Then they said to the woman, “Now we believe, not because of what you said, for we ourselves have heard Him and we know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world.”
John 4:42
No one would have expected anything of any importance to have come from it. After all, it was nothing more than a casual conversation with an imperfect stranger at a nondescript rest stop in the middle of nowhere after a long, tiring journey – or so it seemed. But Jesus was God and He knew the deeper, importance of all things and was actually right there on purpose and for a purpose. The Lord chose to be at that place at that time to reach out to a troubled woman with the goal of setting her free from her sin.
The Samaritan woman not only recognized Jesus as the Messiah, but proclaimed His coming to her whole neighborhood. Conventional wisdom would not have expected any Samaritan to be a seeker of the true God, much less an entire town. Probably hundreds of people came to listen to Jesus and acknowledge Him as the Christ. The half- hour lunch break turned into two full days of special meetings. In the end, that group of non-kosher Jewish wannabes gave Christ one of His most significant titles – Savior of the World. Their understanding of who the LORD‘s Anointed was, was more insightful than anyone else’s at this time. They realized that He was the One who would not only save the pure-blooded sons of Abraham, but everyone else in this sin-cursed world that needed saving.
The experience must have had a lasting impression on the apostle John, because he invokes the title again in his first epistle: “And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son as Savior of the World.” (1 John 4:14).
It’s the core of the gospel: “For God so loved the world […] that the world through Him might be saved” (John 3:16-17).
July 31
