Sermon Tone Analysis

In south-central Missouri, near the town of Van Buren, is an enormous first magnitude natural spring—the largest natural spring in the United States—appropriately named “Big Spring”.

It was one of our favorite camping spots when I was in the Boy Scouts.

It’s an amazing place to visit.

The Spring is 80 feet deep, and has an average daily flow of 286 million gallons of water.

That’s enough water to fill 6,500 two-liter soda bottles every second.

The spring is estimated to dissolve and remove 175 tons of limestone during an average day from its underground passages.

It’s a huge caldron of aqua-blue water bubbling from the ground at the base of a towering bluff.

It churns and boils like a pot of water sitting on a hot stove.

The roar is loud, you can barely hear the conversation of the person standing next to you.

The water tumbles down a cataract into the Current River almost doubling the stream's size.

Why the brief lecture on the natural history of Missouri?

Because it represents the kind of spiritual life and abundance that God wants you to have in Christ.

When Jesus was witnessing to the Woman at the Well, he told her: “ ... “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst.

Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.””

(John 4:13–14, NIV84).

As we come to the 7th chapter of John’s Gospel, we’re going to see that Jesus invites all those who are thirsty to come to him to have that thirst satisfied.

The invitation will take place during the final day of the Feast of Tabernacles—also called Sukkot.

What does the chapter teach us?

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I. MAN HAS A DEEP-SEATED SPIRITUAL THIRST THAT THINGS CAN ONLY TEMPORARILY QUENCH

* /“Therefore my people will go into exile for lack of understanding; their men of rank will die of hunger and their masses will be parched with thirst.”/

(Isaiah 5:13, NIV84)

#. what was true in Isaiah's day is also true today

#. because of a lack of understanding of /God's will/, /God's ways/, and /God's word/ our culture leads lost men and women into spiritual exile to face a harsh captivity which leaves them hungry and thirsty

#. the things of this world will never quench the hunger and thirst which only God can fill

#. and still, people scramble to acquire more and more stuff thinking that material abundance, financial security, health, happiness, and prosperity will fill the emptiness they feel deep down inside

#. they don't realize that those things actually /feed the emptiness/ and make it all the more profound

* ILLUS.

I was surprised to learn some years ago that one of the ironies of drinking sea water is that in drinking too much of it, a person will actually dies of thirst.

During WW2 many U.S. sailors and airmen found themselves floating in the ocean after their airplane or ship went down in the sea.

After days without water, some would yield to the temptation to drink the sea water.

This almost always led to their death.

Ocean water contains something like seven times more salt than the human body can safely ingest.

Drinking seawater actually causes a person to dehydrate.

Once a person begins drinking sea water, the kidneys demand extra water to flush the overload of salt building up in the body.

The result is that the body craves more and more water, but the more seawater a person drinks the more salt the kidney's have to flush out of your system.

The more saltwater a person drinks, the greater his craving for more water.

But because so much salt builds up in the body, the person who drinks too much sea water actually dies of dehydration!

#. the irony and tragedy around us today is that the /pleasures/ and /abundance/ of the world are like /an ocean of salt water to a thirsty man/

#. men thirst desperately for something that looks like what they want and even think they really need

#. they don't realize however, that material abundance, financial security, health, happiness, and prosperity are precisely the opposite of what they really need to fulfill the God-vacuum in their life

#. in fact, what the world has to offer us can kill us

* ILLUS.

In His parable of The Wheat and the Tares, Jesus told His listeners: /"but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word [of God], making it unfruitful,"/ (Mark 4:19, NIV )

* ILLUS.

Franz Werfel, an Austrian author and playwright, once said, /"Materialism is organized emptiness of the spirit."/

#.

Jesus said it like this:

* /"What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?"/ (Mark 8:36, NIV)

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!! A. MANY PEOPLE WILL REJECT THE ONLY THING WHICH WILL QUENCH THEIR THIRST

* /“O LORD, the hope of Israel, all who forsake you will be put to shame.

Those who turn away from you will be written in the dust because they have forsaken the LORD, the spring of living water.”/

(Jeremiah 17:13, NIV84)

* ILLUS.

Imagine a thirsty man lost in the desert.

He’s stumbling across the dunes dying of thirst.

Suddenly he finds an Oasis containing a cool, clear spring of water.

But he refuses to drink from it because he is convinced that, if he keeps looking, he will find something bigger and better further on.

#. spiritually, that is what every lost person does when he or she is confronted with the gospel of Christ and walks away

#. if ya ain't got Jesus, than no amount of /material abundance/, or /personal righteousness/, or /moral perfection/ can give you the /abundant life/ that Jesus promised to give His disciples

#. this morning you're faced with a simple choice ...

#. commit your life to Christ and follow Him and experience the /welling-up/ of eternal life that leads to abundant life, or ...

#. commit your life to yourself and do it your own way and experience eternal damnation that leads to a beggarly life

#.

v. 1 reveals that the Jewish leaders obviously did not accept Jesus as the Messiah

* /“After this, Jesus went around in Galilee, purposely staying away from Judea because the Jews there were waiting to take his life.”/

(John 7:1, NIV84)

#. in Jerusalem, the crowds were divided

#. some thought he was a /"good man"/ v. 12

#.

others said, /"he deceives the people"/ v. 13

#.

a few even thought him /"demon-possessed"/ v. 20

#. even his own brothers ridiculed him and did not believe on Him w. 3-5

#. rejecting Jesus and depending upon your own abilities to get you to heaven is like digging a well that won't hold water

* /“My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”/

(Jeremiah 2:13, NIV84)

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II.

JESUS OFFERS LIVING WATER THAT WILL QUENCH A MAN'S SPIRITUAL THIRST

* /"On the last and greatest day of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.

Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.”/

(John 7:37–38, NIV84)

#. let me set the scene for you

#. it is mid-October and the Jewish /Feast of Tabernacles/ is approaching (also called Sukkot)

#. the feast was a week-long celebration and came five days after the Day of Atonement

#. historians of the day tell us that hundreds of thousands of Jewish pilgrims from around the world would crowd into Jerusalem and its suburbs for this great festival

#. it was a time of great rejoicing, and everyone was expected to bring a thank-offering to the Lord

#. its purpose was to remind the people of the blessings of God for the harvest, and in particular, to celebrate His providential care during the wilderness wanderings

#. in remembrance of their tent homes during their wilderness wanderings all over Israel people erected booths or tents to dwell in for seven days

#. when Jesus attended this particular Feast of the Tabernacles He was only six months away from His crucifixion

#. in these final days of His ministry His popularity had begun to wane

#. once great crowds had followed Him everywhere

#. the feeding of the 5,000 had been the high point of His popularity

#. after that, however, more and more He began to stress who He was and what His work really was all about—that He would be crucified by the Jewish religious leaders

#. when the people saw that He wasn't the kind of Messiah they were expecting, the crowds dwindled

#. even many of His disciples abandoned Him

#. after the feeding of the 5,000 Jesus returned to Capernaum and there He told His disciples that He was the /Bread of Life/—that He was the /true bread/ that the Heavenly Father had sent—and that unless they /eat the flesh/ and /drink the blood/ of the /Bread of Life/ that they would not and could never have eternal life

#. the disciples said, /This is an hard saying; who can hear it?/

#. it's still a hard saying and many still don't want to hear it!

#. the result was that many of those followers on the periphery of spiritual commitment ceased to follow Him

* /“From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.”/

(John 6:66, NIV84)

* ILLUS.

Isn’t this still true today?

How many professing Christians are on the membership rolls of churches across America who haven’t been an active part of the congregation in only God knows how long?