Thirst

The Samaritan woman at the well was bewildered that a Jewish man was speaking to her, asking her for a drink.   

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.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 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.”  

Never thirst.

Thirst for what?   For the feeling of significance, the feeling of being safe, the feeling of belonging?  We will have feelings of longing for these things at times.  We are designed to long for them. 

But Jesus isn't talking about feelings.   He is not saying we will never feel insignificant in a certain situation, unsafe in a dangerous place, or lonely and wanting companionship. 

Feelings are temporary and sometimes not to be trusted.   This deep thirst must be quenched by more than just emotional satisfaction from our circumstances.

   

"Living" is a grammatically present progressive, implying that it does not stop and start or just end - like feelings do.    If we base our lives on efforts to secure emotional satisfaction, we come to a dead end.   We will strive, manipulate, and eventually exhaust ourselves.  

Timothy Keller, one of my favorite authors, puts it this way in his book Encounters with Jesus:

Everybody has got to live for something, but Jesus is arguing that, if he is not that thing, it will fail you.  First, it will enslave you.  Whatever that thing is, you will tell yourself that you have to have it or there is no tomorrow.  That means that if anything threatens it, you will becomes inordinately scared; if anyone blocks it, you will become inordinately angry; and if  you fail to achieve it, you will never be able to forgive yourself.  But second, if you do achieve it, it will fail to deliver the fulfillment you expected.

The first step to finding living water is to realize that we have a deeper longing, a thirst of the soul that can only be satisfied by the supernatural - never the earthly.   Its a state of being - of being "athirst".   

Jesus uses this word again in Revelation 21 when speaking to John in a vision:  "And he said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely."

What a relief that we do not have to, and cannot if we try, find a way to satisfy the deepest needs of our soul.