What Does God Say?

What is the essence of the gospel message?
    Where is the Center?
        Where is the meaning?

Today, as in the days of Jesus, there is so much clutter,
    so much noise of the machinery of man's self-generated beliefs,
        and the perpetuation of man's projects.
            Yet we find a simple unveiling in the gospels.

We find it very clearly in the story of the woman at the well in John 4.
    A woman without qualification of race,
        without clarity of understanding.

Hers was a life destroyed, but a life that having tried other fountains,
    and knowing the falseness of their promise,
        turned with a sure spiritual instinct to the Truth.

How simply she came.
    How direct were her words.
        How sure was her direction.
            How quickly she perceived.
                How quickly she believed.
                    How quickly she received.

Nicodemos, with all his study, questioned "how" God could do His work.
    She only asked how to come to God,
        and sought God's coming to her.

Her question rings true for us today,   
    "How are we to worship -to come and prostrate ourselves before God?"
        "What is the essence beyond all the external?"
            "How can I Come?"

Her statement "Messiah will tell us all things,"
expresses a total conviction of God's ableness.
    
    The question is:
    "How can I hear?'"
No more is needed than this -
    to find, beyond place or form, an encounter in spirit,
        to hear the One Whose words are Life for all our being.

Here she found the Answer to her questions.
Here she found the Life she sought.
Here she knew the  release of the ever sufficient Fountain.