All Hands
Introduction and the “All Hands” Call
Welcome to The Well Community Church. I am so glad you’re hanging out with us today. If we haven’t met, my name is Brad, and I have the privilege of handling God’s Word with you.
If you were with us last week, we just wrapped up our summer series called Invitations. Every June and July, we do a summer teaching series where we pair some of our older, seasoned veteran communicators with our younger staff to invest in the next generation. We believe part of our responsibility is not just to handle God’s Word regularly, but to raise up the next pastors as they grow in their craft. We turned them loose, and we had 15 communicators this summer. It was one of the best series we’ve ever had. It was so great to sit under really good Bible teaching. We get those communicators together to give feedback and help them get better, and the goal is that every summer we improve, knowing we are in good hands regardless of who is handling the Word.
Today, we’re turning a corner. Welcome to those joining us at our Clovis campus, our various other campuses, gatherings, venues, or online. We are launching a mini-series called All Hands. August is an opportunity for us to hit the reset button and do two things. First, for those of you who have been around for a while, it’s a reminder that we are still committed to the same things we’ve always been about. I hope your head is nodding as we look at two critical passages that have shaped us for the last twenty-five years. We haven’t changed; we just have more gray hair.
Second, for those of you who are new to church or new to The Well, I want you to know what it means to be part of this church and how you can join the madness that is The Well Community Church. It’s unique and special, and we’d love for you to be a part of it.
Cruise Ships and Battleships
We’re calling this series All Hands because of a metaphor we’ve used for years: the church is much less like a cruise ship and much more like a battleship. Many of you have been on cruises. It’s amazing what they pull off. If you want chocolate mousse at two in the morning, they’ve got you. If you want your towel folded into an elephant, they can do that. If you’re not sure whether to have the lobster or the filet at dinner, they’ll bring both. It’s all about you—your preferences, your karaoke, your dancing. It’s easy to come into a church and assume the same thing. We live in a consumer-driven culture where we want exactly what we want, exactly how we prefer it.
When you come to a church, it’s different. That’s not to say our quality shouldn’t be high, but we don’t exist simply to meet your needs. That’s not the purpose. A church is more like a battleship. On a battleship, when the siren goes off, it’s “all hands on deck.” Everyone knows where to go and what to do. It’s participatory, and there’s a higher purpose involved. For a battleship, the purpose is to be battle-ready. For a church, it’s to be about what the Gospel invites us to be about in our city.
I wanted more insight into this, so I called Carl Bitter this week. Some of you know Carl; he’s a retired Lieutenant Commander who spent ten years on the USS Midway and also served on the Nimitz. I asked him to walk me through it. He told me there are different alarms for flooding or collisions, but the one they trained for most often was called “General Quarters.” When that alarm went off, every single person responded to their station.
He said the flow was choreographed. If you needed to go up, you went to a specific side of the ship where the ladders only went up. If you needed to go down, you went to the other side. You didn’t want people colliding in the middle of a ladder during an emergency. Every two or three days, they would do an “all hands on deck” drill. It didn’t matter if it was two in the afternoon or two in the morning. Every sailor—between eight and ten thousand of them—had to respond immediately. Do you know how long it took them to get to General Quarters? Four minutes.
That ship was battle-ready in under four minutes because every single person dropped what they were doing and knew exactly where to go. If a church is a battleship, we’ve got some work to do. We need to help you determine where God has called you to serve. When the alarm goes off, how do we get battle-ready? If a handful of people just said, “I’m not feeling it today,” it would be disastrous for the vessel. When we shift our perspective and realize the church exists for us to partner with the movement of the Gospel, it changes everything.
The Way of the Patriarchs
With that in mind, I’d like you to turn to a familiar passage: John chapter four. To give some context, in chapter three, John the Baptist is on the scene baptizing people. He’s the one who baptized Jesus. As the religious leaders watched the popularity of both John and Jesus, John made a beautiful statement.
John 3:30 (NASB)
’He must increase, but I must decrease.
John knew who the hero was. Jesus is the one who needed to increase. In chapter four, Jesus sees the religious leaders drawing attention to this, and since His time had not yet come to fully present Himself as the Messiah, He decided to head north to Galilee. John uses very specific language here: He “had to” pass through Samaria.
John 4:4 (NASB)
And He had to pass through Samaria.
Geographically, this is interesting. There were two primary, easier routes from Jerusalem to Galilee. One went east through Jericho and north along the Jordan River. The other went west to the coast and up through the Jezreel Valley. The hardest, most inconvenient route was called the “Way of the Patriarchs,” which went straight through the mountains of Samaria. Nobody chose that route for convenience.
It was unpopular for two reasons: the terrain and the people. The Samaritans and the Jewish people did not get along, and this tension had ancient roots.
2 Kings 17:24 (NASB)
The king of Assyria brought [men] from Babylon and from Cuthah and from Avva and from Hamath and Sephar-vaim, and settled [them] in the cities of Samaria in place of the sons of Israel. So they possessed Samaria and lived in its cities.
Back in 722 BC, the Assyrian Empire destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel. They killed or enslaved the men and moved Assyrian men into Samaria, who then took Jewish women as wives. This created a population that was half-Jewish and half-Assyrian, and they were considered “ethnically other” by the Jewish people. Nobody went to Samaria to find a friend. Yet, Jesus had to go there.
Living Water and Physical Needs
Jesus arrived at a city called Sychar, near the ground Jacob gave to Joseph.
Genesis 33:19 (NASB)
He bought the piece of land where he had pitched his tent from the hand of the sons of Hamor, Shechem’s father, for one hundred pieces of money.
Jesus was weary from the journey. Middle Eastern geography is hot—Fresno hot. He sat down by the well at the “sixth hour,” which was noon.
John 4:6 (NASB)
and Jacob’s well was there. So Jesus, being wearied from His journey, was sitting thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour.
While He was there, a Samaritan woman came to draw water. Jesus asked her for a drink because His disciples had gone into the city to buy food. The woman was caught off guard. She asked how He, a Jew, could ask her, a Samaritan woman, for a drink. Jesus responded with something fascinating.
John 4:10 (NASB)
Jesus answered and said to her, ’If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.’
In those times, there were two kinds of water. “Living water” was flowing water from a spring or river—clean and preferred. The other was cistern water—stagnant water collected in a hole in the ground. You could survive on it if you boiled and filtered it, but you wouldn’t desire it.
Jesus tells her that if she knew who He was, she would ask Him for living water. He was showing her that while she came for a physical need, her true need was spiritual. Nothing has changed today. We live in a culture that says if you want to be satisfied, you must satisfy your physical desires. If you just get more of this or more of that, you’ll be happy. But the things of this world will never satisfy you. They only require one thing: more.
Jesus offered her something that would actually satisfy.
John 4:14 (NASB)
but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.’
He offered her hope. He told her she didn’t have to live unsatisfied. She still didn’t quite get it, thinking only of the physical exhaustion of drawing water every day, so she asked for this water.
A Collision of Conviction and Hope
Then Jesus said something that seemed out of context.
John 4:16 (NASB)
He said to her, ‘Go, call your husband and come here.’
Why ask for her husband? We still have the question of why she was at the well at noon. If you have to draw water in a hot climate, you go in the morning or the evening. You don’t go at noon unless you’re trying to avoid people.
When she said she had no husband, Jesus revealed that He knew everything about her. He knew she had five husbands and was currently living with a man who wasn’t her husband. In that moment, she must have felt incredibly awkward. He was reading her mail. But Jesus showed her incredible grace and dignity. He didn’t shun her for her scandalous past. He saw her as someone created in the image of God and invited her into a new way of life.
She began to realize He wasn’t just a man. She asked if He was a prophet, and then she brought up the Messiah.
John 4:26 (NASB)
Jesus said to her, ‘I who speak to you am [He].’
This was a life-changing moment. Some of you have a past like this woman. Do you remember when you first heard the Gospel? It was a beautiful collision of conviction and hope—an acknowledgment that you were a wretch, but that in Christ, you could be a new creature.
Isaiah 6:5 (NASB)
Then I said, ‘Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I live among a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.’
Look at how she responded.
John 4:28 (NASB)
So the woman left her waterpot, and went into the city and said to the men,
She left her water pot behind. The physical things didn’t matter anymore in comparison to what He was offering. She went to the city and told the men, “Come and see.” Good news deserves to be shared. She didn’t have the perfect language yet, but she had passion. Many Samaritans believed because of her testimony, and many more believed because they heard Jesus for themselves. They realized He was the Savior of the world.
A Home for the Broken
Jesus met this woman in a beautiful collision of grace and truth. If He only showed grace, it was half the story. If He only showed truth, He would be a legalist. The well in Samaria was a place of encounter where people aware of their sin found hope.
Twenty-five years ago, when we started this church, we asked what it should be about. The response was: it needs to be a home for the broken. We decided to call it “The Well” so that every time we said the name, we were reminded of that mission. Our logo is a “W” that looks like a top-down view of a well. It’s a little bit off, because we’re all a little bit off.
If you have a past, you are welcome here. We want to invite you to the living water only Jesus offers. I’m a pastor with more of a “past” than many. I went to high school and college here; there are stories circulating, and they’re probably all true. But by the grace of God, the Gospel changed my life.
We exist to help people connect to God and to each other in every neighborhood. We are unashamedly Gospel-centered. Reconciliation with God through Christ is the hope of the world. We also want to help you connect to each other because life change happens in community. We’re going to throw you into a Life Group, and it might drive you nuts. You’ll realize that the person who talks too much bothers you because you want to talk more. We make each other better like iron sharpening iron.
And we want to do this in every neighborhood. If everyone from The Well suddenly disappeared, I would hope the city would notice. I want us to be everywhere—in gated communities, section eight housing, dorm rooms, and office buildings. I want people to see us serving and say, “There go those people from The Well again.”
Rooted and Established
Our vision is to serve as a premier hub of Gospel transformation in the Valley and beyond. Why does the coast get to dictate how we live? We have the opportunity to put the Gospel on display in the center of our state and change the region.
There is scriptural anchoring for why we do this.
Colossians 2:6-7 (NASB)
Therefore as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, [so] walk in Him, having been firmly rooted [and now] being built up in Him and established in your faith, just as you were instructed, [and] overflowing with gratitude.
Paul tells us that since we have received Christ, we must walk in Him. This is an active, present command. We are to be firmly rooted—something that has been accomplished for us—and being built up and established. The Gospel is doing something in our lives. What God began, He will be faithful to complete. We aren’t Christians just by what we say, but by a proclamation lived out in action.
Responding to the Word
As we close, I want to share something that might be convicting. We think through our gatherings very intentionally. We want our campuses to be welcoming. You come early, grab some coffee, and connect with people. Then we worship to prepare our hearts for the Word. We listen to the teaching of God’s Word to adjust our lives to it.
But then, we worship in response. We respond so we can integrate what we’ve heard into our hearts. It’s a long journey from the head to the heart. I’ve noticed that many people take off as soon as the message is over to beat the traffic. But if you leave then, you’re short-circuiting the process.
In that response time, you should be asking: “God, how am I like the woman at the well? Do I show grace to those in need? Am I living out the mission?” If content alone transformed us, we’d be the godliest people on the planet because we have more access to content than any generation in history. But knowledge can make us arrogant. We need to allow the Word to sink in and change us.
Let’s pray.
Father, we are so grateful to be part of Your church. Thank You that You are the Chief Shepherd. We submit to You. We pray that by Your grace, we would be faithful to be a home for the broken. Help us to invite one another into the richness of life lived in Your Word. Change us and shape us to be more like You. In Jesus’ name, Amen.