their own way, they in effect said, “its my life!” And so the experience of perfect love – between us, between us and God, between men and women was permanently affected, it was cursed, never to be the same.

 

And despite all of our modern-day gadgets and advancements we’re mostly the same as our first parents. We’ve gone our own way, we’ve sinned against our Creator and the connection between us is broken. But we still want to connect, we still need love. We still want to know that we are loved, we still long to know that we’re not missing out on something. We’ll trade almost anything in life to get the love we want. We’ll trade in a perfectly good partner for a new one. We’ll trade one marriage for another. And the statistics say that the average American will trade in their virginity at the age of 16 (13 if you live in the inner city). We put our need for love above safety, our family, our own health, our morals.

 

 

I have a friend that works for a ministry called xxxchurch, an organization that among other thing is being Jesus to pornographers and porn stars. Along the way they’ve seen a number of people rescued from that life, you can listen to their testimonies on their website. All of the stories begin like this: “I just thought it would be fun to have so many people want me, to desire me sexually, and I thought the money would be easy.” “After all the rejection of being molested and raped, it just felt like no big deal, its just who I am.” “My husband was so into pornography that I started to compare myself to those women...”

 

And those are the stories of women that have traded anything to fill their need for love.

 

But its not just porn stars who’ve got that problem. If any of us were honest about our sexuality, we’d have to say that our decisions are not always based on good sense, or our rational thoughts about how we want to live life. Many of our sexual decisions just come down our need to be loved well.

 

Proverbs: what a man desires is unfailing love.

 

Today I want to look at a story of Jesus addressing someone in this very condition.

 

John 4:7

So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.

   When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

   The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans. )

   Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

   “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?”

   Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink 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.”

   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.”

   He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”

   “I have no husband,” she replied.   Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. 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.”

   “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

  “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 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. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

   The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

   Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”

   Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?”

   Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?”

 

There’s a lot going on here...Jesus is crossing a couple taboos, first, Jewish men aren’t supposed to speak to women like that in the street. She’s a Samaritan, a group hated by the Jews.

 

But here’s the big issue: this woman has had had 5 husbands, the man she’s now on is not her husband, she’s on her sixth man.

 

I don’t think this woman experienced a string of tragedies: 5 husbands

 

Notice she says: “Come see the man who told me everything I ever DID.” Jesus didn’t literally tell her everything she ever did.

What he did do: Jesus put his finger on the great theme & need of her life. It was all she’d ever done in terms of the important decisions, patterns, the motivations. Apparently she was desperate – desperate to be loved well. And Jesus begins talking about living water, right away.

 

You know how this goes: she had tried to find what she needed in a man, in men. All her life she had been searching for a man to make her complete, to fill the void. But on this day all of her searching ended when she looked up from her bucket and locked eyes with THE man: the man who told her everything she ever did.

 

Jesus doesn’t call her a name, a slur, he doesn’t call her a sinner. He doesn’t look her up and down. No catcalls, no pickup lines, no sneers. He’s different than any man she’d ever met. He simply points out the effects of her life: you’re kinda right when you say you don’t have a husband. (Even though her reply is a lie, a half-truth). He doesn’t condemn her, he just points her to an alternative.

 

Most of us probably haven’t had 5 husbands. But you don’t have to have 5 husbands to be a woman at the well.

 

How many women have you known that are obsessed with getting attention from men? Or obsessed with how sexually appealing they are? Doing anything to feeling good about themselves?

 

How many men have done the same thing: hoping to feel better about their masculinity, that they matter, or covering over their insecurity as a man by how many women they’ve been with? Or always needing to have a woman attached in one way or another. Or taking advantage of a women? Or needing the rush of excitement that comes with looking at other women and fantasizing that they’re returning the gesture. Or just trying too hard to get noticed?

 

When Adam and Eve come together its almost always brokenness meeting brokenness. The vicious cycle we call modern sexuality, or sex in the city, or desperation in the suburbs, or sexual liberation. And its never really liberating or satisfying. How many times have we engaged in flirtation or fantasy because we wanted to be noticed, valued, held up, looked up to, loved? Underneath we’re desperate to feel unfailing love.

 

Our culture tells us a lie. According to the myth the most important thing in life is to have as much sex as possible or we can’t be truly happy. If you’re not having a lot of sex you’re weird because sex is the principal path to happiness.

 

I’m not here to say sex isn’t fun. But without God, sex is just another empty shallow well. Sex is an amazing gift from God. This strange and wonderful creation of the Creator. For some of us its an odd thought: God thought of sex, it was God that dreamed it all up: all its sensations, all the mystery, all the rush, all the incredible feelings. Because the Christian worldview puts a higher value on sex that any other worldview. We’ll be exploring that during this series.

 

But there one thing sex can never do; it cannot fill the basic need of the human heart.

 

So many of us discover sexuality and think it will fill everything.

We’re like the 3-year-old who discovers a hammer and thinks the whole world is a nail.

 

This woman was trying and it didn’t work. I’ve heard so many people that gave themselves over to promiscuity, went from one relationship to the next, gave themselves away to friends and strangers, and then are left empty, broken.

Its water that leaves you thirsty again.

 

And here at this ancient well, Jesus says to this thirsty woman, “if you would asked me, I would’ve given you living water. If you ask me, I will give you living water. What she needs most is the unfailing love of God. Jesus offers nothing less than an encounter and experience of the unfailing love of God.

 

Without that, our sex life, her sex life, is just a mess. A trail of bodies.

 

Apart from an experience of God’s love, our sexuality can never reach what God intended. We’re forever chasing an illusion. Because sex was created out of God’s love. Separated from that it can never be what he meant it to be.

 

email from a Vineyard leader: Recently I lost my job, this sent of an emotional chain reaction in me, feelings of rejection and abandonment, anger and despair hit me hard. Not to mention I was suddenly given long lonely days to fill with making phone calls, sending out resumes and looking for jobs. Despite some accountability structures I had in place, I found myself being tempted by the familiar lure of internet pornography. And I fell. After several years of freedom, I was still vulnerable. After experiencing God’s love so clearly, it was surprising to be that vulnerable. The addiction that had once trapped me now felt so empty. Conviction and the need for confession now came quickly. First to a group of men, then to my wife. As I confessed my sin, God began to show his light in the dark places. As I told my wife, the hurt was visible on her face. But we talking, and then it hit me. Feelings so deep in me began to well up I began to weep and sob. Through my tears I cried out one word, why, why, why do you love me? At that moment I was in touch with the lie at my core. I’d felt this way for years, unlovable. I am unlovable. I am unworthy of love. This lie has hindered me from feeling God’s unfailing love and the love of others. And after getting prayer from friends, God’s love now has access to this feeling. God is helping me to receive his unfailing love.

 

That’s what Jesus offered to the woman at the well. He knew all about the shallow wells in her life. His offer was to drink from the true well, a spring of continual living water, the water of the love of God. The water that is true and from the endless source, a love that never fails, a love that reaches to the deepest part of who we are.

 

Jesus offers her a true well. There are all kinds of false wells. Maybe this relationship will be different. Maybe if I had sex with a few more people. If I could just get my fix of pornography. Maybe its an emotional fantasy, an ideal that will never be met. Others of us have been so wounded or so lonely that we’ve put up walls and we’ve become asexual: unable to receive or give love.

 

What we need is to be filled with the water of God’s unfailing love in our hearts. What’s underneath is a lie/deception. I am not love-able, I am not loved. If people really knew me they’d reject me. I’m probably missing out on life, God is probably holding out on me.

 

How do we get the living water?

“You don’t even have a bucket!” says the woman. How can our hearts be restored?

The woman assumed it was some kind of religious answer, go to church and say seven rosaries.

 

But Jesus says this: we must become worshippers of God, in Spirit and in Truth. And that’s not about this mountain or that, this song or that prayer.

 

You need to become a worshipper in Spirit. Connecting at the deepest part of yourself. The same place where we feel the ache for love. The same place where we carry around the lies. The same way that the first man and woman were connected with God...our spirit, connected to God’s Spirit.

 

And Truth, as in worship that is more than lip service, more than ritual and repetition of someone else’s song & prayer. Truth would be offering your true self God. Not who you wish you were or should be. But your broken, thirsty, dirty, bruised, empty self. No pretending.

 

Worship is more than a ritual: it has to do with what we love, we pursue, what we obsess with on a daily basis. When we say so-and-so “worships this person” we know what that means. That’s what has to happen between us and our Father God. Where he fills our thoughts and satisfies our hearts. You could actually have an experience of God that would begin to change you from the inside out. That’s what Jesus invites us to.

 

Jesus is saying to many of you this morning: "if you only would've asked me...each time...each place...each temptation. You can ask him now for living water; he's here.

 

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