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Welcome to Day 2140 of Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.\nThis is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom\nThe Gospel of John \u2013 8 \u2013 Water for a Thirsty Woman \u2013 Daily Wisdom\nThe Gospel of John \u2013 Part 2 Presentation of the Word \u2013 Water for a Thirsty Woman\nToday we continue our Good News series according to John the Apostle. Today we will learn that Jesus is concerned for and loves those rejected by others.\xa0The passage for today is a rather long one, John 4:1-26. Instead of reading it all upfront, I have embedded the scripture in today\u2019s message.\n\nOnce John the Baptizer announced Jesus as the Messiah, the Lord wasted no time calling disciples. Within forty-eight hours, five hand-selected students had begun training for the transformation of the world. They had seen Jesus perform miracles (2:1\u201312), they had experienced His passionate desire for revival (2:13\u201325), and they had heard Him preach and teach (3:1\u201336). The time had come for them to glimpse their future as evangelists. Jesus, the Jewish reformer, would become Jesus the missionary and show His students how to reach the world outside of Judaism. Between Galilee to the north and Judea to the south, a lost and forsaken people lived in a spiritual no-man\u2019s-land called Samaria, and they needed to hear the good news.\n\nJews traveling between Judea and Galilee usually avoided Samaria, a land they considered defiled by Gentile intermarriage and religious syncretism. Rather than walk on impure soil, they descended the mountains surrounding Jerusalem to the Jordan Plain, journeyed along the eastern shore of the Jordan River, and then turned west into Galilee. Jesus, however, chose a direct route from Jerusalem to Cana, which took Him through the Samaritan town of Sychar.\n\n4:1\u20133\n\nTracing Jesus\u2019 movements in the Gospel of John is not as helpful as in Luke, which provides more geographical information. However, the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) don\u2019t tell us nearly as much about the Lord\u2019s ministry in Judea. We learn from John that Jesus frequently traveled between Galilee and Judea, and His reasons for moving from one region to the other varied significantly. Now Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John\u2014\xa0although, in fact, it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples.\xa0\xa0So he left Judea\xa0and went back once more to Galilee. In this case, He sensed that His ministry in Judea was attracting attention for the wrong reasons. While truth will always stir controversy, Jesus was not interested in squaring off with the Pharisees\u2014at least not yet, not until it served His ultimate purpose (15:22\u201325).\n\n4:4\n\nNow he had to go through Samaria. The phrase \u201chad to\u201d is translated from a Greek verb meaning \u201cto be necessary.\u201d Anyone unfamiliar with Samaria\u2019s history who might be looking at a map would not see anything peculiar about John\u2019s word choice. Draw a straight line from Jerusalem to Cana (4:46), account for the hilly terrain, and a stopover in Sychar appears perfectly reasonable. However, John\u2019s choice of words would have been provocative to any Jewish reader. Jews despised Samaritans. To the Jews, Samaritans were idolatrous half-breeds\u2014ethnically polluted, religiously confused, and morally debased. Moreover, during a particularly dark period in Israel\u2019s history, the Hebrew inhabitants of this region intermarried with Gentiles and established their own temple to rival the one in...