That is good to see that. He was human. That is the way you and I are. You know very well that sometimes when you have a task before you that you do not want to do, and you kind of go grumping around, doing everything you possibly can to avoid the thing. You walk around the job about six times, and finally you decide, Well, I gotta do it. It's not going to get done. If it's not done, the boss is going to get on my case. I don't want him on my case, so I better do the job. So we jump into it, and the feeling comes right back, and the first thing you know, you are totally absorbed in what you are doing, and you begin to enjoy what you are doing. Maybe that does not happen to you, but it happens to me.
That is what happened here. He was suddenly all energized here. He was ready to get going. It led into something else:
That is a little bit unwieldy. What He was doing was He was quoting a proverb - not one of the proverbs out of the book of Proverbs, but just a local saying. What He was saying was, Don't you have a saying, 'There are still four months till the harvest'? What it meant was, there are four months between the planting of the seed and the reaping of the harvest. He had just planted the seed in this woman's mind. He was excited by that. When you look at this whole chapter, beginning with the first verse, He was in a hurry to get away from Judea because things were beginning to take shape there that He did not like. His intention was to go to Galilee, so it says that He needed to go through Samaria. He did not intend to stop there. He did not intend to preach to that woman. He did not intend to get involved. He was going to go right through there, go to Galilee, and begin His ministry up there. But instead, God took Him on this digression. Now He was all energized.
That tells you something about Him. He did not know everything that was going to happen. He had to be led by God's Spirit. He had to figure things out logically, using the Bible as the guide. Later on we find - in Matthew 10 - where He says, I am not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But by this time He had already been to Samaria, and in the meantime He had concluded that it was not His responsibility to go to the Gentiles.
This digression was something that was led of God. There is no indication that anybody was ever converted out of it - at least during the ministry of Christ - yet still Christ saw that the seed was planted.
I want to ask you something. In Acts 8, to where did the apostles first go to begin to preach the gospel in the area of the Gentiles? To Samaria, where Jesus had already gone. You can look back on this now and see that Jesus perceived that the seed was already planted. He said,
The harvest did not come until years later. But Jesus had vision. He knew that there was going to be conversions out of this, even though He may not actually live to see it. You see, there is an approach here for you and me to understand.
