Encountering the Savior

Just then His disciples came back. They marveled that He was talking with a woman, but no one said, “What do You seek?” or, “Why are You talking with her?” So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, “Come, see a Man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” They went out of the town and were coming to Him.

John 4:27-30

She came into the PCPC Bookstore looking for a children’s book to gift. While I was showing her options, she offered that she was no longer attending our church. She said she felt unknown in our big church. She quickly added that God had graciously led her to a much smaller church where she feels known by members of all ages. Being known. Is that not what we all want? Not just to be known, but to be known and loved?

When we discover that we are known by the One who holds the universe in His hands and yet also cares about the minute details of our lives, we want to invite others to be known by Him as well. The woman at the well ran off proclaiming, “Come see a Man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” Their exchange was not simply information. The Man at the well could have gathered His intel about her from the market or the local bar, but this Man, Jesus, God incarnate, did not only have facts about her, He knew her to the depth of her soul. He knew her better than she knew herself. He knew that she was perpetually thirsty – thirsty for something that her five marriages and her current relationship were not satisfying. His pointed question revealed that they both knew she was just surviving.

The same thing happened when Jesus called His disciples. Remember, back in the first chapter of John, when Jesus called Nathanael. “How do You know me?” Nathanael asked. “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you,” Jesus answered (John 1:48). An internal exchange happened that an outside observer would not see, yet Nathanael knew instantly that Jesus was the Son of God.

Jesus sees us, past, present, and future. He sees deep into our souls, even where we cannot see. Where we are deceived by our own heart, He is not.

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? I the Lord search the heart and test the mind to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds (Jeremiah 17:9-10).

When we encounter Him, the power of His Spirit communicates to us that He knows us, and He knows all of it. He didn’t miss those thoughts, those words, or those actions we hope the rest of the world will never know about. We know He knows them, and yet, we also know He is inviting us to come to Him. Then, we begin, by the power of His Holy Spirit to want to know Him, to want more of that deep connection we just had, more of being seen and known.

Remember back to John chapter one with me, again. “Life was in Him and that life was the light of men” (John 1:4). Jesus turns the light on for us! Our souls live with an emptiness, a loneliness, a wandering, and a sense of surviving until He turns the light on for us. It is only in the light of Christ that life becomes meaningful, purposeful, and clear.

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will place My Spirit within you and cause you to follow My statutes and carefully observe My ordinances (Ezekiel 36:26-27).

My Dad’s recent conversion is a perfect example that having the eyes of our heart opened to Jesus has nothing to do with our own merit, our own ability, or our own terms. Dad was dead. He wasn’t just dead in his trespasses and sins, as Colossians 2:13 reminds us. Dad was lying on the operating table in Houston, and he was a Code Blue, a dead man. He refers to it as “when he met Jesus.” I asked him to tell me about it and he said, “I could not see. I could not hear. Yet, all at once, I knew I was a very bad man.” Dead men (and women) are Jesus’s specialty. We are why He came. He makes us to be born again. He gives us living water. He is the Savior of the World, the only One who can turn the light on for us.