Hi, everybody. It's so great to be with all of you. Great to see you again. If you want to take out your message notes,

we are finishing up a series that Andy started here about three weeks ago on relating to humans.

And two weeks ago, Stacey brought a message about how do you relate to difficult people? Last week, Andy talked about how do we relate to destructive people.

And today, Anthony and Will and I are going to be talking about how do you relate to people

who are different from you?

People who are different in their culture, different in their ethics, different in their

values, people who are different in their politics, their

gender, their religion.

What does the Bible say about how we're supposed to relate to people like that?

So when Andy asked us to do this message, I immediately thought of an encounter that Jesus

had with someone in the Bible that I think perfectly illustrates how

Jesus did this. And it's the encounter he had with the woman at the well in John chapter 4.

And it tells us how he relates to people who are not like him. Now, we're going to dig deeply into this conversation that he's had with this

woman. But one of the things I discovered is that this is the longest conversation Jesus has with

anybody in the Bible. And you would think that his longest conversation would have been with

one of the disciples, or maybe John the Baptist

or maybe some kind of a debate with a Pharisee.

But his longest conversation is with a different kind of person.

It's with a Samaritan woman.

And in this encounter, we find that there are four important lessons that we can draw from

Jesus' model here. Four important lessons on how to relate to people who are different from us.

And they all have to do with love. That's the bottom line. It's all about love. But there's some

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