Living Water

John 4:15 (ESV) The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”

We are familiar with this story. The Lord Jesus was on his way to Galilee with his disciples and he had to go through Samaria. About noon, his disciples were in town, but a Samaritan woman came to draw water. You are familiar with how it was totally unacceptable for Jesus to have any contact with this Samaritan woman. Jews and Samaritans were hostile toward one another’s cultural and religious practices. However, Jesus reaches across such boundaries and more to begin a conversation with her about thirst.

He asks her for a drink. He initiates. She tells him her concerns. He offers her a different kind of water–living water. Eventually, she says she desires this water so that she does not have to be thirsty again and to keep coming back to draw water. She’s thirsty. Then, seemingly to change the subject, he asks her to call her husband. Then he begins to tell her her own life story. She has had five husbands and the man she is with is not her husband. She has a different kind of thirst. Eventually, Jesus tells her that he is the Messiah–the Christ–that she has been looking for. And brothers and sisters, he is the one we’ve been waiting for.

You and I have a much deeper thirst that nothing in this world can satisfy. Thanks be to God, Jesus has given us the only one who can satisfy that thirst–he has given us himself. On the cross, Jesus would say “I thirst” (John 19:28) so that we could go to him and thirst no more. This new year, don’t go anywhere else. Go straight to Jesus and thirst no more.