I am currently a college freshman at Erskine College and I am absolutely loving it. I am getting involved and meeting some of the friends I'll have the rest of my life. While I'm doing that, I have found myself in some amazing clubs and environments. One That I truly treasure is RUF, Reformed University Fellowship, ran by some godly people and filled with the word of God, good music, and wonderful fellowship. Out of all places in this world, I find myself surrounded with college kids like myself, in a barn. A BARN! That coolest thing in this world. I digress, but this Sunday, I find myself sitting on a bale of hay, with my friends, listening to the word of God being shared and something just struck me. I am a prostitute. I'm not talking about the worldly version of a prostitute, I mean, a person who is after things of this world and forgetting all about the happiness that can and is found in Jesus.
One of the most famous encounters in the bible is Jesus and the woman at the well. Who is "that woman?" John 4:4-26 reveals to us "Now he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans. Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?” Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of waterwelling up to eternal life.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.” “I have no husband,” she replied. Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.” “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.” “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”
Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”
Now why did I make you read that long passage? Why is it significant?
Honestly, I say to you, I've been there. I've been that woman at the well going out late in the afternoon where there is no one out to judge me for who I truly am. I've been that woman who had searched for love in the wrong places, in men, in things of this world. Yet, God has brought me to my knees every time. Jesus knows my past, yet he loves me.
The best moral of this story is this, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of waterwelling up to eternal life.” In some translations it says "living water." Let's think, the things of this world makes us thirst and hunger and never satisfied. Yet in Jesus, he knows this, and he says, "I, your God does not want you to settle for anything less than the best, me, my son Jesus, living water." By anything but the best I mean in him he will provide the best guy, woman, job, house, guides, teachers, anything in general.
Jeremiah 2:13 says, "My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water." Now first off, what is a cistern? A cistern is like a bucket and is usually used to catch and store water. Let's think of it this way, our bodies are cisterns. It's almost like the phrase "our bodies are a temple" well, I just made up a new term, "our bodies are cisterns"
On a serious note, we need to catch all the living water we can get before we can truly serve God for all He is worth. We are nothing without this living water and once we have this living water in our system, it shows and we a never the same. Let's be cisterns, but not just any cistern with just plain water, but a cistern full of living water that's shining so bright and full of (living) water is bound to overflow and brighten our paths and everyone around us. Are you that woman? If so take the message of the truth, living water.
