Over the last year or so you have heard me often ask the question, “Why are we having arguments when we should be having conversations?” Arguments are battles of will, they are competitions of right and wrong, they are an effort to prove ourselves, our point or our positions while conversations are a determined exercise to not just be heard but to also hear. All you need for an argument is an opinion and a voice, but a conversation requires a determination to listen, a willingness to understand and a desire to learn. Arguments are about me, conversations focus on us. Jesus was a teacher, He moved about from village to village and town to town preaching the kingdom of heaven and making God the Father known. Mark 1:22 says “The people were amazed at His teaching, because He taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law.” This was not a statement against the scribes and the Pharisees. What the people were saying was that Jesus taught as if He was the originator of the knowledge not as someone who had been taught well or learned much. They were amazed because Jesus embodied what He was teaching, it flowed from His character not just intellect, He didn’t simply know His stuff, He was the stuff He was teaching. As amazing and authoritative as Jesus teaching was (and continues to be), it was His conversations that were life-changing. Mary of Bethany sat at Jesus’ feet in her home (a place of conversation not sermons) and later poured her expensive perfume over Him to anoint His body for burial. Nicodemus met Jesus late at night for a conversation, and years later was one of the two men who cared for His body after He had been crucified. Jesus’ visited Zacchaeus’ house, again a place of conversation, and before He left the tax collector had vowed to repay anyone he had overcharged. The woman in our text, this unnamed Samaritan woman that Jesus “had to” journey through Samaria to meet at the well of Jacob, she had a conversation with Jesus that caused her to go and tell everyone that she had carefully avoided prior to that conversation, that she may have met the Messiah. Teaching tends to touch our heads but when teaching leads to conversation that is what often moves our hearts. This morning we are going to move into the conversation of Jesus and the Samaritan woman, to look at Jesus’ words and how He carefully and kindly prepared her heart to discover His identity, His character and His love. Last week we saw that God caused the encounter, and Jesus created the conversation and we began to discuss how Jesus often used conversation to confront the culture. Today I pray that we will see that for Jesus to truly confront the culture He must disrupt our understanding, we have been far more affected and influenced than we realize and so the first step in bringing redemption is to restore order, to turn right-side up what has been upside down for far too long. The conversation between a Jewish man and a Samaritan woman initially was the beginning of shining a light on the sinfulness of prejudice but it’s true purpose was to set her free from a lifetime of rejection by immersing her in an eternity of love.