Living water

“So he [Jesus] came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field ehat Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 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.
A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me 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.”…. 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.” 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.”…
So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?”” John 4:5-7,10,13-15,28-29
I want to take a look at the story of Jesus at the well with the Samaritan woman in John 4. It is a familiar passage, but one with some profound lessons to teach us.
First we need to think about the context – it was scandalous that Jesus would even think to speak to this woman. In Biblical times women were a second class citizen, good for making dinner and having babies. Jewish customs considered it improper for a rabbi to even speak to a woman in public.
But Jesus doesn’t conform to society’s man made rules and prejudices. He sees the value in all, and refuse to relegate anyone to a position of being second rate. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Gal 3:28
Jesus sees the worth in everyone – the Jew and the Samaritan, the slave and the free, the sinner and the saint, the male and the female. Jesus saw past the external and into the heart. He didn’t see a Samaritan woman; He saw a heart in need of a Saviour. And that is how we need to view everyone with. We need to see the hearts in need of a Saviour. We should be blind to race or class or gender or age or status. We should just see hearts in need of a Saviour, and point them to the source of living water.
We come to Jesus with ideas about what we want, but He knows what we need and supplies those needs.
The woman was looking for her physical thirst to be supplied, but Jesus had something better. He could satisfy her spiritual thirst with living water. So often we come to God looking for quick superficial fixes, but He wants to give us a deeper fix, a heart fix
The woman doesn’t realise it at first, but Jesus is offering her eternal life. He is making the gift of heaven available to her. She would have been happy with a drink, but that was a temporary issue. The living water wasn’t something see realised she wanted, but Jesus knew she needed it. God knows us better than we know us. He knows the difference between our wants and our needs, and He always provides for our needs. When we encounter Jesus we go away with all our needs met and our thirsts satisfied, and like the Samaritan woman the only natural response will be to go and tell others about what we have found. Don’t keep it to yourself – let others know where they can find the living water and have their deepest needs met!