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Water is essential to proper functioning of your body.
Humans need to drink water to survive.
Here’s how important water is to the human body:
- Your body is approximately 60% water
- Your brain is 70% water
- Your lungs are nearly 90% water
- Your body uses water in many ways
- Water cushions and lubricates joints
- Water nourishes and protects the brain and spinal cord
- Water regulates your body temperature
- Water helps remove waste, yep.
- Water is more important to your body’s survival than food. You can only live approximately one week without water, but can survive without food for more than a month.
- Water aids us with weight loss, and endurance, protects us from cancer, improves our moods, energizes us, keeps us alert.
- Lack of water or dehydration does damage to your body.
- Lack of water reduces the amount of blood in your body, which forces your heart to pump harder.
- In the early stages of dehydration, you become dizzy, irritable and experience headaches.
- As it progresses you’ll become clumsy and exhausted. Eyesight fades.
- You’ll eventually feel nauseous and begin vomiting before you enter a coma and die.
- Remember this: without water, your physical life cannot sustain.
Now that we’ve established that scientific fact. Let’s get to a bible story.
The Woman at the Well
It is in this short conversation with a very ordinary sinner in Samaria that Jesus takes a seemingly simple, everyday item like water and turns it into a profound lesson.
It is in this conversation with the woman at the well that Jesus offers living water.
Take a quick look at John 4:4-26:
4 And he had to pass through Samaria. 5 So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour (noon).
7 A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) 9 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.”
11 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? 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.[b] 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.”
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.” 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.” 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.”
You and I live in a time and a place when water is abundantly available. It comes out of the faucet, the shower, the toilet. If you get thirsty you can walk down to the store buy a plastic bottle of water.
It rains here regularly. Our streams and rivers rarely run dry. When I’m thirsty in the morning I walk down the hall to the kitchen and have a cold glass of water in just a couple minutes.
This is the modern world we live in, and it is a far cry the world this woman lives in.
Real Life for this Woman was Hard
This woman lived in an arid, desert climate where the land was dry and barren with little rain to support vegetation.
The wells were usually placed just outside of town, which means they were accessible but not overly convenient. Most women walked from their homes to the well twice a day – morning and night.
Yet this woman came to the well at noon, drawing water at the hottest time of the day, probably to avoid women who knew her bad reputation.
To her, water was hard to come by. It took work and effort and intentional planning. Literal steps down a hot, dry path toward water in the head of the day.
Long Walk on a Hot Day Leads to Jesus
At the well on this day she meets a man named Jesus.
A man she does not know. A Jewish man who should not talk to her in public for multiple reasons. She was a woman, she was a Samaritan woman (a half-breed race that Jews had been in conflict with for hundreds of years), and worse yet – she was a promiscuous woman.
And yet Jesus spoke to her. And he knew her all about her. And he shared truth with her in love.
When you look at her life you may say this woman is not like you and me. Where she lives is different, her ethnicity is different, her generation is different, her lifestyle may be different – all these specifics are not you and me.
We are all the same
However, I’m introducing you to a woman who is a lot like you and me.
All of us, before coming face to face with Jesus are like this woman. When listening to her story, we discover our own story. I discover my story. Life before Jesus. Life after Jesus.
Let me re-introduce you to the woman at the well:
She didn’t know she was in need of Christ. She didn’t know she was dying of thirst. She didn’t realize that her life was wilted and dry and dehydrating. She didn’t realize what she was thirsting for, or that she was longing for an intimate partner, Jesus, her creator.
All she knew was an unending sense of dissatisfaction, an unsettledness, an uneasiness. She had five husbands, each one different than the others, each one offering her a different medicine to soothe her itch, to ease her anxiety.
But none of them worked out. Nothing filled the void. Maybe one left her for another woman, another complained of irreconcilable differences. Even though the excuses were different, the result for her was the same: loneliness, awful loneliness.
She came to the well alone, in the heat of the day, when it was so hot and uncomfortable that she knew no one else would be there.
She came to draw water from Jacob’s well, a deep well. What she found that day was Jesus, the Spring of Living Water, and Jacob’s Creator. He touched her in the deepest part of her heart where no one else saw.
In fact, it was a part of her scarcely known by her herself.
Oh, you may not be a promiscuous woman. You may never have faced the pain of divorce.
But you and I, until we meet Jesus face to face, are just like her.
In our humanness we have long-standing habits of self-indulgence. Missing the mark and sinning against God.
You have sinned and by your sin you are separated from God. It is Jesus alone who can bridge that gap.
You must be saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.
The only solution to a life like this woman was living in to be born-again.
Jesus is the answer.
Jesus taught her she could have living water. What she didn’t realize was that He was that living water, and the living water he offered her was the missing piece her soul was thirsting for.
Throughout the Bible there are many verses that speak of thirsting after God as one thirst for water.
God is the fountain of Life.
He is the spring of living water.
He is the fountain of living water.
When Jesus said to this woman he could offer her living water, he was offering her eternal life. He was claiming to be the Messiah, the Savior of the world. Because only God could give the gift that satisfies the soul’s desire.
He gave her an extraordinary message about fresh and pure water that would quench her spiritual thirst forever.
Quenched Thirst becomes a Testimony
When she realized that Jesus was the Messiah, I love this:
“…the woman left her water jar beside the well and RAN back to the village, telling everyone! ‘Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could he be the Messiah?” – John 4:28
She ran into a town that knew she was a sinner, and claimed forgiveness. When the people of the city heard her testimony it says many believed and they persuaded Jesus to stay, and he stayed with them for two days, long enough for many more to hear and believe.
Jesus took time to love a woman who needed to be loved even in her sin, and as a result, many were saved through his eventual crucifixion and resurrection.
Let’s stop thinking about that woman though for a minute.
Jesus went to the cross and died for her, he met her at the well and had a profound conversation with that led to her salvation.
Look at the cross. It’s easy to look at the cross and see Jesus hanging there for the general sins of the entire world. That’s easy. Of course He did. We can put a big pile of sins in this corner and say, ‘Jesus covered these.’
But what about making them personal? What if you walk over to that pile of sins and see your own. Start picking them out one by one.
You begin to look at the cross differently.
The cross becomes so real to you and of the utmost importance to say, I put him there.
It was my personal sins that cause Jesus to be wounded, bruised, insulted, shamed. He suffered for me, in my place.
When your soul wakes up and sees that you and that promiscuous woman at the well are not so different, you’ll see that your sins put Him on the cross just as much as hers did.
All the devils in Hell and all the demons on earth will not have the power to keep you, and awakened sinner from fully devoting your life to Jesus Christ.
Come to the River
Your soul will thirst for living water. Jesus is the eternal life you’re searching for. He is ready to meet you at the well.
Jesus offers to fill you up with His life-giving spirit.
Just as our bodies hunger and thirst so do our souls.
When your physical body gets thirsty, you quench it.
If it happens again, you quench it again.
In this passage, the water that Jesus offers the woman is the satisfying eternal life found only in Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world. He alone can provide.