Sermon Tone Analysis

!! Come and Drink

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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."

By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive.

Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.

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John 7:37-39

It is as if Americans had discovered water again.

Restaurant patrons want water brought in a bottle so they can read the label.

Something like fifty-nine varieties of bottled water are available today.

For serious water drinkers to order water now demands the same discernment that used to be reserved for other beverages.

A waiter may be asked, "Is this water imported or domestic?

Is it natural (all from one source) or processed (mixed from several sources)?

Is it still or effervescent?

And if it's effervescent, is the carbonation natural or was it added artificially?

I'm not kidding!

From Europe alone come such brands as Solare, Fiuggi, Spa, San Pelligrino, Apollinaris, and of course, Perrier, from Vergeze, France—the bottled-water champion.

Recently the company doubled its operations to eight hundred million bottles per year.

In the United States you can buy Mountain Valley Water, which has been bottled for 115 years in good old Hot Springs, Arkansas.

All this attention makes it seem as if people were looking for something special in water.

Perhaps they're looking for a meaning that water itself does not hold.

People in Jesus' generation could not be so selective about the water they drank.

To have water at all was a great gift of God.

The last great feast of the year, the Feast of Tabernacles, celebrated God's gift of water to His people.

It was on this occasion that Jesus made His great statement about water, describing living water flowing from within, the Holy Spirit residing in and presiding over the lives of His people.

This same living water is still there for us today when we come back to God—and stay.

It swirls through us and around us, quenching us, energizing us, comforting us, inspiring us, and protecting us.

It is the gift of life everlasting in God's presence.

!!! Crying Out

Each year the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem recreated the wilderness wanderings of the Hebrew people.

On the streets, in the courts, and on the roofs people lived in arbors constructed of palms, myrtles, and olives.

Looking up at night, they saw the stars through these booths and remembered the Exodus.

The ceremonies of the week defy description.

Seventy bulls were sacrificed for the seventy nations of the world.

The temple trumpets sounded a triumphant blast twenty-one times.

On the evening of the first day a huge candelabra was lit in the court of the women, and in the light of the torches men danced until the temple gates closed at night.

The celebration of water dominated the whole week.

On each of the seven mornings of the feast, the multitude followed the priests to the pellucid pool of Siloam, fed by the sacred spring of Gihon southeast of the temple hill.

There, with great ceremony, the white-robed priest filled a shining golden pitcher with the living, sparkling water of the spring as the people cried out from Isaiah with one voice, "With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation."

Then the masses of people—children wild-eyed with wonder, women rapturous with joy, old men with renewed vigor—all of them proceeded back up to the temple, singing the six psalms which end with Psalm 118.

In their left hands the people carried twigs representing the journey of the Exodus and in their right hands they held fruits representing the land of promise.

The silver trumpets blasted as they circled the altar, and then the real moment arrived.

The priest ascended a ramp with the golden pitcher in hand and poured the water through a bright silver funnel until it landed, laughing and splashing, on the pavement below.

The occasion was so filled with joy that one rabbi said those who had not seen it did not know what joy meant.

If it rained during the feast, it was seen as a forecast of abundant rain and harvest.

All of this was the setting of one of Jesus' greatest statements.

John 7:37 says, "On the last and greatest day of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice. . .

."

Some believe that the last day of the feast was a solemn Sabbath with no ceremony, and that the people were quiet and stilled as they kept the Sabbath around the great temple.

Amid that quiet setting, Jesus stood up and cried out.

Normally He taught from a seated position, but here His posture as well as His voice demanded attention.

He cried out in the midst of the solemn Sabbath, His voice reverberating in the halls of the Jerusalem temple.

Just as we are told Jesus "cried out" in the tomb of Lazarus, calling life out of death, with that same intensity He "cries out" into the lifeless religious ceremony in Jerusalem.

It was an electrifying interruption.

The impact would be similar to someone standing up and crying out the same way in the public worship service of a large church.

It would be like crying out at a presidential inauguration or a solemn graduation.

It was an audacious, preempting, substitutionary act.

Jesus cried out that He is the replacement for all empty ceremony; He is the substance of which all else is the shadow.

He is the real of which all else is the symbol.

Many of us need to hear that cry.

We come to religious ceremonies, we follow the order of service, we watch the pageantry, and hear the praises, but still we thirst.

We are parched, and still not fulfilled.

!!! Hearing the Invitation of Christ

Christ calls first for our recognition of need: "If anyone is thirsty. . . .

" Jesus compared the intensity of higher spiritual needs with the intensity of lower physical needs.

Before Jesus, the psalmist had cried, "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God" (Ps.

42:2, KJV).

And Jeremiah had cried out to his generation that they had "hewn themselves . . .

broken cisterns" (Jer.

2:13, NKJV).

In that day, people's lives leaked.

They were like cracked containers, the water of life slowly seeping out of them.

Jesus had proclaimed earlier, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled" (Matt.

5:6).

Jesus' use of thirst in His appeal would surely touch a nerve in His desert-dwelling listeners.

Today, we cannot imagine what thirst really meant to that generation.

The Feast of Tabernacles took place in October, after the seemingly endless stretch of blistering desert days.

The thirsty person of Jesus' day knew the torture of fine sand entering every pore of the skin, choking and blinding, and the scorching wind drying up the very marrow of the bones.

A human can live a long time without food; but seventeen days is the world record without water.

Experts say there are five stages of extreme physical thirst.

First, there is a protest stage of disbelief and discomfort.

Then the mouth feels as dry as cotton and the tongue sticks to the roof of the mouth.

Next there comes the agony of the tongue shriveling into a knot; in agony, the victim tears at his clothes.

Next the skin cracks from lack of water.

And finally there's the writhing, convulsive end.

This is the picture of extreme physical thirst.

But spiritual thirst can be just as real.

And even worse, there are some so dead to life and to God that they are beyond spiritual thirst.

They have drunk at the fetid, stagnant, foul wells of godless existence until there is no spiritual thirst left.

For them life is only a long day's journey into night.

If they have not found the Source of living water, those who do feel a spiritual thirst try to fill it endlessly.

They fill their thirst with money, but only want more.

They fill it with sensuality, but one conquest only makes them want another.

They fill it with ambition, but that is like drinking salt water.

They fill it with the desire for power, but every little bit makes them jealous of those who have more.

When you try to fill the God-shaped void in your life with conquests in the bedroom or the board room it only stokes inward fires with an intenser heat.

It is the same thirst felt by a drug abuser who moves from amphetamines to marijuana to cocaine to crack to heroine, trying to douse the fire within him.

If anyone has eyes to see he can witness a horde of people whose souls have shriveled with spiritual thirst.

What do you have to know to come to Jesus Christ?

The only fitness required is the knowledge of your need.

All you need to do is humbly admit, "Lord, I thirst."

And hearing your whispered plea, Christ opens His arms: ". . .

let him come to me and drink."