A Conversation About Morality

Complete Livestream Service

To be sure, having Christianity as the dominant religious influence in the Western world has done us no favours in terms of actually living out the gospel as Christians. We have all too often substituted genuine discipleship and the mission to lead people to Jesus with a crusade to make our nation Christian. We have ceased to witness and instead taken up placards in protest, signed petitions, and engaged in the political process as an organized lobby group in order to impose a Christian ethic on our fellow citizens. The task seems so noble yet it fails the test of Scripture. The imposition of biblical standards of morality on people who are not Christians, falls outside of the Christ-given mandate to simply, “make disciples.”

That’s what we see Jesus doing in John 4. He’s seeking to make a new disciple of a woman who has come to a well at midday to draw water. Her life, from a moral standpoint, has been a disaster. She’s broken and ashamed having made multiple poor moral choices over the years. Knowing this, Jesus engages her in a conversation that eventually leads her into the freedom from sin’s curse that only salvation in Christ can provide. Jesus deftly navigates the moral bankruptcy that characterized her life, pouring out grace where other Christians might have only heaped condemnation and shame on her.

As we gathering online this Sunday, we’ll be in message three of our Conversations with Jesus series, and we’ll be looking at A Conversation about Morality he has with this Samaritan woman, and then I’ll lay out seven principles from the passage that will help us all see morality the way Jesus sees morality. Ultimately, he’s the only one who should be truly offended by our sin, and yet he offers grace and mercy to any who lean in to listen to him speak and to consider his offer of forgiveness. An offer the woman gladly accepted.

Fact is, we live in a messed up, sinful, broken world. And we’re part of that brokenness. The only hope we have is not moral reformation but the life-giving message of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Amen?!

Sermon Notes

Conversations with Jesus
A Conversation About Morality
Pastor Todd Dugard
John 4:1–41 (The Samaritan Woman)

May 3, 2020

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See morality the way Jesus sees morality...

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1. Meet people where they are no matter their moral choices

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2. Believe that no one is beyond the reach of God

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3. Present the gospel, not moral reformation, as their hope

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4. Navigate each person’s journey with grace and patience

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5. Watch as guilt, fear, and shame melt away at conversion

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6. Recognize that there is a God-established standard of morality

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7. Pursue and encourage the holiness of God for all believers