Making Space For Life 3: Risk

On the radio the other day I heard of a survey that was recently conducted with a bunch of ninety year olds. They were asked, ‘What are the things you would change in your life if you could live it again?’ The results were interesting: the first was that they would spend more time with their children and the second was that they would take more risks.

What do these people have in common?
They all had something to say about risk.

	T.S Elliot said: “You have to risk going too far to discover just how far you can really go.”
	Cher, the American singer and actress said: “I've always taken risks, and never worried what the world might really think of me.”
	Harold Macmillan, the British politician, said: “To be alive at all involves some risk”.

I wonder how many of us have taken risks recently? I’d like to explore the topic of risk and to look at, in particular, how Jesus took risks. I hope that as we go on, you will see that, as it says in John, Jesus only did what he saw the Father doing. I think we can learn a lot from that model.

So maybe you’re now thinking, ‘that’s great Kate but actually I feel weary and just tired from the journey of life’ or, following on from what Sally said a few weeks ago- maybe you feel just too busy and too stressed to even think of making space for risks?

I wonder how many of us have stopped taking risks because actually the passion has pretty much gone and the most you would hope for is to be sort of ‘harmless’? Maybe you don’t hurt anybody, you smile a lot and you find that weeks just happen, they go by without you realising what happened between last Sunday and this Sunday. Does life just roll on?

Last week I was reading the paper and I found this article which I found very interesting. The headline is ‘How two- thirds of women are utterly bored with life’ and it starts by saying:

'Two thirds of British women are “completely bored" with their lives – and dream of driving to an airport and getting on the first plane out.' It goes on to say that “Two thirds of British women are bored with their lives and half are sick of doing the same thing day in, day out”. Then it says that “Life coach, London based Becki Houlston says “Grabbing those spontaneous moments only takes place when we remove the barrier between what we want to do and actually taking action”.

This morning I want to look out how the life we have with Jesus is life for now- that He is at work and He wants you to get on board with what He’s doing. Some people don’t actually live, to feel, to risk, some people just live to get rid of all their ‘stuff’. There’s a religious system that aims to get passion out of our life, to not be driven by our passions or desires, it’s actually called Buddhism – where you try to get rid of all the desires of your heart. If you’ve ever been around Buddhists they are very peaceful because their goal is to get rid of the desires and passions.

But the life we have with Jesus is the opposite. John Wimber, the founder of the Vineyard movement said ‘Faith is spelt R-I-S-K’. The challenge of life, and what Jesus challenges us to do, is to live with passion, to get out of the boredom and take risks - remembering that’s it’s OK to fail. So I’d like us to look at how Jesus did this, how he simply followed what he saw the Father doing. We’re going to look at a passage this morning from the New Testament. If you have a Bible, please turn to John chapter 4. It’s a long passage so I’m just going to read part of it, I’d encourage you to read the rest at home or in housegroups to find out more of the story.

John 4:3-13

So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee. Now he had to go through Samaria. 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."

So Jesus was on his way to Galilee but it doesn’t actually make sense for Jesus to go to Samaria. Samaria is the name given to the land between Galilee to the north and Judea to the South. If Jesus and his followers were travelling from one to the other, through Samaria was the natural way to go.

Natural, that is, geographically but sometimes the Samaritans would attack people going from Galilee to Jerusalem so many would choose to go a different way, probably down the Jordon valley to Jericho and then up the hill from there to Jerusalem.

So when I’m reading this passage, I’m asking Jesus questions such as:

‘Why did you go to Samaria?
Did you deliberately go that way?
Did you know you were going to have a conversation with a woman?
How did you feel?
Did you get that excited feeling I get when you recognise you’re in a God moment?'

Well, maybe not the last one as he was always in a God moment, but you get the idea!


I think the answer to those questions can be found in the next chapter where John writes in verse 19:
“I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can only do what he sees His Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does.”

I think Jesus knew that he had to go to Samaria for a specific reason but how much other information he knew we are not told. But the point is, He wanted to get involved with God’s agenda, he wanted to be in on what the Father was doing.

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1. Pray- ‘Show me what you’re doing Father’.

This leads me to my first point. Jesus was in constant communication with his father. He would ask all the time, ‘Father, show me what you’re doing’. And we can ask the same question ourselves.

I’ve been learning to listen like this for several years now and one thing I’ve learnt is that the Father is always at work. If you ask God to show you what He’s doing, He will probably do precisely that.
I regularly pray ’Show me what you’re doing Father’ on my way to school to drop off or pick up our boys. Sometimes the Lord will prompt me to talk to someone to see if they are OK- several times that has led to me making a meal for them because of a family bereavement or job loss. Other times, he’s given me words of knowledge and sometimes he will prompt me to pray for healing. That’s not easy because it’s scary- I’m always in constant chat with the Lord, ‘if you want me to pray for them Lord, help me out, make them on their own’. And do you know He always does help.
So when I prayed for my friend Samantha’s varicose veins in her leg or for my friend Joanne who had flu or my friend Rachel who had tonsilitis, they were all healed but I can give you several more examples where people were not healed.

I often get a feeling of total excitement and total fear.

John Wimber said:
“When do I know I should pray for someone? When your mouth is suddenly really dry so can hardly speak, and your knees go weak, and your mind fogs over so that you can barely remember your name, and your palms get all sweaty and you shake all over with fear, that’s when you know. That’s when the time is right.”

For me, it’s the most exciting feeling when we get to take part in what the Lord is doing.
So my question to you would be ‘Are you living expecting God to work?’ Maybe start with praying –‘show me a moment Lord where you’re at work.’ Yes we have to have times where we need to get the washing done and we pay the bills, but from time to time there have to be moments when God breaks into our reality and makes us realise that there’s a lot more going on here than what we thought.
So, over the next week, look to find when God’s at work. Keep asking Him to show you what He’s doing, to give you eyes to see and ears to hear what He’s doing. If you recognise when God’s at work and don’t act, don’t worry too much, it’s great progress that you’ve started to recognise when you’re in a God-moment

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2. Tired/weary – the Father still speaks

So, back to the passage. Jesus and his followers have left Judea and are on their way north, through Samaria and, apparently, without trouble. And there, in the heat of the day, Jesus found himself alone by Jacob’s well.
We read that Jesus was tired.- my second point.

I love that small glimpse into the humanity of Jesus. Hebrews chapter 2 talks of Jesus becoming fully man in every sense. It says He came to identify with us, to understand us and to unite himself to us. This really helps me because there are many times when I want to take risks with people, I recognise I’m in a God-moment but I’m tired and can think of a million reasons why I don’t press on. But this passage says that Jesus understands that, he’s been there before us.
 

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3. Perhaps something unexpected.

Moving swiftly onto my third point, what the Father is doing may perhaps be something unexpected.

Newspaper and magazines often run features entitled ‘what’s wrong with this picture?’ This doesn’t mean it’s a bad photograph. They mean that someone in the picture is doing something so unusual, it seems a bit crazy – here are a few examples:

The picture we find ourselves looking at here with Jesus also seems a bit ‘wrong’. It may not immediately appear odd to you so let me expand a little:

Jesus was already known as a holy man, leading a movement to bring Israel back to God. We know that He was more than that, but this is what the followers at the time thought. In that culture many devout Jewish men would not have allowed themselves to be alone with a woman. If it was unavoidable that they should be, they certainly wouldn’t have entered into a conversation with her. The risk, they would have thought, was too high- the risk of impurity, risk of gossip, risk ultimately of being drawn into immorality. And yet Jesus is talking to this woman.

The Lord often does things that appear to us a bit daft, or not how we would have planned it. A while ago, my friend Shirley and I were in a shop where people were chatting about a man who was lying down on the bench outside. As they were talking, I felt a huge compassion for this man and felt God prompting me to see how he was. For some reason I seemed to know he had somewhere to go and that the Lord wanted Shirley and I to take him to his home.

So Shirley and I started taking to him and clearly he had had too much to drink, though he could tell us his name and address. At this point, I need to tell you that this is not something I regularly do- meet random drunk men on park benches and take them home...you need to understand that I’d been asking ‘Lord what are you doing’ for a few years, I was used to Him showing me things and I felt strongly that this was the Lord

So, we asked his permission, then lifted him up and encouraged him to walk with us to the address he’d given us. We kept on saying, Lord show us what you’re doing here. As we were walking and praying, asking the Lord to help us, a car pulled up on the other side of the street. A man got out and asked if he could help. He said he was a fireman and he could take David in his car to the address.

You may think I’m totally barmy but I believe that was God literally helping us. Because as you do this stuff, as you do what you see the Father doing, He’s walking with you, He won’t give you something to do and then leave you to it, he is with you all the time, prompting you, talking to you, just like he kept giving Jesus insight into the woman’s life at the well if you read further on in the passage.

So we met the fireman at this block of flats, the address that David had given us. As we got there, there was a bit of commotion going on as the address was actually not for his home but his friend Pat’s. She said that he couldn’t come in because he had ASBO’s on him and then said that OK, he could. She invited us in for a cup of tea. Then there was a knock at the door and Pat said ‘Oh God, that’ll be the police!’ So I’m now thinking, ‘this is so exciting Lord, but what do you want us to do now?” So, the police came in. We stayed around a bit and then thought it best if we left. So, I always carry around some little cards saying ‘Just to say God loves you’ with the church office number on it. (There are some on the resources table for you to take and use also.) So I wrote on one ‘Lovely to meet you, if we can help with anything, let us know, love Kate and Shirley.’

I left it at that, actually thinking we wouldn’t see either of them again. Lots has happened since then and their story is obviously still not over – Pat dabbled with an Alpha course, came along here several times but more importantly still sees Shirley regularly and she knows that Jesus loves her. Just in the last 2 weeks and because of Shirley’s friendship, Pat has made radical decisions herself to get her life on track. David we know of less. For 4 months after that event, I prayed for Pat and David everyday and he turned up here one Sunday morning. He was clean shaven, in a suit and sober, helped with stacking chairs and it was truly a delight to see him. At the end of the talk, David went up for prayer and gave his life to Jesus.
He knows where we are and he sees Pat often. He knows that Jesus loves him but sadly the addiction to alcohol is still the driving force in his life.

You get my point that our job is to follow what we think the Father is doing, He doesn’t ask us to plan for him – our job is to just follow, He will show you what is going on and reveal his plan to you. Yes this was a risk and I loved every minute of it.
So back to Jesus who is having a conversation with a woman. If that was not risky enough, another reason it was risky was because she was, of course, a Samaritan and Jews had nothing to do with Samaritans. Why was this? Well ever since some of the Jewish exiles had come back from Babylon there had been constant trouble because they found that the central section of their ancient territory was occupied by a group (the Samaritans) who claimed to be the true descendents of Abraham. The Samaritans totally opposed their return there and so sometimes there had been murder and bloodshed but mostly it was a matter of not mixing. The Jews and the Samaritans certainly wouldn’t be sharing drinking vessels between them and yet here was Jesus, asking this Samaritan woman for a drink.

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4. People not like us

So Jesus is taking risks all round here. My fourth point is that this girl obviously has a, shall we say, colourful character. The Father may actually ask you to take risks with people who are not like you.

How do we know this about the woman’s character? – because the normal time for women to visit the well, which was probably some distance from the town, would be at a cooler time of the day, most likely first thing in the morning or late in the afternoon. This woman had come at the time when she was least likely to meet anyone –at least, anyone who knows her, her past and her immoral lifestyle. The last thing she would want would be to rub shoulders with the other women of the town, and unfortunately, they would feel the same about her.

I was raised to not associate with the Big Issue sellers or homeless people on the streets. Unfortunately, that meant that up until about 10 years ago, I walked past Big Issue sellers, not even acknowledging they were there. Interestingly, one of the things that I hear when I talk to these guys on the streets is that the worst thing sometimes is that nobody even acknowledges their presence. That was me, I didn’t have a clue what to say or how to behave.

So I asked Steve Restrick (who is really good at relating to people on the streets) and he encouraged me to just ask them how their day’s been?. The interesting thing for me was that I knew I could do that, that I could start with my one question ‘How’s your day been?’ and see what happened. It made the idea of talking to people I thought of as so different from me, less scary. So, I still do that now, even though I’ve known many of them for a while. It was a big risk initially but now I really enjoy talking to Shane, Phil, Andrea and others. I still start by saying, ”How’s your day been?”. So, like Jesus, we can take risks talking with people who are from different social backgrounds, cultures or countries.

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5. We don’t need all the answers.

My fifth point is that we don’t need all the answers.

Again and again in John’s gospel, Jesus talks to people who misunderstand what He says. Jesus is talking on a heavenly level and they are listening at an earthly level. For example when Jesus asks for a drink – this is, in a sense, a natural thing to ask for but He tells the woman she should have asked Him for one. He talks about ‘living water’ – water that’s fresh and clean, not water that’s been standing around getting stagnant. Jesus isn’t referring to physical water, whether still or moving, Jesus is talking about ‘living water’ which will quench your thirst so that you’ll never be thirsty again. The woman, however, doesn’t know exactly what he’s talking about, but she wants to know more. It’s OK to not have all the answers. It’s OK to just bring you, because following what the Father is doing is all you need to do. Yes it helps to know your Bible, yes it helps to have thought through your stance on various topics, but ultimately, follow what God is doing in that moment at that time and don’t let the fact that you don’t know where you stand on an issue get in the way.

The woman was on a totally different wavelength to Jesus but she was still captivated by him. Some people you come into contact with may start talking about religion or their opinion on this that or the other about church, that’s just what the woman at the well does later on in the conversation when she starts talking about which mountain is the most holy.
She says in verse 19 "Sir," the woman said, "I can see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem."
 
NT Wright talks of her reaction:
‘as soon as Jesus saw straight into her heart and told her what was going on, she started talking about something else. Most people when they are confronted with Jesus will start talking about religion. They’re all excuses, all irrelevant. God and the church, God and religion are not the same thing. It’s not about which church you go to or any other debate – Jesus could have got into a debate about whether Mount Zion, in Jerusalem, or Mount Geriim, in Samaria was the holy mountain, it’s not the point –it’s distraction’.

Again, don’t let the fact that you may not know the Bible inside out prevent you from taking risks, you don’t have to have all the answers, just be available to what the Father is doing.

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6. The implications can be staggering

My final point, number six, is that the implications of us following what the Father is doing can be staggering.
After the conversation with the woman at the well, do you remember how embarrassed the disciples were?

Verse 27 says: 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?"

The woman, on the other hand, seems to have lost her inhibitions in her haste to tell others about Jesus. Her grasp was very limited and tentative yet she did arouse considerable interest. Many people believed because of what the woman said.

Verse 39 reads: Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony, "He told me everything I ever did." So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. And because of his words many more became believers.
They said to the woman, "We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Saviour of the world."

We must assume that the faith of the woman was limited by her experience. If you read the whole passage you will see that her testimony showed Jesus’ remarkable insight, but personal contact with Jesus himself must have deepened the faith of the whole town because, remember, the fact that the Samaritans wanted Jesus to stay with them another 2 days was extraordinary since he was a Jew. For me, it showed their awakening conviction that He was a Saviour not simply of the Jews but of the whole world.

When I felt that we should take David home that day, I never thought for a minute he would end up giving his life to Jesus and the result of that being that I will be spend eternity with David praising Jesus. Just by taking a risk, following what we think the Father is doing, can have huge implications.

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So in summary:

1. Pray - Show me what you’re doing Father. In the next week, when will you pray this prayer? Maybe in housegroups you could share stories.

2. Tired/weary – the Father still speaks even when we’re tired. Are you interuptable?

3. Perhaps something unexpected - The Father will not ask you to take part, then leave you, remember He will walk with you.

4. People not like us - Maybe as you walk past someone selling the Big Issue, ask them ‘how their day has been’.

5. We don’t need all the answers - Do you feel you need to know all the answers? Does that stop you from you making space for risk?

6. The implications can be staggering - Once you start taking risks more and more and you see the Lord at work, your faith will grow enormously.

May you hear and see what the Father is doing this week, may you take risks and trust Him to lead and guide you and may you delight in joining in with His plans. Amen.