What Fills Our Soul? | Ben Synder - Cedar Creek Church, OH

And today I want to look at a story where Jesus uses both of these as a word picture to show us what our soul needs most and how to get it.

And so today we're going to be going to the gospel of John.

For those of you that are new to the Bible, John was one of Jesus' disciples and he followed Jesus for his three or so years while he walked here on earth in Israel and in the Israel area.

And at the end, after Jesus left, near the end of John's life, his experiences were so valuable, he wanted them to be passed on, and so he wrote them down, and those writings became so important that they are included in what we now call the Bible today.

and um and what is fascinating to me about john's we would call it the gospel the good news that he writes about jesus in his account of jesus life he takes two stories and he puts them back to back two different conversations that jesus has right next to each other in john 3 if you were to open up your bible and look at the third chapter which is Just a numerical way of navigating through John's writing.

Jesus has a conversation with a guy named Nicodemus.

And Nicodemus was influential.

He was educated.

He was successful.

He was respected in the community.

I don't know if the disciples went along for the gathering or the meeting with Nicodemus.

But if I were one of the disciples, I would be like, this is the kind of guy we need on our team.

Like he knows all of the answers.

He seems like a kind of leader that everybody would respect.

And so Jesus and Nicodemus have an in-depth conversation.

Where did Jesus come from? What are you teaching? What do you believe? And Jesus explains God's heart for the world.

One of our most popular verses in the States is John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he sent, he gave his one and only son so that whoever believes in him will not perish, will not die, but can experience eternal life.

He explains all of this to Nicodemus and then he invites Nicodemus to believe.

And that's basically the end of the conversation.

We're not given any other response.

John just goes in our next chapter to the next conversation that Jesus has where he meets with a Samaritan woman.

And as you're gonna see, her life is the opposite of Nicodemus'.

She's been through it, easily overlooked, often misunderstood.

And John takes these two stories and he puts them back to back to show that there's no type of person that Jesus prefers or seeks over another.

And so if you came in today and you feel like your life is a bit of a mess, I think Jesus has something for you.