TD Jakes — It's Not What It Looks Like
Now, you must understand that they traveled by foot, and it took a while to go on such an errand. It took quite a while to go an errand, and you would think that if you sent your disciples, 12, to go get lunch and all of them walked off and left you by yourself, 12 men going to get lunch for 1 man, he should have been pretty hungry. And then, when they come back with the lunch, there he is sitting by the well, talking to this woman, and though they had too much respect for him to question him, the gospel of Saint John reads their mind, says, "Wait a minute. I thought you were hungry. Now you say you have meat that we know not of, and I thought you were tired, and we come back and you're engrossed in this conversation with this woman". And he says, "It is not what it looks like".
You must realize, my brothers and sisters, for Jesus to say that he must need go through Samaria, that was startling alone. If we could excuse the fact that he has become engrossed with this conversation with this woman of a questionable past, we still have the glaring reality that what is this Jewish teacher doing in Samaria, particularly if you understand, as I do, that Samaria was a particular area that most Jews avoided. The theology of the time lended itself to an ideology that any Samaritan woman was in a constant perpetual state of uncleanness. The Samaritan people were not respected as being legitimate believers in the first place after the Jewish Orthodox tradition.
Can I give you a little history? You will understand, then, that Samaria is a result of when the tribes split in the Old Testament about 700 B.C. They split in the Old Testament and all of the various ethnic groups that they could gather from different regions that were not a part of the ten tribes or the two that were separated in the split they brought into an area that would later be called Samaria. These seven or eight ethnic groups that were gathered together were not people who worshiped Jehovah at all, but they were heathens, and they were cultish, and they worshiped various gods, about seven different gods, some of which they worshiped by offering up human sacrifice. They worshiped their gods for a period of time until wild beasts, the Bible says lions in particular, began to be turned loose into Samaria area, and they were being destroyed by wild beasts. The attack of the wild beast, or lions if you please, was so devastating that they went to Jerusalem and said, "Teach us about your God, because we think that we have inadvertently offended your God with our worship".
Consequently, they began to embrace the Torah, the Old Testament theology, and they began to embrace the Pentateuch in particular and included it into their worship. Now, I didn't say they were converted to it. I said they included it into their worship. They included it into their worship so that they had some aspects of Orthodox Judaism and then they had some aspects of human sacrifice and polluted their theology with various ideologies to the point that they had mixed it all together and made a mess. And this is not strange to us, because you know people in your own life that take a little bit of Bible, and they mix it with a little bit of this and a little bit of that. And you'd be surprised at the people, as long as you throw a few Scriptures and things, that they will eat it all up and never question the authenticity or the intensity or the integrity of the subject matter.
That was the Samaritans. They had a little bit of Orthodox Judaism mixed in with a lot of cults and sorcery and witchcraft and idolatry, and they mixed it all up together and began to offer it up before God. The Jews were so offended by it that they gradually distanced themselves from this group of people in Samaria. They were so distanced by them that even after the Jews had gone through Babylonian captivity and the Temple of Solomon had been destroyed, when they came back and desperately were trying to rebuild the temple and the Samaritans offered to help them, they resisted the support of the Samaritans because they did not want, even after 70 years of captivity, they did not want to partner with people who had a diluted understanding of who God was. They chose to do it on their own.
The ancestors of the Samaritans would have been represented through people like Sanballat and Tobiah, who began to agonize the work of Nehemiah because they were resentful of the fact that they were not included in the rebuilding of Jerusalem. They are a mixed multitude and amalgamation of a lot of different ideas. These people are confused and what church people have a tendency to do, when they think that you are confused and they don't agree with you, they either attack you or alienate you, but I'm so glad that Jesus is not like church people. He said, "I must need go through Samaria". In other words, "I'm going out of my way to go after a group of people that everybody else has rejected, because just because you have not included them does not mean that I don't have a strategy for their lives. And not only are they important enough that I have added them to my agenda, included them on my itinerary, but I am willing to sit by the well all day to find one person who can help me break down the wall and get into Samaria, one person".
Now, I would have thought Jesus being the son of God, Jesus being of the tribe of Judah, Jesus being the seed of Abraham, Jesus being the root of Jesse, that if he was going to infiltrate the Samaritans and break into their world, he might have talked to their magistrates, their kings, their leadership, their authority. I would have thought that he would have made an appointment, at least with one of their priests, in their ruined temple and battled there Scripture against Scripture to bring them into a reformation of truth. I would have thought that Jesus would have written a blog site and said, "They're in error, and they're in heresy," and attacked their integrity. I would have thought that Jesus would have put them on blast in some sort of way, dealing with their leadership to break into the city, but, no, Jesus doesn't pick the aristocracy of Samaria. He doesn't pick the religious scribes of Samaria, but he sits by the well not even waiting on a man. He waits on a woman, a woman of Sychar, to come down to the well.
The Bible doesn't even give us the name of this woman. She is a nameless woman, and yet Jesus sits down at the well and waits to meet her. He sends his boys on an errand because sometimes even the people who are with you do not understand your vision, and they will alienate you from the very people that God sent you to serve and to save, because there is nothing and there is no group of people that act any more important than the people that are with the man of God. Often act more important than the man of God himself.
I'm gonna work on this a little while. Jesus knew that he could not get done what he was trying to do surrounded by his disciples. They had already tried to shut up blind Bartimaeus who sat by the highway side begging. He was too loud, and he makes too much noise. And what about the woman who came to Jesus crying after her daughter? They said, "Send her away, for she crieth after us". These disciples would have messed up the mission because they were so indoctrinated with preconceived ideologies, that there was no room for revelation to break through their orthodox religion.
Some people are so religious that they miss the revelation that there are other people who may be theologically wrong but God still has a purpose for their life and them also must I bring. Oh, glory to God, so Jesus sat down at the well, and he began to wait for this woman to come down to the well, and when she comes down to the well she has an attitude. She has the kind of attitude that results from people who are used to being attacked. She does not wait for him to attack her. She comes down to the well and attacks him, saying, "Now you know that your people and my people don't have any dealings. You already know, so don't come down here trying to be nice to me, 'cause you know we don't have any talk".
Sometimes people who have been hurt are the hardest people in the world to help, because even when you reach out to help them they already have an attitude. You have never been fought like you will be fought by somebody you are trying to save from drowning. Even though your intentions are good, their desperation is so bad that you can get killed trying to help somebody who's hurting. Oh, y'all don't hear what I'm saying to you, but Jesus begins to deal with her, until in the next phrase she goes from being sarcastic to calling him "sir". She calls him "sir" because now she begins to understand that he is due some respect, and then later on she acknowledges him as a prophet, and then later on she brings up the Messiah, and then later on he says, "I that speak am he".
Look at how God is bringing this woman into gradual revelation. He goes from being an enemy and an alien to a sir, from a sir to a prophet, from a prophet to the Messiah. Isn't it nice how God will bring you into truth? Not one step, but several steps to bring you into the enlightenment of what God will do in your life, and I wanna take a moment and just thank him I haven't always thought what I think now, and I didn't always know what I know now, and I didn't always feel the way I feel now. But when I had the wrong attitude and the wrong spirit and the wrong aspect on faith, I wanna thank him for being the kind of patient God who could have cut me out of his schedule, but sat down by the well and waited for me to come into a progressive revelation of who Christ is in the earth.
"I that speak unto thee am he". Touch somebody and say, "He is". Everything you've been looking for, touch somebody and say, "He is". Everything that you've been needing, touch somebody and say, "He is". Everything that you've been searching for, touch somebody and say, "He is". Everything that you've been crying about, he's more than your grandmother's God. He's more than your mother's God. He's more than a religious ideology. He's more than what you thought he was. He's everything you need, everything you want, everything you seek, everything you long for, everything you've been craving for, and he's been waiting on you.
All your life, all while you were drunk, all while you were high, all while you were in hotels, all while you were serving other gods, he sat down by the well, and he waited on you. You might not be important to anybody else, but you must be important to God. He stopped the gun from killing you. He stopped the car wreck from destroying you. He stopped the disease from attacking you. He said, "Leave that girl alone. I got a plan for her, and I'm waiting on her". Everybody who's ever had God wait on you, take just a moment and give the Lord a praise! Touch your neighbor and tell 'em, "He waited on me". While I was acting crazy he waited on me. While I was in my sins he waited on me. While I was in a state of confusion he waited on me. While I was distracted he waited on me. While I was attracted to other things he waited on me and if he never gives me anything else I all have a praise for waiting.
This woman who comes down to the well, who has the social dysfunction of being unable to able to come down to the well when the other women came down to the well, comes an odd time of day to avoid interaction with other women. She comes down to the well because she's carrying water pots, and she wants to draw water. Water pots. We have heard about water pots before. In "Wedding Gone Wild" we saw the same kinds of pots coming down to be filled with water that they might be turned to wine.
Isn't it funny how God will always fill whatever empty thing you make available to him? What the well is in the earth, Christ is in the spirit, for Christ is of Jacob. He is born to Israel. He is the well of living water, so what you have here is a well sitting on a well and here comes an empty woman down to the well that she has already come to all of her life, but now there is a well sitting on a well. He starts the conversation by saying, "Give me to drink," knowing that her pots are empty when he asks the question, knowing that her religious dogma would alienate her from giving him water, knowing that even his own disciples would not approve of him asking this woman for some water seeing as she is a Samaritan woman.
He knows she cannot give him what he asked for. God always ask us to give something that we cannot give without him so that his request will create a thirst to ask him to give us what he ask us for so that we can give it. Oh, now can I go just a little bit deeper with this? The well is sitting on a well, and he asked her for water, and she's suspicious. She said, "Mm, you come down here saying you want something to drink, and you didn't bring nothing to draw with? Sound like a pickup line to me". She said, "You ain't got nothing to draw with". And he says, "If you knew the gift of God, you would ask me for water".
Now, he's switching up on her because he asked her for water. He said, "But if you saw the well that's sitting on the well instead of cross-examining me about that which is temporal, you would bypass your well and come to my well and ask me for that which is eternal". She said, "Oh, yeah? What's so good about your water"? He says, "If you drink of the water in here, you will thirst again. But if you drink of the water in here, you will never thirst again". Now she's confused. She knows she has a need. She knows she needs to draw. She doesn't know whether to draw from the physical or the spiritual. She says, "But this is water, and this is a well, and this is where everybody else goes". And he's saying, "It's not what it's look like".
Just because everybody goes there doesn't mean that it will satisfy your thirst. It may look like it will satisfy your thirst, but it is not what it looks like. I don't know who I'm preaching to this morning, but I feel like I'm already talking to somebody. The enemy is showing you how to get your needs met, and he says he's got a solution to your problem, but the Lord sent you here this morning so that you would have a warning. That that looks good is not good. It is not what it looks like. Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord. Some trust in horses, some trust in chariots, but I will remember the name of the Lord. Slap your neighbor and tell 'em, "It's not what it looks like". All that glitters is not gold. Just because it winks at you doesn't mean it's a blessing. Just because it takes advantage of your need doesn't mean that God has answered through what you're about to do. You need to stop and be still.
I hear the Lord saying that the coming of Ishmael is a sign that Isaac is on his way. The false always comes before the real and if you have the power to say NO to this well, you will open up to this well, and your latter day shall be greater than your former day. I don't know who I'm preaching to, but if you think it might be you give God a praise on credit.
And she says, "Well, give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw". She says, "I am tired, since you brought it up, stranger. I am tired of going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth to the same old stuff that just gets me by for a little while and then I gotta go back and do it again and again and again and again. And I'm old enough now and I'm wise enough now to value my time, and I don't wanna go through the next year what I went through the past year, going through the same old deadbeat stuff to get a little water to get me by for the weekend. Give me this water so I can finally thirst not, settle down, master what God has called me to be, step into my destiny, out of my history. I'm ready to get this water. I'm too old to spend another year going through the same old stuff over and over again. I need a breakthrough". Is there anybody in the house this morning who's ready for a supernatural breakthrough? Give God 20 seconds of praise.
Touch three people for me and tell 'em, "You're getting close". You're closer than you've ever been. You're closer than you've ever been in your life. You're nearer than you've ever been in your life. You're nearer to the peace you've been looking for. You're nearer to the power you've been looking for. That's why all hell is breaking loose in your life, because the enemy knows you have an appointment with destiny, an appointment that you didn't set, an appointment that you didn't know you had.
You think you're just going down to the well to get the same old stuff again, but this is a setup. God is about to change your life. God is about to give you a breakthrough. God is about to deliver you. God is about to snatch you out. God has deliverance for my life. Somebody praise him. Anybody praise him. Everybody praise him. Walk over and slap somebody and say, "It's not what it looks like". You think I'm not gonna be nothing, but the devil is a liar. You think I'm not gonna make a comeback, but the devil is a liar. You think I'm not gonna get a breakthrough, but the devil is a liar. Tell everybody who left you, "It's not what it looks like. You thought I was a sinking ship, but the devil is a liar". Somebody give God some praise.