Living Water

Living Water

⁷ A woman of 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 Then the woman of Samaria said to Him, “How is it that You, being a Jew, ask a drink of me, a Samaritan woman? For the Jews have no dealing with Samaritans.” ¹⁰ Jesus answered and said to Her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says 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 with, and the well is deep. Where then do you get that living water? ¹² Are you greater than our father Jacob who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, as well as his sons and his livestock?” ¹³ Jesus answered and said to her, “whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, ¹⁴ But whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.” ¹⁵ The woman said to him “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.” Jesus said, to her, Go, call your husband, and come here.”

Jesus had asked the woman for a drink of water and then offered her living water in place of the water that she was about to draw from the well. Jesus was suddenly revived and without Him having taken a drink of the physical water that was deep within the Jacob’s well.

“If You knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.” Jesus was referring back to the water that had rushed from the rock in the wilderness that had watered the thirsty Israelites (see I Corinthians 10:4). Christ was that living rock that supplied living water to the Israelites. Now as he sat talking with this woman He offered to her the same living water that had once been offered to the children of Israel from old.

Just one drink of this living water, just one encounter with Christ and the desires of this world that you and I thirst for will begin to fade away. Instead we will naturally lay or place our thirst upon the only thing that can satisfy the longing for something better within us and that something better is a relationship with Christ our Messiah.

Christ, upon entering into this conversation with the woman of Samaria, seemed to revive. His thirst seems to have gone away and his weariness gone.

That the woman was a sinner is of no doubt for she lived in open sin, but so do the rest of us in one way or another. Christ came to her by Devine appointment and offered the one thing she needed and that which she needed most was a relationship with the messiah.

Christ by way of a question engaged in a conversation in which he awakened in her the need for something better. He said, “I will give.” The word “I” is emphatic and draws a sharp contrast between the “living water” and that from Jacob’s well which represents things of this earth. The water Christ gives, the figurative nature of the “living water” Jesus offered the woman is now fully apparent. This water satisfies the thirst of the soul for better things than this life has to offer.

But at this point the woman still links the offer of “living water” with literal water, thinking that once she has obtained the “living water” she will no longer need to make the daily trip to Jacob’s well. Perhaps she thinks that this “living water is for herself alone, and that she will still need to draw water for her husband. But, as Jesus hastens to explain, this “living water” concerns her husband as well as herself.

Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband and come here.” The woman answered and said, I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You have well said, ‘I have no husband,’ for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; in that you spoke truly.”

We will explore why Christ said these things to her in our next post.