Indeed, what great words those are. In Christ alone, my hope is found. In a moment, our guest speaker, Brad Jenkins, is going to come up and speak. I'm going to ask you if you'd all please bow your heads as we ask God's blessing on the message. Father in heaven, we do indeed thank you. for your goodness to us. We thank you for our Savior, Jesus Christ. And indeed, Lord, in him alone is our hope. Lord, we are grateful now to sit under the authority of your word. And so we ask, Lord, your blessing to be upon Brad as he delivers the message. We ask, Lord, that you would loosen his tongue and that you would enable him to declare to us this truth with power and authority. Bless him, bless us as we hear this message. We pray in Jesus Christ's name, amen. Good morning. As the pastor said, my name's Brad Jenkins. My wife, Shannon, is over there with our third. Our kids are here today. Our oldest is Sawyer. She's nine. Our middle, Barrett, who is six. And our youngest, Crosby, you can actually see him in the window right there. I want to introduce them just briefly. We would love to meet with you after, talk with you. But as we're here today, we want to say thank you. We have the privilege and the opportunity to be overseas in Thailand. God has definitely opened doors for us to be there, put a call upon us in our hearts, got our attention to go, but we cannot be there without churches and without supporters, partners, most importantly, people praying for us. active and alive today and he does not want people to know about Jesus and to know him as our personal Lord and Savior and we are over there but we know we are covered in prayer and supported to be there and First Baptist Garden Grove you guys are in that with us and we want to say thank you. Pastor today as soon as we as soon as we arrived asked us how some of the difficulties were going that we were encountering with spiritual warfare and different things, and he reaffirmed to us that you guys were praying. Things like that, we can't say thank you enough. I'll just put it like that. So as we're here today, we want to share, obviously from God's word, sharing that together, give a bit of a report. But if anything, you guys encourage us throughout the year and we want to encourage you today as well. If you have your Bibles and you want to hang out in John chapter four, that's where we'll be gleaning from today. But what I'm gonna do in the beginning portion is to do a little bit of a tie spin on it, which is tell the story instead of read it. And then when we get to some very important parts, I'm going to read specifically from the text. But I'm gonna do that because it's very tied, it's very oratory. But like you were saying, Pastor, I did get to grow up in this church for many years. I'm looking at Dave and Cindy, I remember coming to their wedding. Is it 25 years? You guys are getting old, so congratulations. I remember playing hide and go seek actually at some of the youth all-nighters in this sanctuary here and it used to freak me out and it looked so big. So being back puts it in perspective how small I was. Tomorrow it'll be 34 years and I'm thinking, wow, okay, life's going by quick. But we love coming back, we love coming back. And we realize that we're where we're at today in this journey with God because of things that happened many years, many years ago, foundationally, and that started for me in this church. So to be back here today is a privilege. Two and a half years ago we were here, prior to launching overseas full-time as a family of five to Thailand. We talked about discipleship. We talked about how, as Pastor said, God does give us commands. Jesus gives commands and we need to follow those. And in Matthew 28 he says to go to all nations. making disciples, baptizing others in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, which means we need to engage with people in a way where they come to know Jesus and take steps not only professing him in faith, but outwardly to show their belief and to become more like him. And that's what we want to be about in Thailand, but that's not just reserved for missionaries or pastors or a select few, that's for all of us. Some people go abroad, some people we stay in the neighborhoods in which we grew. God has plans for each and every one of us, and that's what we talked about two and a half years ago, was that great commission or that mandate and what it means just a little bit and none of that has changed. What we're going to talk about today is right along those same lines and we're going to spend some time in John chapter 4 and we're going to get to see how Jesus went about this in one instance with a woman at a well as she was going to get water. But before we go to this scene in which Jesus just does what he does so well. I want to talk about water briefly because in Thailand, one of the things we do is use water to engage with people. to meet a physical need so that we can, in turn, speak to the spiritual need that they have in their lives. But there's so much physical need, if we come in and we just say, hey, I know a God, the one true God, I know Jesus and I want you to know him, we're speaking to deaf ears. They're not very receptive. But if we can come in and we can meet physical needs, relationship happens, doors are open, trust is built, and then we're able to speak to a spiritual need. But water is the main way we do it. That's where it starts. Let me read a few statistics. To make it real for us here, I know we all have homes, we have faucets, we have toilets, we have sprinklers. Some of us have pools. We can go to raging waters and go down slides with water. Water is abundant here, even in drought times. We still have it. We may need to conserve, but most people don't go without. Water is available. For us personally, 60% of who we are as people is made up of water. Our body uses water in all of its cells, organs, and tissues. It helps regulate temperature and maintain other bodily functions such as digestion, removing waste, and prevents dehydration. But if this isn't regulated, we can die. And I say this because water is integral, but we go much of our day, many days, maybe years, some of us may never have thought how important water really is. But we need it, and without it, we can't survive. We can survive a long while without food, but not without water. So that's us, personally. Let's go to the larger scale of the world. At least 1.8 billion people use water on a daily basis that's contaminated with fecal matter, which averages out to about 25%. So 1.8 billion is 25% of the world, so one quarter. Water scarcity affects more than 40% of the world's peoples. And this is actually projected to rise because of migration and where people are going. Specifically, in Thailand, where we're at, the water crisis, we would say, is immeasurable. There is plenty of water, but consumable water is not had or easily accessible by many people in the hill tribes, even in the city. Actually, a lot of people consume dirty, I guess it's dirty water with viruses, bacteria, and other things that are going to create a lot of problems in their lives. But specifically, as we talk today, we're going to talk about the hill tribes, because that's who we went over to Thailand to work with. So outside of the major cities, there are many tribal ethnic groups that have lived in the rural parts of the mountains as subsistence farmers. The rain falls heavy up there, streams can be abundant depending on certain regions, but consumable water that is healthy is not a norm. And so we want to talk a little bit about that because one, we want to update a bit on what we get to do as an extension of you guys through meeting the physical need of water so that we can talk to that spiritually, but also we want to jump to John chapter four because Jesus uses water in its physical form to talk to a woman's heart. to bring about life change within her and within her entire city of Sychar. Basically, these people could not deny that somebody came and this woman had life change and many other people actually came to profess Jesus as their Lord and Savior and affirm him as the Christ. But it all started with water. In John chapter four, if you wanna go there, I'll paraphrase a little bit, Thai style. Jesus is going to Galilee. He's leaving Judea for many reasons. If you read in chapter three and the stuff going on with John the Baptist and baptism, all these different things, for many reasons, he says, he tells the disciples he's gonna go to Galilee. But in order to get to Galilee, there's this plot of land in the middle called Samaria. And many Jewish people would go around Samaria. because they didn't want to engage with these people. They didn't want to go through there and have contact with them, share life with them. They didn't want to cross these cultural barriers, these geographical barriers, mainly because of the people, though. So many people would go around in order to get from Judea to Galilee, and Jesus went through. And I believe as he went through, he wanted to engage with these people. I think he had a plan, and he went to a well that was Jacob's well, and it had been passed down for many generations. And he sits there, and it says he's weary from his journey. And a woman comes up, it says, in the sixth hour to draw water. So if we do the math, right, if we understand the situation, they didn't have running water in their homes. So they would have to go to a well, because water was extremely important. Cities were founded, were settled around water, rivers, bodies of water, wells. It not only was used for their daily life, but for their livestock, also for plants, for growing, for agriculture. It was agrarian society back then. And so water was extremely important. This lady comes out in the sixth hour to draw water. Let's not forget Jesus is a Jewish man, right? And this woman is a Samaritan woman. So there's a lot of cultural barriers there in that time where a Jewish man would not speak to a Samaritan woman, let alone a Jewish person interact with a Samaritan person. That was not normal. That was not a regular thing that would take place. But Jesus, instead of going around, he goes through and he goes to this well. And then when this woman comes, he says, can I have a drink? And she's thrown off guard, if you read there, and is trying to put this thing together and says, why would you ask me for a drink? You being a Jewish man asking a Samaritan woman for a drink. And he responds to her and said, if you knew who it was who was asking you for a drink, you would have asked me, and I can give you the living water. And then she goes on to respond, says, sir. So she obviously doesn't know he's Jesus yet, doesn't know he's king of the universe. Says, sir. Are you greater than our father Jacob who gave us this well? You don't even have anything to draw with. This is where we'll jump into the passage. Jesus answered and said to her, whoever drinks of this water will thirst again. But whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life. Let me read this again. For me, when I read this, I want to go there and I want to meet Jesus and I want this living water. It almost seems too good to be true, right? Where we never have to thirst again. I mean, I'm thirsty right now. I consume a ton of water all day long. I have a big yellow water bottle I carry with me everywhere I go. I would love to take a drink of water to where it quenches me so much that it's actually going to produce a fountain that is springing up into eternal life that Jesus is talking about to where I am not thirsty. I want that, but it's not something that I just have to want. Physically, yes, I do need to consume water, but spiritually speaking, that is available. Jesus makes it available to this woman, and he makes it available to you and I, and to people all around the world, which is what we get to engage in in Thailand. But let's take another look at it. He says, because she just got done asking, sir, what are you talking about? What authority do you have? He says, whoever drinks of this water will thirst again. But whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life." Her response is amazing. She says, Sir, give me this water that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw. So if we pay attention, she's hooked. He's talked to her. He's encountered her through, hey, can I get a drink? to a few sentences later in this passage, we come to a place where she says, I want this water. After he just got describing, I'll give you a water that will quench your thirst. And it's going to spring up into a fountain of everlasting life. And she says, I want it. And if you continue to read on, They exchange some more, and he asks her about her husband. And he draws out in her her sin, some of her issues. She doesn't deny it. She's open with God. And she sees something different. And they converse more and we come to a place where she recognizes he is the Christ because Jesus tells her that. And it says that she drops her pot, she runs back to the village and she tells everybody about it. And then she comes back, the villagers, I say villagers, that's what I'm thinking in my head in Thailand, the villagers come back, right? The other townspeople. And they believe because they heard it with their own ears and they saw the Christ. They saw the Messiah that was prophesied about for years upon years. And it all started with the conversation of, can I get a drink? A physical need, something that we all have. And Jesus turned that in to an opportunity to share about the hope, the life, the love that he has. If we go to John chapter seven, you don't have to turn there now if you want to go on your own. When we talk about this living water, he's actually talking about specifically, and this chapter refers back to the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit, is our assurance of salvation. He seals us till the day Jesus comes. He's the one who brings about belief in our hearts to become sons and daughters of Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit is living and active within our lives. This is something that in Thailand we've encountered more because we have to be dependent upon him. We don't get to pick and choose on some of the things in our day to day any longer because of spiritual warfare, because of things that Satan's trying to do to deter us. The Holy Spirit is real and this is what he's promising. We never have to thirst again. If I could, I would pull up a short video and show you what the hill tribes look like. If you could imagine in your mind, they're not even rolling hills, they're mountains, and they're completely covered with vegetation, trees, vines, shrubs down below, to the point where if you want to trek through them, you have to have a machete and you have to have a lot of time, and you have to be willing to fall, because it is so thick, it is so dense. There's rice paddies all around, tiered on the side of mountains, and it looks like plates of glass. Down below, there can be streams. The rains fall so heavy that you actually cannot talk with somebody who's standing five feet from you because it is so loud, just hitting off the thatched roofs or the leaves on trees to the ground, to the grass. Rain falls. Water is abundant, but not the kind that is consumable. These people that live in these places have infant mortality rates above 50% because they don't have clean water for moms and for babies to consume. Viruses and bacteria is contracted, these diseases and different things, through the water to where people are dying from the common flu, issues born in water. For about eight to nine months of the year, the waters fall heavily from the sky. For a few months of the year, there's a drought. So many people don't have the opportunity to use proper hygiene, I'll say. Take baths, brush teeth if they have toothbrushes, wash hands, disinfect things. They have to walk extremely far for water. On a different day, I'd bring my daughter up. This is a piece of bamboo. As you can see, it has little stops here. And people who don't have water will put this on their shoulder, and they'll walk up and down the hills, through the jungle, on tiny trails, sometimes through the shrubbery, through the bush, in order to get to water sources that flow. Oftentimes, it's two hours in the morning, two hours in the evening, and it's not reserved for mom and dad. Oftentimes, it's for the teenagers and the kids who are about eight to 10 years old, because they don't have to go to the field and till the paddies in order to plant rice. I know if I were to tell my kids twice a day, Sawyer and Barrett, to go and fetch water with this uncomfortable piece of bamboo in the morning and at night, I'm not going to get the best response. I don't think I would want to do it. I've carried stuff on these poles before. And for the first five minutes, it's fun because you're trying not to spill stuff. And then after that, your shoulder hurts and you're just upset. At least I do. I get upset. But this is the reality of these people. They don't have this consumable water. So what ITDP is the organization with, ITDP stands for Integrated Tribal Development Program. And a guy by the name of Mike Mann has been to this church in First Baptist Garden of Goa, supported him for many years. He went over as a second generation missionary and started an organization that says, we want to come in and bring clean water to villages. And by bringing clean water through systems of gravity flow, people will see life change immediately. Within two weeks, they can go from having no water, potentially in some areas, to no clean water, depending on the region, to having flowing clean water at their doorstep. And the government doesn't do this. because they don't recognize these people. They treat them like those people in Samaria. Hey, they're there, but we want to go around, and we want to avoid. We don't want to put the work in to cross the geographical barriers. We don't want to cross the cultural thresholds necessary to engage them, because they're less than. They're lower. But ITDP, this organization, says, no, those are the people we want to go to in the hill tribes. And by bringing them clean water, they ask the question, why do you do this? And the best response we've been able to give as an organization, on short-term trips, as individuals, with teams, whoever it may be, is because we want you to have the living water. And that obviously sounds different in Thai, but that's the response. And they say, what are you talking about? And we say, well, this is going to help you now, but what if we could quench your thirst for eternity? and they're open, and they wanna hear because they see immediate change in their physical life. If I were to use the analogy of water a little bit further, water is abundant, right? We already talked, it falls from the sky, it rains, it flows, but it is not clean, it is not helpful to their survival on a lot of fronts. If we take it a little bit further, not from the passage here, but just in regards to water itself being unclean, there is animism, there is Buddhism there. Fear-based. They make constant sacrifice of food, of money, of animals, of different things in the hill tribes because they need to appease spirits. Because if they don't appease a spirit, the rain doesn't fall, their rice doesn't grow, they don't live. Or they appease guardian spirits so that they're not attacked by evil spirits. Or they make appeasement to spirits so that their kids don't get sick. Or if they're sick, they could get healthy again. And these evil spirits would leave. There's no assurance of salvation. They're just trying to stay ahead of the bad stuff that's coming. They have opportunity to drink of water, right? But they're constantly thirsty. Their soul is not quenched. Religion is there. In fact, Christianity has been in Thailand for over 200 years. Which on the first time hearing that, I thought, praise the Lord. Christianity, the gospel's been in Thailand for over 200 years. And then if you ask a little bit further, how many people are professing Jesus as their Lord and Savior, it's less than 1%. I'm doing the math, I'm thinking that's not, we're not being as effective as we could be with the gospel. And there's a lot of reasons for that. And so we're combating, a couple hundred years of complacency within the people. We're combating religious differences. We're up against Satan and his tactics to keep these people isolated. We as believers are up against a lot, but we don't need to be fearful in that because God goes before us. He knows these people. These people are created in his image and he wants them to know him. And the beauty of it is when we can come in and we can meet a physical need of clean water which changes their daily life immediately, we have earned the right to share about Jesus Christ, the one who can quench their thirst for eternity. Where if they drink of that, they will have that fountain of water springing up into eternal life that John chapter four talks about. And that's amazing. And it's not just something that we talk about. ITDP, to date, in its 24 years, have done, let me give you the exact numbers. I always mix them up. 280 water systems. That means 280 villages. We've built four schools. One of them goes up to sixth grade. In one of these schools, there's a youth hostel that houses 30 students from surrounding areas that these families cannot provide food, they cannot provide clothing, or they live too far to come to school. Within this youth hostel is a, we call him a hostile mother and a hostile father. He was an evangelist for that area who would go around from village to village living with people, sharing the word. He lives there now full time, and they teach the Bible in the morning and in the evening and do worship with these kids. as they're coming to public school. There's a medical clinic in this village, another way to say, hey, we can help you with this physical issue, but let us talk to you about something more. Thousands of coffee trees have been planted. Through coffee, the growing of opium is not necessary for a lot of people. And the need to engage in human trafficking or sex trafficking for income is no longer a need, because they have a cash crop that, with time, will become more abundant. Agriculture training is done on a monthly basis. And for these people, if they can't grow plants, vegetables, fruits, they don't eat. So all these things are specific to meeting physical needs so that we can talk to the spiritual need. We've often talked with staff and this can be great work. And sometimes by the time we get done with physical projects, we're kind of tired and we just want to get back to the city. And that's where we really need to rely on the Holy Spirit to be able to share about Jesus Christ. If I were to I'll go back and recount a little bit. 16 years ago, we did a water project in a village called Mojo. When we walked out of there, it felt like a very dark place. We thought this place isn't gonna take for the gospel. We had a great time, we felt like we had good relationships with the people, but it just felt dark and difficult. Little did we know, fast forward the tape 16 years, this is the village where a school goes up to sixth grade, medical clinic, a youth hostel. There was one believing family at that point, and that was marginal back then. Now there's 18 families that attend church in the village, and they built that church on their own. It's one of the most beautiful churches I get to worship in because it's made out of teak wood that they harvested from the local jungle, and the walls only come up to about chest height. So as you look out, you see miles upon miles, we're over there at kilometers, right? Of hillside, of mountains of God's creation as you're singing, and as you're hearing people praise Jesus in a different tongue that we don't know, it's a different dialect. All this stuff going on, you're just thinking, wow, God, how great are you? That you know these people, that you love them, that you have a plan. And I just want to say today thank you to First Baptist Garden Grove because you guys are here in Southern California but you guys are making an impact halfway around the world whether you see it or not. And that's not because of anything my wife and I do, we're simply going alongside with you to engage in something that God's doing bigger than any one of us. Through an organization, we have inroads to go to people to meet physical needs so that we have the opportunity to share about the spiritual need. And we're grateful for that. But anytime we have an opportunity to share, we don't want to stop there and say, thank you for sending us. Thank you for being a part of that over there. What we want to do is also encourage and say, as we're doing that over there, as we're being prayed for to do that over there, to share about Jesus's love, do that here too. Let's do it together as Christ followers. Because I would venture to say all of us, if we were to pause for a moment right now, could think of people that God has placed in our lives who don't yet have their thirst quenched. So I'll ask it. In your head, in your heart, who does God have in your life that needs to hear about this living water? And I don't say that in a convicting way. That is exciting because if we believe in Jesus Christ already, we have that living water. That is a fountain that is hopefully welling up, overflowing, growing. And by having that inside of us, we just need to respond to what God's doing and who he's put in our life. And we just get to share that and see him do things here in Southern California, in your workplace, in your friendships, in your relationships, in your families. wherever God has you. For us, it happens to be in Southeast Asia right now. We don't know how long. We don't know where's next. That could be home forever until we get promoted someday. We don't know. Same with you guys. We're in this journey together, and we want to say thank you for supporting us, praying for us, lifting us up, and helping keep us over there for now. But it's not just about us, it's about all of us in this together as we follow Jesus. And we hope today, as you get to hear a little bit about what God's doing in a different part of the world, to be encouraged to know that this is the same God that we all serve and follow. This living water is inside of all of us, he has promised that. And we get to share that with people right here, today, tomorrow, next month, hopefully every day, here in Southern California as well. I would love to pray for you, and then I believe pastor will come back up after. Father God, I thank you for this day. I thank you for the opportunity to come back to First Baptist Garden Grove. God, you are living and active. You are the good shepherd who goes before us. You love us. You desire to bless us. God, and as you are calling people to your worship, as you are saving people, starting now into eternity, God. You've been at this for centuries. God, you allow us to be a part of this with you, and we thank you. Lord Jesus, help us to answer the call. Holy Spirit, give us resolve. Help us to be dependent upon you. Give us the words in these moments and situations where we do get to use words. And please help us to continue to grow in your likeness so that in our work, in our relationship, and in our day to day, God, we would model your love for others to know. In your name I pray, amen.