We little know what our own prayers involve. Should we pray them if we did? Here, too, the veil is drawn in mercy before the future. You ask for the waters of joy, and you have them; but the first drops of the waters of joy are the tears of penitence. The woman wished to drink of Christ's well, but she must first drink of her own sin. "Go, call thy husband, and come hither."
I. Notice, that it was just after He had awakened bright expectations of the future, that Christ at once sent her mind back into the past, and led her to retrace her sinful course. Prospects should precede retrospects.
II. How was sin fastened upon the woman's mind? Christ took it out of all generalities. He did not talk of the corruption of the human heart, but He sent one arrow straight home to its place in that heart. It is a very great thing to look upon Christ not only as the healer, but as the detector, of sin. Is it not an equal part of the physician's work to detect as it is to heal a disease? Ask the Great Physician to do for you the same office which He did for the Samaritan woman. There is no hand which can do it like His so faithfully, and yet so tenderly. Your own or another man's may be rough, His will be laid delicately; theirs may be partial, His will be true; theirs uncertain, His exact. Under that wise hand, immediately the woman began to show the two signs of a changed heart, she thought badly of herself and honouringly of Christ. At once there was an acknowledgment of guilt, "I have no husband;" and at once, too, Christ stood out to her in one of His greatest offices, "I perceive that Thou art a prophet." I do not suppose that she felt sin yet as she felt it afterwards, or that she saw in Christ all that she afterwards recognised in Him, but there was some confession of faith. It is well; the rest of the road to that woman will be much easier. If you have gone so far as ever to feel and confess one sin, and to honour one attribute of the Lord Jesus Christ, from that point you will be led on, like her, quickly.
J. Vaughan, Sermons,3rd series, p. 181.
Reference: John 4:16. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. iv., p. 116.