Come to the Well of Living Water!

Have you heard the story from the Gospel of John where Jesus confronts a woman by a well? He actually doesn’t start the conversation off by confronting her, he simply asks her for a drink of water. He had been walking all day and the other men, his disciples, had gone down to the town to get some food. While he was waiting on a hill in the region of Samaria by a well of water, a woman comes in the early evening to draw some water. When Jesus sees her he simply asks her for a drink. Now in that culture and in those days it wasn’t like a Jewish man to ask anything from a Samaritan, since they were considered ‘unclean’, much less to ask a Samaritan Woman. But he did. Now she’s a little taken back by his request and asks him why he a Jew would ask her, a Samaritan woman, for a drink. This is when the conversation gets interesting. Jesus tells her that if she knew who he was and the gift of God, she could have asked and received ‘living water’. Living water? What was that? She didn’t even question it, she simply told this stranger, Jesus, that he didn’t have anything to draw the water with- she sure wasn’t going to loan him her bucket was she?- and the well was too deep to get it without something to draw it out with. She asks him how he thought he was going to get out the water since he surely wasn’t greater than her ancestor Jacob. I mean Jacob was one of the three, you know: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This stranger couldn’t be more powerful than Jacob, could he? Jesus lets the woman talk, he doesn’t just make water appear to show that, yes, he was more powerful than Jacob. When she finally finishes her ‘you can’t get out the water and Jacob is better than you’ rant, Jesus picks up where he left her and says, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.”N.A.S.B.  There it is again, that living water. This time the woman does pick up on the living water theme and asks Jesus for some of that living water so that she wouldn’t have to come up the hill anymore and get water! She’s thinking physical, He’s speaking spiritual. This happens a lot to Jesus, he speaks great spiritual truths and inevitably the people he is speaking to take it in physical terms. If you want to see a good example of this skip ahead to verses 31-33 of this same chapter and his own disciple’s fall into the same problem as the woman.

So, that’s the part of the story I want to look at. What is the Living Water that Jesus was talking about? And how can he give us something so that we never thirst? And thirst for what?

Have you ever had a problem, felt guilty, overwhelmed and didn’t know how to get rid of the feelings you were feeling. Sure, you can stuff them down and pretend that you’re okay- but you’re not. You’re not, and you know it; if you look deep within, you know you just can’t shake that feeling, that guilt, that shame, that anger- you fill in the blank. You see, this woman at the well had stuffed her guilt, her shame, her anger, and all those other things she was feeling deep down. They were there, but she didn’t want to deal with them, so she kept trying to get Jesus on to some subject that didn’t involve him and her and what he could do for her. I mean, let’s give the woman a little credit here: I’m sure because of her past and all those things that she has stuffed inside- see the next few verses- she is being cautious with this stranger, after all, she didn’t know this was the Jesus of the Bible, right? So, she keeps trying to shift this to some practical, logical type conversation, but this man at the well, this Jesus, just keeps pushing her back to face this ‘living water’ topic. Why? Because he knew she needed it. That’s what Jesus does, he just keeps on putting those same things in front of us so we have to face them before we can move on. Who knows, maybe right now some of you are saying, man this sounds just like… yep! You may be thinking, “Why does this Jesus stuff keep coming up? I don’t even believe in that stuff, can we just stop talking about it?” or, “Every time I pick up the Bible to see what it says, I keep on reading about…”  Yep. That’s him, Jesus, trying to give you some of that living water. The exact water you need.

You see, we all have some of that ‘woman’ inside of us don’t we? Some of us have more, some less, but we all have some. And Jesus is still offering that living water to anyone who will come to him and ask. Did you notice that Jesus said to ask and he would give it? He didn’t just start spewing it out did he? Why? Because Jesus wants the people that receive the healing, living water to want it. Do you ever notice that if you aren’t thirsty water doesn’t really taste that great, but when you’re thirsty, wow! Jesus wants the same thing with us, he wants us thirsty so that when the water is offered we will take it in deeply and let it do the work. Once again, it comes down to choosing Jesus: asking him for the living water.

Now, you may have noticed that last line in the last paragraph: ‘Jesus, the living water.’ Yes, Jesus is the living water. And what Jesus is saying is that if we ask, he will give us himself! And notice that he says that the water he gives will be inside whoever drinks of him and that water (Jesus) will become a well springing up inside of them to eternal life. He will fill you; he will give you life eternal. So when we drink in Jesus he is able to calm those storms inside, to give healing to those feeling that you never could do on your own, because now you see, you have Jesus “springing up” inside of you, never running dry, always enough.

Like I said, the offer is still there just like it was for the woman. “If you knew the gift of God, you would have asked and I would have given you living water.” There is one other thing we should get clear right here: notice the word “gift”. This living water, this Jesus, is a gift of God. Let’s get this straight, a gift isn’t a gift it you do something or try to pay part of it; it then becomes a reward or merit of some kind. This is not what Jesus said; it’s not what he is offering, he is offering us a gift. He didn’t tell the woman that she needed to do something to earn the water, or say some special words to merit it; he offered it freely as a gift. He does the same for you and for me. If you’re wanting to do something to earn the water you will need to see someone besides Jesus, the only problem is that He is the only one that has it to offer: there is no other way.

So, now that we know what the water is, how we get it and what it is for, we get back to those words that Jesus originally wanted from the woman, and now wants from you and me:

“Ask”.

Randy