Thirst no more

Do you know your thirst? The new food recommendations have come out this week from across Canada and of course they want us to eat more veggies, less cookies and limit the amount of big macs we eat in a given afternoon. They also recommend that we make water our drink of choice. Not juice, not pop, not even vitamin water, Just plain water…

Now I am okay with that because I figure that coffee has water in it. and if I don’t add the sugar it is like I am drinking super water.. water plus veggies… Coffee is a bean after all :)

But while Coffee is great in the morning, or in the afternoon, or at lunch or at dinner. I know that if I only drink coffee in a given day I will be hurting by the end of the day. I might think that I am thirsty for Coffee, but that is a lie.. What my heart and my head needs to function isn’t coffee it is the other stuff.. Water.

Water satisfies my thirst when coffee does not.

In John chapter 4 water is the key element of the passage. With Good reason. The conversation begins in the heat of the day..at the mouth of a well. Where Jesus and the woman he is speaking too are looking to draw water…

Now the well is in Samaria, a nation that is attached to Judah but not beloved my them. These two groups of people really didn’t like each other. The jews thought the samaritans where half breeds, half jew half gentile and claimed that they where impure and wrong in the their religion. Eve though they both worshiped the same God. The samariatains thought that their jewish neighbors where stuck up and they worshiped god in the wrong ways. And so it was rather awkward since jews had to travel through samaria to get from Galilee to Jerusalem.

Which is why we find Jesus at this well in the first place… he has left Jerusalem and is headed back to Galilee with his disciples who have gone into town to get food. While he sits beside Jacobs well and rests. I wonder what he was thinking about as he sat by the well. Perhaps as he sat there he remembered Jacob who dug the well. or perhaps he was enjoying a quite moment of conversation with his Father.

But there in the heat and the quiet a woman came to the well. This was unusual since it was hottest part of the day.. and we don’t know why she would come now instead of in the morning like most women did. We don’t know why she wasn’t there with the gaggle of women that had come in the cool morning hours.. But she finds herself at the well thirsty and hot..

And Jesus is waiting for her.

Adn Jesus doesn’t waste any time.. First he asks her for a drink. Which even she points out is out of character of a Jew.. Here he is asking a samaritian for help.. He is thirsty. She can satisfy that thirst.. But according to the prejudices of the day he risks ritual uncleanness for that drink.. Because some pharisees considered Samaritan women constantly unclean..

But Jesus is not some legalistic Pharisee. He treats this woman with even more love and compassion than he treated Nicodemus last week.

So when She says,

English Standard Version Chapter 4

The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

He doesn’t waste any time pointing her to the heart of the matter.

This woman is thirsty.. She has come to the well for water.. But she has an even deeper thirst that she hasn’t satisfied.. A relational, spiritual and worship thirst..

English Standard Version Chapter 4

Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” 13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” 15 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.”

English Standard Version Chapter 4

16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” 17 The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.”

The woman is quick to ask for the endless spring of water the wells up within. But she is still thinking in very physical terms. Perhaps her physical thirst was dominating her perceptions.. perhaps she was confused.. What jesus is offering her echoes the promises of the prophets with we don’t think the samaritans considered to be genuine. So jesus goes the extra and vital step of reminding her of her greater thirst. She has had five husband now she is not married and living with a man as an adulteress. We don’t know why she has gone through 5 husbands.. maybe they died.. More likely they divorced her. But her current situation is what jesus is calling attention to.. She has let her thirsts, be they a need for love. or for security or for sex rule her life in such a way that she is now living in a broken and twisted imitation of the covenant of marriage. She is living with a man.. But she cannot call him husband.. She has not given her heart to him and he has not given his to her.

This fake attempt at marriage is her cracked cistern. And all the energy and effort that she pours into it will quickly flow away.. leaving her thirsty and tired..

As it says in Jeremiah.

English Standard Version Chapter 2

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.

And Jesus brings up this brokeness in her life not to be mean.. or to be “judgy” but because he wants her to know what he can give her..

Because the thirst that she is trying to satisfy with that broken relationship. Can be quenched by Jesus’ Love. His spirit is the water that quenches our thirst.. And springs forth in the heart of the believer.

The old testament is full of promises of a time when living water will flow out from Jerusalem’ (Zc. 14:8; cf. Ezk. 47:9). The metaphor speaks of God and his grace, knowledge of God, life, the transforming power of the Holy Spirit; in Isaiah 1:16–18; Ezekiel 36:25–27 water promises cleansing. . In John’s Gospel there are passages where Jesus is the living water as he is the bread from heaven (6:35), and other passages where he gives the living water to believers. In this chapter, the water is the satisfying eternal life mediated by the Spirit that only Jesus, the Messiah and Savior of the world, can provide. It is an invitation to know God and to walk with God.

Now what can be confusing is what she says after this amazing moment of connection and conviction..

English Standard Version Chapter 4

19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. 20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” 21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.

She jumps from her love life to a question of theology.. and this shows us two things..

She still doesn’t know who she is dealing with..

And yet she understands something many of us don’t get!

She doesn’t know that jesus is more than just a palty prophet.. Spouting unfulillable promises. She doesn’t know yet that he is the son of God decended to earth.. That she is speaking with someone who is truly greater than Jacob who dug this well.

And yet this odd question that she asks about worship isn’t just a distraction. The issue of worship was and is an important one. And so when she askes where people are supposed to worship it reflects a greater problem.. distance and iregularlity of worship..

The scriptures declare over and over again that lord made us to worship him. but if we are only able to worship him after a long pilgramige to a foriegn land.. or only for an hour once a week. then that isn’t much of a life.. The waiting for worship to happen takes to long.. that moment of celebration and connection is too brief..

In a way her question where shoudl we worship God is is a clever excuse for her current relational problems. . God is so distant.. So far away.. I am left to do the best I can on my own. And of course I am failing.. because God is so very far from me.

That is why jesus’ responce is so beautiful.. he says that one day very soon worship won’t be about a place or a time.. but about a relationship.. an active and ongoing intinmacy.. God’s spirit with us.. God’s truth revealed to our hearts..

This is exactly what a relationally thirsty person needs to hear..

your thirst will be satisfied because your maker will be near to you.. and you will be near to him,, No lies.. Just the grace and the truth of God!

This is the promise of a life of worship.. a life of not waiting to worship on sunday. but a life of waking up to walk with God.. to walk through the day with him and to go to sleep with him watching over you..

But she knows enough to know that this is an escatalogical moment.. Something that people may be talking about.. bt alway promising some day..

there is something that more happen first.. or rather some one who must happen first..

English Standard Version Chapter 4

25 The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” 26 Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”

And then the audio cuts out.. what ever they talk abotu after that is between them.. But jesus has made his point and her life is changed and her thirst is no more..

How do we know that? because she leaves her water jug.. Look at what John says.

English Standard Version Chapter 4

28 So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, 29 “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” 30 They went out of the town and were coming to him.

This is of course a symbolic leaving of her water jug.. She carried it out to the well. and leaves it hurrying home to tell her community about the man she has met..

She was alone when she went out.. but now she is certainly not alone as she gathers her community. Friends and enemies alike to meet jesus and to hear his words of life.

At the beginning I asked you the question do you know your thirst? Do you know that you and I like this woman has a thirst to worship.. to walk with God.. to be loved by God..

And we look to all sorts of other places to meet that thirst.. and all of them are Broken cisterns that leak!

You are hear today becasue you want to worship.. but the reality is you and I on our own can no more worship than that woman could. the divide between God and man is too Great! Our rebellion to bloody and our hearts are too blind.

We must be washed clean and given new hearts..

that is why we and the woman at the well need the messiah.. An intermediary to connect us to God.

jesus is that intermediary. Our judgment became his death, we are clothed with his rightousness and clothed as such we can worship in the presence of God with out fear..

Today do you take advantage of that prilvedge.. do you live a life of worship.. Or is your worship divided.. and locational? You worship god on this montian and on this day.. but throught the week you trust in the idols of relationship, money or entertainment to satisfy your thirst?

Jesus didn’t die so that we could worship God one our and fifteen minutes a week. And you will die of thirst if persist in only coming to the well of life once a week!

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Thirst no more

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