"Touching Lives"
Chance Encounter – Where is your well?
Matt: You know these stories reflect the life we live so well. I am still waiting for heaven to open up and a voice to speak to me but I do know that I have had many chance encounters just as these stories. But I wonder if they really happen simply by chance? Now I don’t buy into the idea that God preordains everything but I do know that God uses everything to accomplish a great purpose. I don’t think God will tell me to go to the grocery store today but if I do, and I happen to have the opportunity to share the love of Christ with someone, I think God was involved in that. I can’t say we have to go to the well to get water, but the wells in our lives are more numerous than we realize. The grocery store, the ball field, our schools and offices, and the list goes on and on. I wonder how many times we have been to the well and missed the chance encounter with someone to share the love of Christ?
Will: Opportunities for “chance encounters.” Fifty years ago, this congregation got into the flow of people moving into the southwest edge of Lubbock and many chance encounters became holy encounters. People ended up becoming friends in the neighborhood, co-workers in business, teachers together in the schools. The chance encounters multiplied and so did the holy encounters with God. Now another flow of people are moving into southwest Lubbock. We want to get involved in THEIR lives and touch them and have them touch us. As we do there will be a new generation of chance encounters that will result in changed lives. And we know it will happen. We’ve seen it before.
Prepared Ground
Will: The thing that strikes me about Annanias and Saul’s story is that God was preparing the ground on both sides. Saul has a vision of a man named Annanias who was going to heal his blindness. Annanias has a vision that he was to go to the house where Saul was and heal him. In fact, throughout the book of Acts we see it over and over. The Holy Spirit is preparing those who give the message and those who are to receive it. Annanias couldn’t see that his visit to Saul was already in God’s hands, so he debated with God about going there. Afterwards, Annanias would see just how much God was in it all. God wasn’t asking Annanias to act in blind faith, but rather to trust that God was leading him. Matt, do you think that has anything to say to us here this morning?
Matt: It is simply amazing how God continues to do this same work in so many areas of our lives. The groundwork he has laid for our church is amazing as I look back on it. Our annual conference has made the work of St. Luke’s the missional priority of all of Northwest Texas. That spectacular tract of land just given to us without any cost associated with it, the conference has pitched in money to help in the front part of our efforts. Many in the community around 98th and Frankford have expressed they are just waiting for us to build a church for their family to attend. Some are already coming! Many are already reaping the benefits of this outreach. I can’t tell you how many times I hear the comment, “I never knew a church could be like this!” The coolest word comes from a fellow pastor who lives in the area, drives by the site and prays for us continually. In his prayer time he believes the response he received was that God is working but God was waiting upon us to build so he could really move among us! God has and continues to prepare the ground before us.
God is throwing us a life line.
Matt: I think also that these stories show us to look for the life lines God throws to us. We get so caught up and stuck in our heartache and pain, focusing on the negative and never accentuating the positive that it gets harder and harder for us to see God. This woman at the well had been married 5 times before and was with a man right then that was not her husband. She was stuck in a pattern and couldn’t get out. God was throwing her a life line, this living water, a new, loving relationship to put an end to the hurt and pain she had been seeking in so many other places. Annanias was worried about death but without God and following God he was already dead. Saul was dead without Christ, but God called him out, just as he has called us out, and redeemed him, gave him sight and new life. The world is stuck in a rut and the world is dead with the saving grace of Jesus Christ and we are called to spread the truth.
Will: I once read a book entitled, “Getting Unstuck” by Wayne Dyer. The book had many techniques to help people get out of their messed up patterns. I tried some of them and most of the cures were short-term at best – getting more organized and keeping a clean desk, being on time and not double-booking appointments, losing weight and keeping a regular exercise program, making more time for my wife and kids. I made promises on paper, did visualization exercises of me actually doing things, got people around me to support me. The results weren’t much better than my 2007 New Year’s resolutions. The woman at the well was headed to a sixth husband and a seventh husband, looking for love in all the wrong places. No one gets people unstuck like Jesus. In Southwest Lubbock, there are lots of great people who are stuck and there are thousands of them to come. They will need spiritual, emotional, physical, mental, relational and situational lifelines. I think I know just the church to offer those lifelines in the name of Christ.
Matt: (Relationship Monologue)
In today’s story from the life of Jesus, we learn of a woman who found Jesus in the midst of running and hiding from life. Jesus just happen to bump into her a Jacob’s well. He found a woman who had a need to fill the emptiness in her life. As they talked, she began to see some definite benefits to what he had inside of him that she didn’t. Jesus called it “living water.”
Her sin, her shame, not only separated her from God but from society. Folks, we are all different. Our perceptions of people are all different and in most cases our perceptions are completely wrong. We try to think for people, we try to project ourselves on to people, and we try to keep up with other people and expect people to keep up with us. When we do this, just like the Samaritan woman, we separate ourselves from God and the people around us.
Folks - we live in a culture that is just like this woman. Our world needs this “living water.” But we will do almost anything to try to meet that need other than look to Jesus to meet it. We are thirsty and so is every other person alive on this planet today.
You might be saying to yourself right now that we are talking about the master of confrontation and conversation: Jesus Christ. Your saying to yourself, Matt, this is Jesus having this conversation with someone. It is easy for him. You expect us to be like Jesus? My answer is, YES!!! Yes, I do expect you to do all you can to try to be like Jesus. I expect myself to try to do all I can to be like Jesus! That’s what the Bible calls us to do, right? How do we let people know about how great our church is? How do we invite people into this loving relationship we have with each other and with Jesus?
We have to work hard at it. For us, in the normal course of our life we cannot in the same fashion conduct ministry such a Jesus did with the Samaritan woman. For us today – Relationships are the key to having conversations like Jesus had. We can follow the example of Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman but for us it just usually going to take a little more time and effort. Are you getting it yet? Do you see that ministry is all about relationships. It is all about building a community who will share with one another the intimate details of their lives. Ministry is all about meeting people at the level they currently live and not expect them to adjust to us. Jesus certainly did it that way. He met the Samaritan woman at the well, in the middle of the heat of day, in her shame, in her distress. Initially, he required nothing of her in order for him to offer her the “living water.”
We need to be available for Christ to use us to build relationships. We need to be honest in our relationships for the sake of Jesus’ name, and we need to offer “living water” to anyone we can.
Will: (Risk Monologue)
The key word for me in the story of Annanias and Saul is risk. And there is risk on both sides. For Saul, there is the risk that people will not accept that his “blinding light” experience was real and will not trust him. Possibly they might take advantage of him or even take revenge. After all, he was one of the most feared, mistrusted people of his day and may have been hated by them. Now the one who has wrecked havoc is now helpless. I think we forget how risky it is for people to be part of a church. We know we’re kind, accepting and loving, but they don’t know that. And many have past experiences that justify their fears, where people in the name of Christ have hurt them, lied to them and even publicly embarrassed them. More than that, many have things in their lives that they are ashamed of. If we knew what they were really like, would we accept them and could we love them? Even more than that, Saul, if he takes Jesus seriously, will have to give up everything and start over. Joel Barker writes, “When the paradigm shifts, everything goes back to zero.” There’s no bigger paradigm shift than being born again in Christ. In some ways that is a very good thing. The old is past and the new is come. But following Christ does mean putting everything at risk and it often means giving up a lot.
The other risk belongs to Annanias. What happens when Saul gets his sight back and decides to go back to what he was doing before? The church will be worse off than ever.
Several years ago, I accepted a wedding with a member of my church and a young man I didn’t know. I told them I’d like to see them in church. When the prospective groom came into the place, my choir director said, “What’s he doing here? He’s dangerous. Will, he hurts people, bad.” In the end, the choir director was right, and that husband became dangerous in that marriage.
Saul had a reputation for being “dangerous,” responsible for the murder of one of the major leaders of the Church. We know the grace of God can do anything and that there is no such thing as a hopeless case, but we can understand Annanias’ reluctance. God shows Annanias the plan he has for Saul and leads him to take a chance on the persecutor. In following God’s Vision and our Mission, we hear God saying that there are many more people that need someone to take a chance on them so God can change their lives. After all, somebody took a chance on us and allowed God to step into our lives. In adding a second campus, we are taking a risk, but the greater risk is stepping outside our normal networks and ways of doing things and offering the living Christ. But following Christ always involves risk. The greatest risk of all was for God to send his only Son and have him die for people who didn’t deserve it and for many who would never respond. God in Christ thought the risk was worth it. It still is.
Ending Dialogue
Will: You know, Matt, in both these stories, we have second generations of faith going on. Jesus shares with the woman at the well and she goes and tells all of her friends and brings them to Jesus. Annanias shares with Saul who became Paul, the greatest missionary ever known and the architect of a worldwide movement for Jesus Christ.
Neither the woman at the well or Saul would have seemed like candidates to change the world, but they were.
Matt: You know what cracks me up about this whole thing is that the folks sitting here today often say the church is growing because of us. I laugh on the inside because I know it grows because of them. They are the continuation of this living story. God moved in the life of these people and someone wrote it down but the story did not end. It lives right now in this room through every single person in here and many who are not here. There is a story in the Bible about a planter who throws seed in different types of soil. The seed is the living word of God, the sower is us (Jesus living in us), and the different types of soil are the different hearts of the people we encounter. It is our responsibility to plant the word of God in the hearts of people. It is up to the people to grow with God and some will grow a lot and some will only grow a little. But imagine the possibilities when we equate this story….that growth in each of us touches the lives of others. The word of God says that some will grow 30 times, some will grow 60 times, and still others 100 times! Imagine the possibilities. To make this easy I am going to say that if 500 people were here today and we averaged the growth of 30, 60, and 100 to 64 times growth that equals 32,000 people reached for Christ! I say we are well on our way.
Will: God really is doing something amazing and magnificent here today and it’s just the beginning.