KNOWN
It’s good to be back! Today’s devotional gets to the heart of the gospel and our human condition. It’s at the same time scary and wonderful. I pray it will also be encouraging. Let’s pray…
Prayer
Almighty, eternal, and life-giving God, be our guide and our comfort this morning. Lead us with your Word and your Holy Spirit, so that in your light we might see light, and in your truth, we might find freedom, and in your will, we might truly discover peace through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Scripture
Psalm 139:1-3
1 O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away.
3 You search out my path and my lying down,
and are acquainted with all my ways.
John 4:7-29
7 A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” 11 The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” 13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” 15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” 17 The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” 19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” 21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 25 The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” 26 Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”
27 Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” 28 Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, 29 “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”
Hymn
“You Are My King (Amazing Love)” — Billy James Foote; Performed by Candi Pearson-Shelton (YouTube video for in-home worship: Click here for Video)
I’m forgiven because You were forsaken
I’m accepted, You were condemned
And I’m alive and well, Your Spirit is within me
Because You died and rose again (Repeat)
Amazing love, how can it be
That you, my King, should die for me?
Amazing love, I know it’s true
And it’s my joy to honor You
In all I do, I honor You
I’m forgiven because You were forsaken
I’m accepted, You were condemned
I’m alive and well, Your Spirit is within me
Because You died and rose again
Amazing love, how can it be
That you, my King, should die for me?
Amazing love, I know it’s true
And it’s my joy to honor You
In all I do, I honor You
In all I do, I honor You
You are my King
You are my King
Jesus, You are my King
You are my King
Amazing love, how can it be
That You, my King, should die for me?
Amazing love, I know it’s true
It’s my joy to honor You
Amazing love, how can it be
That You, my King, should die for me?
Amazing love, I know it’s true
And it’s my joy to honor You
In all I do, to honor You
In all I do, to honor You
In all I do, let me honor You.
Reflection
Charlie Mackesy is a cartoonist. A few years ago, he began to draw a boy, a mole, a fox, and a horse. They ended up taking a journey together through a broad wilderness and, along the way, through life. Occasionally, Charlie would dab in some watercolor, mostly blues and browns, though sometimes green. After a while, it grew into a dream. Maybe a wish. Certainly a need.
Deep into the wilderness, the boy begins to wonder, feeling quite unsure and very small next to his equine friend, who may have been the tallest living thing he had ever seen,
“So you know all about me?”
“Yes,” says the horse.
“And you still love me?”
“We love you all the more.”
I like to think the story of the oft-married now unmarried Samaritan woman in John 4 is kind of like that, a boy anxiously wondering about the love of his newfound friends. Did she feel the same way when she heard Jesus reveal her own secrets? “You know everything I’ve ever done, and yet you still love me?” It’s easy to imagine Jesus replying, “Of course, and I love you all the more.”
Have you ever wondered what it might feel like to have someone know absolutely everything about you, even your deepest, most intimate secrets? Fantasy novels enjoy imagining such things. In the Harry Potter series, it’s veritaserum, or the truth portion that’s considered one of the most dangerous magical things in existence. In Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, it’s the evil Lord Sauron himself, whose all-seeing eye “pierces cloud, shadow, earth and flesh.” When we fantasize about being known inside and out, we usually imagine something we fear. And yet, the Bible literally rejoices in God’s most intimate knowledge of each and every one of us.
If there ever was something that got down to the very heart of the gospel, it’s this. God knows us through and through, and still he loves us.
Take, for instance, Psalm 139. Verses 13-14 are often read and prayed at births and baptisms, probably because the depth of divine love they carry is unmatched. “For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” Praise God for I am known both inside and out! Indeed, these two verses are part of a much larger song that, if I didn’t know any better, I would say came straight from the mouth of Jesus’s beloved Samaritan woman: “O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways” (139:1-3).
If there ever was something that got down to the very heart of the gospel, it’s this. God knows us through and through, and still he loves us. To me, that right there is what is so amazing about God’s love, that it’s bigger than all our sins, that it’s deeper than even our most closely guarded and intimate secrets. God knows us through and through, and yet God loves us all the more.
What this means is that our dignity and our worth as human beings loved by an all-knowing God is not diminished by our sins. What else could Paul have meant when he said that we’ve all “sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” though now we’re “justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:23-4)? Our dignity and worth have nothing to do with our innocence. We could be the chief of sinners (as Paul himself says) and yet God sees it all and still loves us. That’s amazing.
To what end, though? Before Charlie Mackesy’s boy even meets his friend, the horse, we find him sitting on a tree branch talking to a mole. They begin to ask each other questions — questions we’ve all had to answer at one time or another.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Kind,” said the boy. “What do you think success is?”
“To love,” said the mole.
I wish those were my answers. They surely were Jesus’s.
This Sunday and Monday, as we celebrate Sanctity of Life Sunday and Martin Luther King Jr. Day, let us grow up to be kind and let us push for love, and let us do so by treasuring all life and speaking up for the dignity of all God’s children, whether they be the unborn and their parents, the racially and economically demeaned, the justifiably incarcerated with their loved ones, the forcefully trafficked and abused, or anyone else caught in our world’s endless cycle of war, poverty, greed, fear, and envy. Because surely God sees it all, and still he loves us.
Closing Prayer
Holy God, give us the grace and strength to love and to be kind to everyone we come across today. Make us like your Son through the power of your Spirit so that we can be your people to your world. Amen.
Source
– Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse (New York: Harper One, 2019), n.p.