Watch the sermon here
CHRIST CANDLE
Despair is strong, but hope is stronger, evil is strong but love is stronger, bitterness is strong but forgiveness is stronger. Darkness is strong, but light is stronger! Let us light our Lenten candle!
ACKNOWLEDGMENT & CALL TO WORSHIP
This Season of Lent, is a call to repentance, to turn back from the ways we too often live, to turn back to God’s Holy Way. We acknowledge the harm still felt by First Nations people in these lands now called Australia. As we stand on Dharawal land, we pledge to seek justice & reconciliation with and for them. Holy One, we turn to you, to your reconciling, healing way, and we honour the land, the people, and life in all its forms as we turn to you and your voice once again. Amen
HYMN
Let us sing to the God of salvation
let us sing to the Lord our rock!
let us come to his house with thanksgiving
let us come before the Lord and sing!
Praise our Maker, praise our Saviour
praise the Lord our everlasting King:
every throne must bow before him
God is Lord of everything!
Let us worship the Lord our Maker
let us kneel to the Lord our God;
for we all are the sheep of his pasture
he will guide us by his powerful hand.
Praise our Maker…
Let today be the time when you hear him!
May our hearts not be hard or cold
lest we stray from the Lord in rebellion
as his people did in time of old.
Praise our Maker…
WELCOME & ANNOUNCEMENTS
PRAYER OF CONFESSION
Lent is a season of endurance. Long, hard, reflective work to acknowledge again honestly that God is God and we are not; to remember that God is love and we are loved; to gratefully receive from God the source, the water of life. You are our water of life, our source; and yet, we turn – we turn from you, we turn towards others for drink that fails to satisfy. In the silence we bring to you our disappointment in ourselves, our sorrow at causing you pain, our grief for the life we’ve lost. (Pause) We bring to you, who can satisfy, our thirst for life, our thirst for hope, our thirst for peace.
ASSURANCE OF GRACE
God hears our prayers, our disappointment, sorrow and grief. Trust the healing offered by grace, the reconciliation we find in Jesus the Christ, our Messiah, our hope, our water to quench the deepest thirst discovered here as Living Water. So be at peace in Him. Amen
HYMN
Jesus Lover of my life
Let me to Your refuge fly
While the nearer waters roll
While the tempest still is high.
Hide me, O my Saviour, hide
Till the storm of life is past
Safe into the haven guide
O receive my life at last.
Other refuge have I none
Hangs my precious life in you
Leave ah! leave me not alone
Still support and comfort me.
All my trust on You is stayed
All my help from You I bring
Lord be present within my heart
Under the shadow of Your wing.
CCLI Song # 2648280 Charles Wesley 1707 – 1788 Public Domain For use solely with the SongSelect® Terms of Use. All rights reserved. www.ccli.com CCLI Licence # 31951
GOSPEL READING: John 4: 1-6, 49-42 5 – 42)
Now Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John— although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. 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.
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.”
In this we find God’s Word of Living water. Thanks be to God.
VIDEO (7 min 30 sec) ‘Jesus and the Outcast woman at the well’, an excerpt from a popular series, used to serve as a springboard for the sermon and congregational activity:
MESSAGE (It is a very short sermon today, to follow the preceding video and lead into an interactive time for the congregation)
For John’s Gospel, this is quite radical – Jesus beating a strategic withdrawal from Jerusalem, taking a shortcut through Samaria. That in itself was quite unheard of for a self-respecting Jew! And he is tired and thirsty. He initiates a conversation with a Samaritan woman! More taboos blown away both because of his physical need (water) and because of his growing awareness of the breadth of his ministry – to apostatised Samaritans. The unnamed woman at the end of the encounter runs back to her village ‘he knows everything about my life’ and that has set her free!
Could we say that about such an encounter we might have or already have had with Jesus?
And Jesus didn’t fix her social standing of having no husband & a past others talked about.
But Jesus gave her living water for the dark times she will still experience, living water for the journey that still tires her & hope & perseverance for when others refuse to allow her past to be the past.
What brings you out to drink in the heat of the day (costly & estranged) alone with your private thoughts? What do you ‘drink’ that doesn’t satisfy? i.e. What do you do that daily wears you down?
What rooms or conversations in your heart and mind are still off-limits to our Lord?
He wants to have a conversation with every part of the life that is you – he wants all that you are – that is the priceless gift he seeks as he engages in conversation beside the well that is our lives.
INTERACTIVE INVITATION to come and drink from the well of his life & love in spirit & in truth (congregation joins in activity)
As we sing…
HYMN – All Together Whatever
Like the woman of old, each day
We go to the wellsprings of life
To find Jesus there.
Some days the well seems dry.
We can’t reach the water –
It’s too hard.
Some days our legs won’t take us
Our hearts are aching, crying.
Some days our minds are reeling
There’s too much happening –
We need to stop.
Some days our souls are parched
We need the water – so thirsty.
Some days we’re resurrected
We feel new life -inside us.
Some days our faith moves mountains
We feel life’s glory – earth and heaven.
OFFERING
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE Loraine
HYMN
Love will be our Lenten calling
love to shake and shatter sin
waking every closed, cold spirit
stirring new life deep within
till the quickened heart remembers
what our Easter birth can mean.
Peace will be our Lenten living
as we turn for home again
longing for the words of pardon
stripping off old grief and pain
till we stand, restored and joyful
with the Church on Easter day.
Truth will be our Lenten learning:
hear the Crucified One call!
Shadowed by the Saviour’s passion
images and idols fall
and, in Easter’s holy splendour
God alone is all in all.
Words © Elizabeth J Smith. Music by permission Oxford University Press CCLI Licence # 31951
BLESSING & BENEDICTION
May the feet of God walk with you
And his hand hold you tight.
May the eye of God rest on you
And his ear hear your cry.
May the smile of God be for you
And his breath give you life.
May the Child of God grow in you
And his love bring you home.
Words © AW Podlich Music © R Mann Used with permission CCLI Licence # 31951
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