And if the church goes along that direction
and continues to have humble brothers and sisters
like that in the next generation particularly, it
will go in such a new way.
Because God gives grace to the humble, and
it's only through those who want to be
nothing before God so that God can be
everything, and God does His work.
And that is what every sister has the
privilege of being.
Have you noticed it says in Proverbs in
chapter 13, 14 Proverbs chapter 14 and verse
1, we can think of the home or
house as a church and our personal home.
And here, have you ever wondered why it
says a wise woman builds her house?
It's not a wise man.
I thought about that for many, many years.
Why doesn't it say a wise man?
Why does it say a wise woman?
That's a mystery, which I don't think they
understood in the day when Proverbs was written.
Proverbs is one of those new covenant books
in the Old Testament.
Amazing things.
God gives grace to the humble.
It's gone in Proverbs.
And yet nobody experienced it till the New
Testament.
And even this verse is fully fulfilled only
in the New Testament.
In the Old Testament, they didn't care much
for women.
It's very important for us to understand, you
know, we have grown up in a Christian
culture, but if you want to know the
place of a woman in Old Testament times,
exactly the same as it was in the
villages of India where a woman is treated
like a slave, I think even worse than
that, because some amount of modern civilization has
come to the villages.
But if you want to know, if you
want to get a little glimpse of how
the Jewish community considered a woman, I want
you to just notice this.
If you turn to the New Testament, there
are two genealogies of Jesus.
Certainly, Mary was the greatest woman that Israel
ever produced.
We can say that because God selected her
to be the mother of Jesus Christ.
I mean, imagine, God searched for years and
looked around Israel and picked on one woman.
She must have been the most wonderful, most
godly, most humble young.
I promise, she was about eighteen years old.
That's all.
Imagine, being a god at the age of
eighteen, that almighty God can pick her to
be the mother.
And with the little life that she had
under the Old Testament, most of you who
have got so much more life, I think
all of you young girls should ask yourself
this question.
If I were living in Israel in the
first century, would the Lord have picked on
me?
Would I have been in the final list,
even, the last ten names that God had
to pick out from?
It's a good question to ask ourselves.
Whatever people may think about us is not
the important thing.
Would God have picked on you?
He picked on a young girl, not because
she knew the scriptures.
I don't know whether Mary knew the scriptures
all that well, not because she was of
a rich family or influential family, but there
was tremendous godliness that surpassed older women.
God could have picked a twenty-five-year
-old woman.
He didn't do so.
And that should be a tremendous challenge.
All of you sisters, even after you're married,
you know, what a low profile she always
took.
Once when she came, her son had become
very popular now, great healer, great preacher, standing
around a big crowd, and she stood at
the fringe of the crowd, just trying to
get a word with him.
So he sent a messenger saying, Please say
your mother is waiting here.
And he turns around and says, Who is
my mother?
My brother is my sister.
And she hears that.
She's not offended.
She says, That's right.
I'm not special.
Even in the marriage of Kena, when she
asks him, saying there's no wine, he says,
Woman, what do I got to do?
She's not offended.
I want to say to you sisters, follow
Mary's example, what a fantastic woman she was.
I fear that because the Roman Catholics have
made so much of Mary and worshipped her,
we Protestants have reacted against that, that we
don't appreciate her at all.
I think she was the most godly woman
in the entire Bible.
Certainly, if God chose her to be the
mother of the son, there's a lot we
can learn from her.
These little examples I just quoted of her
humility, always taking the background low profile, you
know how it is for some big shots,
mother-in-law trying to become famous, Carol,
the name of their son, but she never
did that.
And even at the day of Pentecost, she's
assisted with all the other women waiting for
her baptism in the Holy Spirit.
She's over fifty now, and she's waiting along
with all these other young people and willing
to accept Peter as the leader, and taking
no important place.
Do you ever hear about Mary in the
Acts of the Apostles?
The fact that you hardly ever hear about
her except in that first chapter shows us
something about her humility.
Imagine the mother of Jesus.
What a position she could have had in
the early Church as a powerful woman, and
you don't even read her name.
I think you'll miss much, dear sisters, if
you haven't studied Mary's life.
You can start now and say, Lord, that's
the type of woman I want to be.
And here's something else I want to show
you.
In Matthew's Gospel, Chapter 1, you read about
the genealogy of Jesus, which finally ends up
in verse 16 with, that Jacob was born
Joseph, the husband of Mary, by whom was
born Jesus.
So Joseph's father was Jacob, and he came
through, you read in verse 6, through Solomon.
That is, Joseph came through David's son Solomon,
and his father's name was Joseph, was Jacob,
sorry.
Now when you come to Luke, Chapter 3,
you see another genealogy.
And you can get confused with this.
Listen to this.
And Jesus began His ministry, verse 23, Luke
3, 23, about thirty years of age, being
supposedly the son of Joseph, the son of
Eli.
How's that?
Was He the son of Jacob?
Or was He the son of Eli?
And you go through this line, and the
names are all different, and the clearest proof
this is a different line is that when
you come to David, you find it's not
through his son Solomon that this descendant comes.
It's another line.
It's David's son Nathan, through whom this, that's
in verse 31, the son of Nathan, the
son of David.
David had a son called Nathan and a
son called Solomon.
So there the streams separated.
Through Solomon came Joseph, and through Nathan came
Eli, verse 23.
And if you got, you read in there
that the phrase son, son, the word son
is in italics.
Why is it in italics?
Words in italics means they are not in
the original Hebrew, they are not in the
original Bible which God dictated in Greek.
The translators added it because you can't have
a sentence in verse 23 saying, Joseph, son
of Eli.
What it really means is the sign law
of Eli.
The translators put it wrong, and they put
son.
Mary came through David's son Nathan.
This is actually the genealogy of Mary.
And the Jews despised women so much that
they wouldn't even put her name there.
That's what I wanted you to see.
Mary's genealogy, and they wouldn't even put her
name.
When it came to her father, Eli, they
said, OK, his son-in-law is Joseph.
Why pass Mary completely?
That's amazing.
I don't think it affected her.
When she read the book of Luke and
found her name was not even there.
Praise the Lord.
Can you be like that, sisters?
Ignorant?
That's God's will.
So often we can have sisters complaining, I'm
not being given the respect you need.
Is that what you look for?
Imagine if Mary had been like that.
I thought of Mary also when she gave
birth to Jesus.
There was no room in the inn.
And people were traveling to Bethlehem to get
their names recorded in census.
And there was no room in the inn.
And she could have told Joseph, I told
you we should have started a little earlier.
See, now we land up here.
How many times did I tell you we
should start a little earlier?
Send a message earlier to somebody.
You know, I was going to be delivering
in the census.
This is my due time.
And you could have sent a message to
a messenger at least a couple of days
earlier.
Or to one of the others who were
traveling earlier to Bethlehem saying, please give a
room for us.
And then grumbling and complaining like that against
her husband, and then they finally find this
place in the stable with all the donkeys
and cows and all that, and she's just
full of complaints.
And imagine if Jesus was born at that
time into an atmosphere surrounded by His mother
complaining and grumbling.
How terrible it would be.
You see her humility.
There is no room in the inn.
God must have planned it that way.
He did.
Of course He planned it.
Jesus was to be born in a stable.
We know that today, but when you are
actually in a circumstance, you don't realize that.
Many of the difficult circumstances you go through
today, when you look at it thousand years
later in heaven, you say, Hey, that was
great.
But you don't say it's great right now,
because you are going through it.
So it's very easy for us to look
at Mary's story now, two thousand years later,
and say, Boy, that was great.
You know, Christmas time, making little cribs and
donkeys and all is great.
Looks fine.
Great, you know.
In fact, it's more exciting that if you
draw a palace than Jesus being born in
a palace.
But when the reality was there, it wasn't
so neat as all these Christmas things that
we see.
It was horrible.
It was filth and dung and smell, all
types of things.
And here she was delivering her first baby.
And I don't believe she complained.
I don't believe Jesus God would have chosen
a woman who was going to complain against
her husband and complain about the circumstances and
allow Jesus to be born into that atmosphere.
I think that may be one of the
reasons why He chose Mary.
Here was a young girl who didn't expect
much, was very happy with whatever she got.
You know, so many women when they get
married, they expect so much.
They expect their husband to provide this and
that and the other thing and the other
thing and the other thing and the other
thing.
And I believe that God can't do much
with such people.
And it limits the ministry of their husband
too.
I look back at my own life and
I must say I am deeply thankful that
I married someone who didn't expect anything.
I didn't have anything.
I quit my job.
I had zero in my bank account, and
I was serving a lot of trusting to
a lot of my nieces.
I didn't have anything.
I thank God someone who didn't expect much.
Mary was like that, didn't expect anything.
And God chose someone like that to be
this mother of Jesus.
And different, you know, some of these women
you read out here like Susanna Wesley and
Catherine Booth and all whom God chose, they
were women whom God found something in them.
God gave Catherine Booth, for example, as a
wife to William Booth, and boy, he went
through such fantastic pressures in the founding of
the Salvation Army.
If you read the story of the beginning
of the Salvation Army, they went through tremendous
pressures that people wanted to kill William Booth.
Because he was, all the bars were closing
down and all kinds of things were happening.
There was not so much saving souls, and
the prostitute houses, some of the prostitutes were
getting saved.
And imagine being the wife of such a
man, and God had given him someone who
was going to grumble and complain, the whole
Salvation Army would have suffered at that time.
Salvation Army that time was not like it
is today.
It was a tremendous movement of God.
I've often felt that if I lived in
England a hundred and forty years ago, I
would have joined the Salvation Army, without a
doubt.
That was perhaps the greatest work that God
was doing in England at that time.
And God chose a woman to be the
husband of this man.
And you know, God may have a man
whom He wants to use in some way,
and He wants to prepare a woman to
be His wife.
That may be one of your young girls.
But you've got to be what God wants
you to be.
You can't afford to be like all the
other young sisters around you, in the world,
or in other churches, or in YMCA.
God wants to see if you've got a
vision to be dedicated and different, because, you
see, God, I've got only one life, and
I wanted God for you.
I wanted God for you, and I'll tell
you, if you're just going to flow with
the time, flow with the current, all the
other sisters and youngsters are going this way,
I'll also flow along.
That's easy.
You'll be popular, but you won't fulfill your
ministry.
Which God has for you.
You've got to swim against the current.
You've got to be different, if you're willing
to be a bit unpopular.
Different in certain things you stand for.
In humility, you stand different.
And God takes note of that.
And then He can prepare you for, give
you as a wife to someone.
So, think of that when you're young.
And those who are married also think whether
God's already given you as a wife to
someone, and whether you are hindering His ministry
in some way.
It's very easy for a woman to complain
and make life so miserable for her husband
at home, that hinders his ministry tremendously.
So there are certain things here we see,
the humility of Mary.
I'm just trying to tell you that in
Jewish society, even someone's soul, the mother of
Jesus, and Luke was written, the Gospel of
Luke was written long after the day of
Pentecost.
And Luke was not even a Jew.
He was a Gentile.
But Mary's name doesn't figure in the genealogy.
It's amazing.
Into this society where woman had no place,
where woman was ignored, came Jesus with a
new covenant.
And one of the wonderful things He did
in the new covenant was to raise woman
from under the feet of man to the
side of man, co-occurring as a partner,
as a fellow heir of the grace of
life.
And you know what's happened in 2,000
years?
In 2,000 years, many, many creatures have
pushed woman back, may not be under the
feet perhaps, down to the knees at least,
somewhere down there, but down from this exalted
position that Jesus gave woman.
So I want you two sisters to see
the exalted position that Jesus gave woman in
this new covenant age.
I want you to turn, first of all,
in Matthew chapter 1.
Again, let's look at the genealogy.
Because that's the first thing you read in
the Gospel of Matthew.
Matthew chapter 1, you read in this genealogy,
as I told you earlier, in the genealogy
in Luke, Mary's genealogy, they wouldn't even put
Mary's name.
They wouldn't say that finally Eli's daughter was
Mary who married Joseph.
No.
They just say Eli's son-in-law was
Joseph.
Good way to get out of using Mary's
name altogether in the genealogy.
Because in Jewish genealogy, they just didn't put
a woman's name.
And that's why it's surprising that in Matthew
chapter 1, you find the names of, you
mention of four women.
That's amazing.
Because they didn't put Mary's name.
But, here they say Joseph, the husband of
Mary, but then, before that, there are four
women in the genealogy of Jesus through Joseph,
who was his mother's husband.
And it's very interesting to look at that.
Because the New Testament begins with the Gospel
of Matthew, and it begins with the genealogy,
and right at the top of the genealogy
you have these four names.
And you heard me say this before.
I'm going to repeat it.
It's very interesting to see the history of
these four women.
The first woman was Timar, verse 3.
And if you read the Old Testament, I
think it's Genesis chapter 38, you read that
Timar was Judah's daughter-in-law, and she
committed adultery with her father-in-law.
She committed adultery with her father-in-law
after her husband died, and she got two
sons through her father-in-law.
And the names of those two sons were
Pyrrhus and Zerah.
And through Pyrrhus came Jesus Christ.
Because Mary's genealogy is also Timar and Judah.
After the time of David, both Mary's genealogies
and Joseph's genealogy are the same.
So Jesus physically descended through Mary, and Mary
physically descended through a woman who had incest.
Incest means sexual relations within the close family,
father with daughter, or father-in-law with
daughter-in-law.
Jesus came through this type of genealogy, physically.
Secondly, the second woman mentioned here is Rahab,
verse 5.
And Rahab is mentioned in the book of
Joshua.
She was the most well-known prostitute in
Jericho.
Everybody knew it was Rahab's house.
I mean, if you went to Jericho and
asked where is Rahab, it's over.
Go to the red light area, the woman
there, you'll find her house quite prominent.
She's one of the ones who's made a
lot of money.
Now, if one day you become a great
man or a woman, famous man or woman,
and somebody writes your biography, okay, would you
like it to be mentioned on the very
first page of your biography that one of
your ancestors was one of the well-known
prostitutes in such-and-such a town?
You wouldn't like it to be mentioned anywhere
in your biography.
Imagine, why does Jesus, why does the Holy
Spirit put it right at the first page
of Jesus' biography?
There are four biographies of Jesus written in
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and the very
first page, that one of his ancestors was
one of the most well-known prostitutes in
Jericho.
That's the second woman.
You go to the third woman.
The third woman here mentioned in verse five
is Ruth.
Now, Ruth, if you see the book of
Ruth, she was a Moabite, and that means
they descended from Moab.
She was not a Jew.
Rahab was not a Jew.
Ruth was not a Jew.
She descended from Moab, and Moab, you know
who Moab was?
He was the son born to Lot when
Lot's daughters got their father drunk and committed
adultery with their own father in order to
have children, and they got a child called
Moab.
And Jesus says, that's the line I'll take.
Would you take, would you choose such a
line?
Would you choose a line riddled with insects?
Father-in-law with daughter-in-law, most
well-known prostitute, father with daughter.
I mean, you think the holy son of
God coming to her constitutes any other line
but that?
Now, remember this.
You and I did not plan our family
tree.
I don't know whether you would have chosen
your family tree.
You had the opportunity to plan it before
you arrived here.
But Jesus was the only one who came
to earth who would choose his family tree
because he was sitting watching from heaven, right
from Adam's time.
Now, which line shall I choose to come
from?
Okay, Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and then
all these different tribes.
That one's got incest, and that one's got
this.
You could have chosen a pure line in
which there was no incest, no adultery, no
prostitutes, nothing.
Why does he deliberately choose Judah committing…
Judah was the next generation after Jacob.
Remember Abraham, Isaac, Jacob?
Judah.
And Judah commits adultery.
It's way back in Genesis, nearly 1,800
years before Christ has come.
He's planning his line, his family line from
heaven, and he sees Judah committing adultery with
his daughter-in-law, having a child.
He says, okay, that's the line I'll choose.
Goes down the line, and down the line,
and down the line, and then there's this
prostitute in Reha called Jericho, a complete mummy
of a Jew, who gets married to a
Jew.
Jesus says, yeah, that's the line I'll choose.
He's just sitting in heaven, planning his own
family line.
And then there's Moab, where the discernment of
all the rules.
He chooses that line.
And the fourth one.
This is not in the physical line of
Mary, but in the line of Joseph.
That's Chito.
In verse 6, it says, David was born
to Solomon.
That was not…
She was not the mother of Nathan.
You find her, who had been the wife
of Uriah, that is Bathsheba.
There's another horrible story of a man who
grabs somebody else's wife, commits adultery with her,
kills her husband, marries him, marries her, and
hides the whole thing.
And Joseph, can you imagine allowing Mary to
marry someone who's come from a line like
that?
And for that to come in the first
page of the New Testament.
What I'm trying to say is, Jesus identified
Himself with some of the most sinful women
recorded in the Bible, because He wanted to
be known as the friend of sinners.
He came to save sinners.
And the Bible says, the last part of
Isaiah 53, He was numbered with the transgressors.
When He was born, His genealogy is full
of all these wretched transgressors, so that today
a child born out of incest…
Now, you and I may not have had
the misfortune of being born out of father
committing adultery with his own daughter or something
like that, but there are children like that
in the world today, who are born out
of fathers committing adultery with their daughters-in
-law, with their daughters.
There are children like that in the world
today.
Unless they feel left out, I know your
pain.
I chose a line like that too.
Can you imagine the encouragement that will come?
It doesn't come to you, because you're not
born out of incest.
But some poor boy or girl somewhere in
the world who is so thoroughly discouraged, saying,
what an inheritance I have.
I mean, I was born with my grandfather
committing adultery with my mother.
My mother, her father committing adultery with her.
I'm born.
And Jesus says to that person, I understand.
I came for you.
Look at my family line.
I've got people like that.
Why did I choose that from heaven 1
,800 years before I came to earth?
Because I wanted to identify myself with people
like you.
Jesus identified himself with the worst women.
Yeah, I praise God for that.
Some of us are so holy, probably holier
than Jesus in our own imagination, that we
wouldn't identify with such women.
I praise God for a Savior who's a
friend of sinners.
I want to be a friend of sinners
myself.
Otherwise, I cannot represent the Savior adequately.
And you sisters, I want to ask you,
are you friends of sinful women?
Or are you so holy that you can't
mingle with them?
Let's learn from Jesus.
It says here in Luke's Gospel, Chapter 7,
Jesus was invited to the house of a
Pharisee, who was one of the religious leaders
of His time.
And He entered into the Pharisees' house, verse
36, and spread lightning at the table.
You know, in those days, they didn't have
chairs and tables like we have today.
It's not a table, and you sit in
a chair with your legs under the table.
Because then you wonder, how in the world
did this woman get under the wife of
Jesus' legs?
But they didn't sit like that.
If you've seen pictures of these old Jewish
things, they had tables, probably nine inches off
the ground, or a foot, and they would
recline like this, you know, with their hand
on their face of their hand, and their
legs would be stretched out, and everybody's legs
would be stretched out.
That's the way they ate.
That's just their custom.
So it says He reclined at the table
with His legs at the back.
And that's how a woman could come and
wash.
So here He was reclining at the table,
and there was this woman in the city,
and all it said about her is she
was a sinner.
Now, all have sinned and come short of
the glory of God, so what's special about
being a sinner?
Is there any woman who's not a sinner?
But when it says this woman was a
sinner, it means that she was from the
red-light district, a prostitute, a woman who
was living in immorality, earning her living from
immorality.
And when she heard, she obviously heard Jesus
somewhere in the crowd somewhere, and she repented
of her sin, being forgiven, because later on
Jesus says she has been forgiven much, means
that she was a repentant prostitute.
She wanted to give up her life of
sin, but she never got any help from
the Pharisees.
She wouldn't dream of going near the synagogue,
because they, the ushers of the synagogue would
say, get out from here, it's not the
place for you.
So she didn't know where to go.
I mean, here's a prostitute who wants to
turn from her sinful life, and there's no
synagogue that would receive her.
I wonder how many churches today would receive
a prostitute who wants to give up her
sin.
Because she's dressed up, painted up and dressed,
and she comes near most churches, they would,
when she goes and sits near the sisters,
some of the sisters would move away a
little bit.
I heard a story of a woman who
was divorced, and marriage broke up, and she
wanted to be restored to her husband, and
she was seeking for some counsel.
And she went to a marriage counselor, a
secular man, and he asked her, have you
gone anywhere else for counsel?
I mean, did you consider going to some
church?
And she said, oh, church?
I wouldn't go anywhere near a church, they'd
just turn me on from the door itself.
What a testimony.
Churches have.
Divorced woman, oh, gotta be careful.
Prostitute, gotta be careful, some of our young
men may be divided if she comes in
here.
And she never found a place anywhere.
But when she heard Jesus preach somewhere, she
said, boy, this man's different.
He's a rabbi also, he seems to know
the scriptures.
But there's something compassionate about his face.
There's something understanding about the way he speaks,
I think.
I think he'll understand.
Here's a woman longing to be free from
the life of sin.
There are a lot of women like that
in our country.
You know, young girls have been kidnapped from
somewhere.
They didn't want to live a life of
sin.
They were kidnapped when they were ten years
old and taken somewhere, Bombay or somewhere, from
Bangladesh or somewhere, and made into prostitutes.
It's happening all over the world, not in
ones or twos, but thousands.
Some of those women who are in the
red-light districts never wanted to go there.
They never wanted to go there at all.
They were dragged there and forced into a
life of prostitution.
I don't know.
This girl was probably…
A lot of people are driven into prostitution
because of poverty.
It's very easy to look down our noses
on these sinful people, but Jesus understands.
You were not driven into that life because
you were not poor.
You were fortunate that you were not kidnapped
as a young girl, and you met parents
who brought you up in a good way.
But they, some of these…
Jesus understands everybody.
That's the thing that thrills my heart.
It really excites me, and I believe that
the Christian Church has not presented Jesus correctly
to the world.
And I don't think in our old days,
even C.S.C., we have presented Jesus
correctly to the world.
It's one of the things we've got to
repent of.
I hope if a prostitute ever comes to
C.S.C., that she'll find the real
Jesus here, represented by this church, the one
we see here, who can understand, who sympathizes.
And she felt, well, I know I'm not
supposed to touch the feet of a man,
much less a prophet, but I want to
express my gratitude to this man who's changed
my life.
This preacher changed my life.
He's not like the other preachers.
I've heard lots of preachers, he says, she
says, but this one's different.
He understands my situation.
I want to show my gratitude to him.
And what does she do?
She takes her entire life savings as a
prostitute.
She knows that it says in Deuteronomy 23
that you cannot take the earnings of a
harlot and give it to God.
There's a law like that.
She knew that because she was a Jewish
lady.
She had been taught that from childhood.
But she says, what else can I give?
I mean, just saying thank you to Jesus
is not enough.
I have to show my gratitude by getting
something expensive for him.
And okay, there is an Old Testament law.
If he kicks me out from there, I'll
accept it.
But let me at least try.
And she violates this Old Testament law that
says you cannot bring the hire of a
harlot into the house.
She buys this perfume, brings the hire of
a harlot into the feet of the Son
of God, and he accepts it.
Wonderful Jesus.
He doesn't care for all these rules.
He goes by the spirit of the Old
Testament law, not the letter.
We've got multitudes of followers of Jesus today
who go by the letter and make life
miserable for other people.
Jesus went by the spirit of that.
And it says here that when Simon the
Pharisee, who knew Deuteronomy 23 very well, saw
what was happening, he says in verse 39,
boy, now I know that Jesus is not
no prophet.
The Living Bible says this proves that Jesus
is no prophet.
I mean, I made a mistake inviting this
guy to our house because he's not a
prophet.
At last I discovered it.
Thank God for revelation that he's not a
prophet.
Because if he were a prophet, he would
know what type of woman this woman is.
He would know Deuteronomy 23.
He would never allow her to touch his
feet.
Prophets don't allow women to touch their feet.
No.
Especially sinful women.
I love Jesus.
He always takes up for the underdog.
Who's the underdog here?
This poor woman.
He takes up for her against all those
people who are looking down at her.
Just like the woman caught in adultery.
Everybody ganging up against the woman and Jesus
takes the side of the woman.
I want to tell you this, my brothers
and sisters.
Whenever you find yourself to be the underdog
in school or college or office, everybody ganging
up against you.
Think of these stories.
Jesus is standing with you right there.
He's the same yesterday, today and forever.
You find yourself being ganged up against by
your husband and sister-in-law and mother
-in-law and Jesus is on your side.
It doesn't matter.
So many women say, I'm the underdog.
I always have the worst part of it
because my husband can do what he likes.
He gangs up with his parents and does
what he likes to do.
But Jesus is on your side.
You show me one place in scripture where
Jesus doesn't team up with the underdog.
Always.
His stories were like that.
The laborers who came at the eleventh hour,
they get the first prize.
The prodigal son who went and wasted his
life, he gets the ring on his finger
and sits with him.
Jesus' stories were like that.
The woman caught in adultery.
The thief on the cross, who even his
mother probably didn't want to be identified.
You'll be with me.
Brother, you'll be with me in paradise.
Imagine that, identifying with a murderer, with a
criminal in society.
That's Jesus.
That's the Jesus we have to present to
the world.
That's the Jesus I want you sisters to
get excited about.
Can you say a hallelujah?
A little louder.
We need to repent a lot that in
the past years, we, including me, have not
presented this savior in all his glory, in
all his wonder to the world around us.
You sisters have a tremendous opportunity by your
lying, by your humility, by your meekness, by
your being treated as an underdog to say,
I have a savior with me.
It doesn't matter if my husband doesn't understand
me.
It doesn't matter if other people don't understand
me.
Some of you young girls, maybe your parents
don't understand you.
Sometimes it could be due to your own
stupidity.
I don't want to repent you all the
time.
If it's your stupidity, you better repent of
that.
But sometimes it could be because your parents
are ungodly.
You're an underdog.
I want to tell you that Jesus understands.
Jesus understood this sinful woman completely.
And he reviewed Simon.
He said, trouble with you, Simon.
I came to your house.
Did you give me any water for my
feet?
It's traditional in every house, a person comes
tired, takes off his chappals and somebody, a
slave will wash his feet.
You didn't have time for that.
You're too big a man.
This woman, she brought perfume, she wept.
She has kissed my feet and washed it
with her tears, verse 44.
And she has anointed my head with this
feet with this expensive perfume, which is her
life savings.
I accept it, despite all that it says
in Deuteronomy 23.
I know what it says there.
I accept it because I see her heart.
God sees the heart.
God won't push away a person whose heart
is good just because of some law.
The Sabbath was made for man, not man
for the Sabbath.
The laws were made for man.
Man was not made for the laws.
He doesn't understand this.
For years we've seen legalism that's brought death
into so many churches, and I say, I
don't want to be a part of that.
And that's how Jesus was, always raising the
level of women, identifying with sinful people.
Think of the story in John chapter 4.
In John chapter 4 we read Jesus and
his team traveling together for ministry, and I've
traveled with brothers for ministry in different places,
and I know how it is.
We travel together, we have a lot of
meetings, and we are tired, and we all
go together to some place to eat.
That's normal.
So Jesus was traveling with his twelve people,
and they came to Samaria, and we read
there that when they came there, he sent
away his disciples.
He didn't go with them to eat lunch.
He was amazing, because normally he'd go with
them to have lunch.
But Jesus lived a life which is so
sensitive to the voice of the Holy Spirit.
We don't understand that.
We read passages like this, and we just
skip over it, and don't realize there's something
wonderful here on the leading of the Holy
Spirit.
Jesus and his disciples pass through Samaria, and
they're hungry, and they're about to go for
lunch, and the Holy Spirit tells Jesus, don't
go with them.
Stay right here.
He lived as a man.
He doesn't know why, but he listens to
the Holy Spirit.
Okay, fellas, you go and have lunch.
Bring some for me.
Bring a packet for me.
You go and eat.
They wonder, why is he doing that?
He always comes with us.
Maybe he's too tired.
He wants to sit down here.
He's not tired.
He's listening to the Holy Spirit.
So they go off into the city to
have lunch, and he's sitting there.
And while he's sitting there, comes this woman.
This is noontime.
Remember?
Lunchtime.
No woman goes to a well at lunchtime.
She goes to the villages in India.
You see that?
They go early morning to the wells to
draw the water.
Why didn't she go early morning?
Because she knew that all the other women
in Samaria would make fun of her and
say, hey, who is this new guy, your
sixth man you're living with?
Where are your other five husbands?
Do you know where they are?
Great, eh?
Enjoying yourself at the sixth one?
They make fun of her and fun of
her.
She never decided never to go in the
morning.
She'd go when she knew nobody would be
at the well.
This woman, reproach of society, rejected by everybody
in Samaria because she's divorced not once, but
five times.
I mean, divorce once is a pretty strange
thing in India.
Imagine a woman in this kind of society
being divorced five times.
This is not Western culture.
In Western culture, that's pretty common nowadays.
But in Eastern culture, for somebody to be
divorced five times is absolutely unheard of.
This is this woman.
And she suddenly sees Jesus.
And she knew that Jesus was a Jew,
but Jews don't talk to the Samaritans at
all.
They don't even go anywhere near, it's like
this caste system, where the Brahmins will not
have anything to do with lower caste Jews
and straight Samaritans like that, and Jesus says,
give me a drink.
And she's surprised.
Verse 9, John 4, 9, how is it
that you being a Jew ask a drink
when I'm a Samaritan woman?
Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.
Now Jesus knew why the Holy Spirit prompted
him to stay.
And see how intently he deals with this
woman.
He's a masterpiece of counseling.
He talks to her, and first of all,
he talks about earthly things.
I was talking to, I was in Europe
recently, I was speaking to a young man
who's not converted, but had heard of some
of my tapes, and I was speaking to
him, and he knew that I was after
his soul.
So he said, I've heard some of your
tapes, Brother Zach, and I hear that you
use clever tricks to capture young people, you
talk about cricket and sport and games like
that, and all like that.
I said, yeah, that's right, because I want
them to know I'm not an angel, because
so that they know that I'm a human
being.
Because they've probably seen so many preachers who
just preach scripture.
It's not a trick.
It's just to show that I'm human like
you.
Anyway, I had a good chat with him.
I hope he'll get saved.
So that's how Jesus started.
He gave me a drink.
Much more than the, I don't know whether
I had any water.
I think she went out before she even
drew the water here, and Jesus finally never
got the drink.
It was only a means of getting into
conversation with her, and then the water of
eternal life.
And then he knew, Jesus knew, the Holy
Spirit said, go on, tell her to call
her husband.
So he says to her, go and call
your husband.
The woman says, I don't have a husband.
And Jesus said, you're the prophet who knows
what's happening.
Supernatural revelation, yes, it's true, because you've had
five husbands, verse 18, and the one whom
you now have is not your husband.
And what do you do when you're embarrassed,
sisters?
Change the subject.
Correct.
So she changed the subject.
She said, you know, this matter of worship,
I'm a bit concerned about this matter of
worship you're talking about in verse 20.
I'm positive that you Jews say, can you
tell me something about worship?
Changed the subject completely.
And Jesus doesn't say, hey, hang on.
This is where you see Jesus' tenderness.
He wants her to know that he's a
prophet so that she will trust him.
Why did he bring up this whole subject
of husband?
Just so that she would trust him as
a prophet who knew.
That's the first step.
Otherwise she'd think he's a stranger.
So that revelation made her know this is
a prophet.
And then, he also wanted her to know
that he was not this regular Bible prophet
who's just out to hit people on the
head for their sins.
And when she changed the subject, said, OK,
I don't know about worship.
Closed out the other chapter about your husband.
Finished with it.
That is the tenderness of Jesus, where he
never makes a person feel small by some
embarrassing thing in their past life.
All of us, even you young people, I
know you have something embarrassing in your past
life.
Now, I'm not a prophet, so I don't
know it.
Don't get scared.
God hasn't revealed me anything about any of
your past lives, and I don't want him
to.
But what I'm saying is, being a human
being, we all have episodes and events in
our past life which are embarrassing, which we
don't want anybody to know.
And I just want to tell you the
good news.
Jesus will not reveal it to anybody.
He doesn't reveal it to me.
He doesn't reveal it to anybody.
He knows, but he won't tell Peter about
it.
So, isn't it wonderful that he doesn't push
you on that point, which is embarrassing, but
he just means that.
That's what won her heart.
And I want to tell you sisters, that's
what Jesus is like.
He wins her heart and then he uses
her to go into Samaria and bring that
whole city to Christ.
Because it says here, she went and began
to be a witness there in the city.
She was a woman who wouldn't want even
to meet one woman at the well.
But she's so changed by one encounter with
Jesus, that she says, come and see a
man.
And it says here in verse 30, they
went out of the city.
A woman.
I love that.
Okay.
We could go on the whole day with
our times.
So, it's wonderful.
The whole Bible is like this.
The whole Bible is full of wonderful stories
of Jesus and how he cares for her.
You know, let's turn to John's Gospel, chapter
20.
Here we read, Mary Magdalene came only to
the tomb.
It's very interesting that Mary Magdalene, this woman
who had demons cast out of her.
We don't know much details about her life,
but she was definitely a demon.
Had seven demons in her, we read in
Luke chapter 8.
She was delivered from it, a sinful woman.
She was so grateful to Jesus, she comes
to the tomb early in the morning.
And she finds that she's the first person
to discover.
There's nobody in the tomb.
She runs, comes to Peter.
She says, they've taken away the Lord.
We don't know where they've laid Him.
And they run and come there and they
looked inside.
There's nothing there.
And they looked, and it's very interesting, they
saw that the tomb was empty.
Verse 10, the disciples went back to their
homes to go to sleep.
It was five o'clock in the morning.
Okay, come back later, eight o'clock, nine
o'clock, I don't know what's happening.
But Mary, it's a very interesting contrast, verse
10 and 11.
The disciples went to their homes to sleep,
but Mary still stood outside weeping.
She couldn't go back.
She couldn't go to sleep.
She said, where have they taken my Lord?
Jesus comes and she thinks it's the gardener.
And she said, why are you weeping, woman?
Verse 13, she said, because they have taken
away my Lord.
I don't know where to lay Him.
If you can tell me where it is,
I will go and pick Him up and
carry the body of that man with me.
Boy, what love for a woman.
Because she had been forgiven so much.
She was a demon-possessed woman.
She was delivered.
You sisters realize what your fate would have
been if you had not met Jesus.
What would be the condition of your home
today?
What would be the condition of your home
if your husband was not a believer?
What would be the condition of your home
if you didn't meet Jesus?
What would be the condition of your children
today?
Where would your children be today?
Just look around and see.
Where are the children of a lot of
other, your colleagues and your sisters and your
brothers and all that, where are they today?
Are you grateful like Mary Magdalene?
You say, I'll never forget, Lord, what you've
done for me.
When others run away, I'll stay at the
tomb.
And God chose her, listen to this, to
be the first witness of the resurrection of
Jesus Christ.
That's also a plan.
Long ages ago, thousands of years earlier, God,
okay, who is to be the first person
to go and announce that Jesus has risen
from the dead?
This is a fantastic privilege.
It's a new covenant.
The first person to go and announce that
Jesus has risen from the dead.
And he got a woman.
And it's not even Mary.
It's Mary Magdalene.
You see something there?
Jesus saying, because she loves him so much.
Think of these wonderful examples that you see
in the Gospels.
I want us to read this verse in
Hebrews chapter 4, verse 15.
So, I feel that so often in reading
Hebrews 4, verse 15, we've got so taken
up with the second part of that verse.
I think for 30 years we've spoken of
the second part of that verse.
He was tempted at all points, like we
are here in love sin, that we have
missed out on the first part of that
verse.
The first part of that verse, Hebrews 4,
verse 15, is he can sympathize with our
weakness.
He understands.
He sympathizes.
He shares with our struggles, our infirmities.
In one translation, the King James Version says,
he's touched by the feeling of our infirmities.
The feeling of our infirmities touches him.
It touches his heart.
I love to think of that.
Your sisters have a lot of infirmities and
weaknesses.
The Bible itself says, you're the weaker one.
I want to tell you that Jesus understands
your struggles, your infirmities, your weaknesses.
The pressures you face as a young girl
at home, you can't do the thing that
your brothers can do.
You don't have that freedom because you're a
girl.
Your parents impose more restrictions on you, frankly.
Or maybe you're a young married person and
you have problems with your in-laws, or
your husband, or your older married person, you
have problems with your children, you're home all
the time at home, and you have a
husband who's not understanding.
I don't know what all you're facing, but
I want to tell you that Jesus is
touched by what you are facing.
I hope you will feel really stirred to
get close to this wonderful Savior and say,
Lord, I want to be a witness for
you on earth.
To witness for what?
Not to do miracles and all that, but
just to say that you are such a
wonderful Savior.
Just to introduce you, like a woman of
Samaria, to others and say, you know, I
found something wonderful.
The world is full of other women like
you, young girls, young women.
Some will come in suicide, people of all
types of pressures.
They don't reveal it.
If you get close to them, they'll reveal
it.
Don't go to them as a religious person,
please.
The world has enough religious people.
Go to them as a friend of sinners
and tell them about this wonderful friend of
sinners who understands their sorrows, their pressures, their
problems, and who can help them, who can
deliver.
And change their mind.
Give them bright hope for the future.
This is the genes of the Bible.
And you are a witness like that.
You can be a witness as a wife,
a mother.
Never mind if your husband doesn't understand you.
You try to understand him.
Support him.
And if you water others, the Bible says,
God will water you.
And when you serve others, God will serve
you.
It's wonderful.
May God help you young girls to be
godly young girls and you older sisters to
be godly, wise mothers.
Peace be upon you.