Field Notes: Week of November 10, 2026

Wed, 11 Nov 2026 10:12:33 +0000

Hello My Deacons, This is an idea I had to help engage our Church family a bit more. The concept is a weekly email/newsletter that details and gives a sneak peek into the bulletin. I'm up for name ideas and suggestions, but take a look and let me know your thoughts. If you like it, once I confirm this week's bulletin, I will update it and send it out to the whole church on Friday. For those without email, we can send a text link to them as well.

"Oh give thanks to the LORD, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever!" (Psalm 107:1).

For His Glory
Pastor Dillon

THIS WEEK AT FIRST BAPTIST (November 11 to 15)

Wednesday, Nov. 11: AWANA, 6 to 7:30 p.m. Cubbies could use a few more helpers, and there are sign-ups in the hallway for security and kitchen help.

Thursday, Nov. 12: Mary Martha Mission Circle, 9:30 a.m. Kathy Newingham will give a pottery demonstration, and all ladies are welcome.

Thursday, Nov. 12: Business Meeting, 6:30 p.m.

Friday, Nov. 13: Game Night, 5:30 p.m. in the fellowship hall. Bring a dish to share and a favorite game, and invite a friend for a fun family night.

Sunday, Nov. 15: Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes are due. Worship at 9:00 a.m. and Sunday School at 10:15 a.m.

FROM THANKSGIVING TO CHRISTMAS

Thanksgiving Dinner Potluck | Sunday, Nov. 22, 5 p.m. The Fellowship Committee is providing turkey, ham, dressing, potatoes and gravy, and rolls. Each family is asked to bring two sides, so please sign up on the sheet in the hallway.

Community Thanksgiving Service | Sunday, Nov. 22, 7 p.m. at Charity Baptist. Head over together right after the potluck.

Lunch & Hanging of the Greens | Sunday, Nov. 29, 11:30 a.m. Stay after Sunday School for lunch from the Fellowship Committee, then help us decorate the church for Christmas.

Women's Christmas Party | Friday, Dec. 4, 6 p.m. at Meyer's Barn. For all women, college age and up. Bring a dish to share and a $15 gift for the rob-your-neighbor exchange.

Community Christmas Cantata | Sunday, Dec. 6, 6 p.m. at Charity Baptist. Rehearsals are Sundays at 5 p.m. at Charity. Contact director Chuck Roberts at 618-792-6884 to sing.

Christmas Eve | Thursday, Dec. 24. Service details are coming soon.

Revival is Coming

Sunday, Nov. 29 through Tuesday, Dec. 1. BJ Vinyard of The Roads Church in Carlinville will preach each night. Prayer begins at 6, fellowship at 6:30, and the service at 7. Pray now for the lost in our community, and bring a friend!

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Encountering Jesus

Tue, 10 Nov 2026 16:35:14 +0000

Come for the Water, Leave the Jar

Out in Greensburg, Kansas, there is a hand-dug well more than a hundred feet deep, and you can walk down into it on a spiral staircase that hugs the stone walls like the inside of an upside-down silo. I made that walk once, and I can tell you that as you get close to the bottom the stairs start to shake a little, and it makes you nervous enough that you start back up a good deal faster than you came down. Standing in a hole that deep, you realize how much work it took to reach water before anyone could turn on a kitchen faucet, because for most of human history, if you were thirsty, you picked up your jar and walked to the well.
Where there was no well, people cut a basin into the rock to catch the rain, which is what the Bible calls a cistern. Picture a thirsty man who digs until he finds a little water, lines the hole with stone, and hopes it holds, only to watch it run dry so that he has to start digging somewhere else. Give him enough years and the field is full of holes. God used that very picture through Jeremiah: "for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water" (Jeremiah 2:13). John 4 is the story of a woman who had been digging her whole life and walked out to Jacob's well one ordinary day, not knowing she had a divine appointment.

The road through Samaria

John tells us Jesus left Judea for Galilee and "he had to pass through Samaria" (John 4:4). Samaria sat in the middle, but plenty of Jews would rather walk around it than through it, the way a devoted Cardinals fan headed for Wisconsin might drive through Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota before setting foot in Cubs country. The joking stops there, because the hostility between Jews and Samaritans was centuries deep. After Assyria conquered the northern kingdom, foreigners settled the land and intermarried with the Israelites who remained, and their worship became a mixture of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob with the gods they brought with them. The Samaritans kept only the five books of Moses and worshiped on Mount Gerizim, the Jews worshiped in Jerusalem, and while the two peoples still traded with one another, a Jew would not so much as drink from a Samaritan's cup.
So when a tired and thirsty Jesus sits down at Jacob's well around noon and says to a Samaritan woman, "Give me a drink" (John 4:7), she is stunned. In one sentence he has crossed three lines, since a Jew was not to speak with a Samaritan, a rabbi was not to be caught alone speaking with a woman, and a holy man was not to drink from a Samaritan vessel. Jesus sets all three aside because he is never made unclean by what he touches. When he touched a leper, the leprosy did not pass to Jesus; the cleansing passed to the leper. Many of us stay away from church because we carry a past we would rather nobody knew about, but Jesus already knows, and he wants you to come so that he can make you clean by the power of the cross.
The Old Testament readers would have caught something else here, because in Scripture a meeting at a well is where love stories begin. Abraham's servant found Rebekah at a well for Isaac, Jacob met Rachel at a well and wept at the sight of her, and Moses met Zipporah at a well in Midian. John the Baptist has just called Jesus the Bridegroom (John 3:29), and now the Bridegroom sits at Jacob's well and begins to gather his bride from the last people anyone expected.

Living Water

Jesus tells her that if she knew who was asking, she would have asked him, "and he would have given you living water" (John 4:10). Living water meant running water, the fresh and healthy kind, as opposed to the still water standing in a well, so she takes him literally and points out that the well is deep and he has no bucket. Then Jesus says, "Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again" (John 4:13-14). He is speaking of the Holy Spirit, and he is offering her something far beyond what she thinks she needs.

We know that thirst, because we keep going back to the same holes. We dig in our relationships, in the approval of other people, in money and pleasure, and Solomon, who had more of all of it than anyone, wrote, "I kept my heart from no pleasure," and then confessed that "all was vanity and a striving after wind" (Ecclesiastes 2:10-11). Churches can dig broken cisterns too. When a thirsty person comes through our doors, we can be a well of life-giving water or a cistern of legalism that says, in effect, God loves you, but first you have to look like us. Jesus is not offering her a better bucket or a deeper well, because he is offering her himself, and in the end that is all any pastor has to offer anyone.

Go, call your husband

Then the conversation turns uncomfortable. "Go, call your husband, and come here" (John 4:16). Nobody likes the doctor who skips the bedside manner and tells you the scan found something, but that doctor may be the one who saves your life. She says she has no husband, and Jesus tells her she is right, since she has had five, and the man she has now is not her husband. We do not know how those marriages ended, and there is plenty of speculation, but we know she came to the well alone at the hottest hour, when the other women would not be there. What we know above all is that Jesus knew her whole story, and he named it not to shame her but to show her that her real thirst was for a Savior. Jesus does not expose your sin to shame you; he exposes it so that he can heal it, because "he who is forgiven little, loves little" (Luke 7:47).

She answers by raising the oldest argument between Jews and Samaritans, the question of which mountain was the right place to worship, and Jesus tells her the hour has come when the true worshipers "will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him" (John 4:23). God was not waiting for her to find the right mountain, because he came looking for her, and he comes looking for you. When she says she knows the Messiah is coming, Jesus answers, "I who speak to you am he" (John 4:26). The tired stranger who asked her for a drink was the Christ she had been waiting for.

She left her jar

Then John gives us the detail I love most: "So the woman left her water jar and went away into town" (John 4:28). She walked out there for one thing, and she walked back without it, because she had found something more important. She had no plans to be an evangelist that morning, yet she told the very town that had pushed her out, "Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?" (John 4:29). Her testimony brought them out to the well, and his word brought them to faith, until they could say, "we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world" (John 4:42).

So name your cistern, whether it is money, food, approval, busyness, or a relationship you keep hoping will finally be enough, and leave it at the altar. Then lift up your eyes, because Jesus said the fields are already white for harvest, and he will bring people to us who do not look like us, vote like us, or share our past. We need a church with a heart big enough to receive everyone Jesus calls, and people who came for the water and left the jar behind.

First Baptist Church | Greenfield, IL