If you have your Bibles this morning, please turn with me to the Gospel of John, chapter 4. This morning, we’re going to look at a story of life-changing proportions. We’re looking at the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. So, pull out your Bibles and let’s go, John 4, starting in verse 3. We’ve got so little time and so much to cover. I’m reading from the New Living Translation this morning and it’s up on the overhead, as well:
Read John 4:3-30
If you’re observant this morning, you probably noticed the overhead behind me with the title of my message. I called the message: “Running on Empty: God’s Cure for the Thirsty Life”.
I think a lot of people today can relate to that phrase: the thirsty life, or the empty life. Because all around us, believers and unbelievers alike, people are living lives on empty. They have nothing to fill them: no purpose, no drive, they’re just running on fumes.
Have you ever been in a car that’s running on empty? I was driving one day back in my old stomping grounds of Quispamsis. Now, where I lived in Quispam, there was a huge, steep hill to get from my house to the main part of town where I worked. So, I’m driving my parents old 1994 Pontiac Trans Sport. Do you remember those? They were the Pontiac equivalent to Wayne’s van…ours was even the same color and everything.
Well, I’m driving up this hill, listening to music and generally not really paying a whole lot of attention… until suddenly, I stop going up the hill. I’m like, “Huh…that can’t be right”. Then, you see, I start going backwards. Now, I’m thinking to myself, “What am I, an idiot? Did I put the van into neutral or something?”. Nope, it’s in drive. FEAR! I can go forward. My car is now going backwards down a hill. What am I going to do? Luckily, I had the presence of mind to jam on the breaks (yes, they worked. Praise the Lord) and somehow guide the van to the side of the road and jam on the emergency brake. Turns out, the transmission was dead. Toast. At least that’s what I was told. I know nothing about these things! I think that was the day I learned what a transmission really does.
You know, so many times in life, we are like me in that van, we’re driving uphill without a transmission. We’re running a car without fuel. We’re running our bodies without water. We’re living our lives on empty.
Jesus used this opportunity to give us this illustration of living water. Jesus’ purpose on earth was summed up well a little later in the book of John in chapter 10 when he says: I tell you the truth, I am the gate for the sheep. All who ever came before me were thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. He will come in and go out, and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
Jesus’ desire is for us to live life to the fullest. There are so many times when we live empty lives when we could live full lives. There are so many times that we live unfulfilled lives when we could live abundant lives.
Jesus wants to quench our spiritual thirst. He wants to fill us up. He wants to give us life to the fullest. But how can we do that, how can we quench our spiritual thirst. I believe there are three things we can learn from the passage to help us quench that spiritual thirst, to help us live our lives to the fullest, to, as John 7:38 says, have, “rivers of living water [flowing] from [our] hearts”.
The first thing this morning is this: recognize your need to be filled by Jesus. Recognize your need to be filled by Jesus.
In our passage this morning, the words of Jesus resonated with the woman because she knew she was living an empty life. She was thirsty and she wanted what Jesus had to offer.
The woman in this story, we’re told, has had five husbands and was living with a man that wasn’t her husband. In retrospect, she was kind of the Elizabeth Taylor of her generation.
This woman was looking for something to fill her. She was looking to have purpose. She was looking to have importance. And this desire, improperly addressed, led her into the arms of all these men, but left her unfulfilled.
And when we look around the world today, we see the same kind of thing: people looking for fulfillment; people looking for purpose, and looking in all the wrong places.
We need to recognize our need to be filled and most importantly, we need to recognize that we cannot be filled or fulfilled on our own.
The world is full of people looking all around for fulfillment. It’s an age-old problem. You’ve probably heard the phrasing, “There’s a God-shaped hole in all of us”. A place in our lives that can only be filled by Him. But people don’t like that. They try to fill it with other things. Money, sex, gadgets, toys, houses, position, power, love. We grab on to these things and try to stuff them into the hole that only God can fill.
Do you remember the little kid’s toy that had those little plastic shapes that you had to fit into the corresponding hole? What happened when you tried to fit the square block through the circle hole? Nothing, right? You couldn’t fit that through!
For those drivers in the congregation this morning, have you ever put the wrong fuel in your car? What happens if you put diesel fuel into a gasoline engine? Now, luckily, I’ve never done this, but my mother has. Diesel into her car. Oh man. Luckily she didn’t put that much and she actually noticed it while pumping it (yea, imagine who stupid she felt when she noticed it).
The long and the short of it is that when you put the wrong fuel into your car, it hurts it. It can kill the engine. In our lives, the same thing applies. When we try to fill our lives with other things, it will only hurt us.
We read earlier a verse from John 10; a fairly well-known verse: “I have come that [you] may have life and have it to the full”. Jesus has come to fill us up. To give us life to the fullest. He has come to quench our spiritual thirst. But we have to recognize our need for Him to fill us. We need to allow Him to be the fuel in our tanks. We need Him to be the oil in our lamps. We need Him to be the water that quenches our thirst. Like drinking milk on a hot day to quench your thirst, all other things that try to fill our lives will leave us worse off on the other side.
Psalm 42:1 & 2 says: As the deer longs for streams of water, so I long for you, O God. I thirst for God, the living God. Like our bodies thirst for water, like a car needs to be filled with fuel, we need to long for God to fill us up. We need to recognize our need to be filled by Him.
The second thing, this morning, that we can do to quench our Spiritual Thirst, is to allow God to mend your areas of brokenness. Allow God to mend your areas of brokenness.
When the Samaritan woman tells Jesus, “Please, sir, give me this water.” Immediate, He goes to a sensitive subject, saying, “Go and get your husband”.
I can image the kind of reaction that the woman must have had. “Ooooo…about that…I…uh…I don’t have a husband”. Hey, that doesn’t seem so bad on the surface. Until Jesus goes on and basically says, “Ha! You’re right! You don’t have a husband- more like you’ve had five and you’re living with a dude you’re not ever married to!”
Immediately, right there, Jesus has exposed a major area of this woman’s brokenness. For a woman in that culture to have been through the experience of five husbands, is unheard of. It would have been a great source of shame and pain. She would have been labeled. She would have been mocked and ridiculed.
And Jesus knew this. That’s why he asked the question like he did: he knew the answer. He knew of her brokenness, but he wanted her to acknowledge that too.
In our lives, Jesus has come to us with the offer of living water, but to be able to have that living water, we have to allow Him to mend our brokenness.
A lot of times, when I’m working in my office here at the church, I like to bring some Crystal Light drink mix to have throughout the day. One day, I grabbed a water jug from the kitchen, mixed it up and brought it up to the office. A few minutes later, I looked over to the jug and noticed a small pool of juice around the bottom. My first thought was, “I must of spilled something”- which is not unlike me, by the way. So, I wiped it up and went about my morning. But then I noticed again that there was more juice on the table. It turned out there was a crack in the bottom of the pitcher.
When you pour water into a broken container, what happens? It leaks. Jesus even used a similar example in Luke 5:37: “no one puts new wine into old wineskins. For the new wine would burst the wineskins, spilling the wine and ruining the skins”.
When Christ offers us His living water, He is also going to use the Holy Spirit to expose our areas of brokenness. The question is: what will you do when He does that? When the Holy Spirit exposes areas of brokenness, how will we react? How will we respond?
Jesus has come to make us into new creatures. He has come to make us whole, but to make us whole, He has to show us where we are broken. In the passage we read, it would have been easy for the woman when asked by Jesus to go get her husband just to turn and leave. Get out of there; as fast as you can. But she didn’t. She was open. She allowed Jesus in.
Jesus wants to reveal our brokenness, not for the sole purpose of showing you your faults, but to make you whole again. He wants you to be filled with His living water. A broken vessel cannot be full. You cannot live a full life without Jesus making you whole. And to quench your spiritual thirst, you must allow Jesus to mend your areas of brokenness.
The third and final thing that you can do to quench your spiritual thirst, this morning is this: Enter into His Presence and Worship. Enter into His Presence and Worship.
In this passage, Jesus shares a brand new concept with this Samaritan woman. Let’s just take a second to look at who the Samaritans really were.
The Samaritans were a group of people that lived in Samaria, which was technically in Israel, but the Jews HATED Samaritans and vice versa. Samaritans intermarried with other cultures and did not follow the Jewish Scriptures. The Samaritans followed only the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, instead of the entirety of the Hebrew Scriptures. And there had been this age-old feud of where was the “right” place to worship. The woman even says it: “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem”
But Jesus doesn’t focus on who’s right and who’s wrong. He takes a new perspective; adds a new point of view, which is this: the time is coming—indeed it’s here now—when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The Father is looking for those who will worship him that way. For God is Spirit, so those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.
Jesus is showing her that to quench her spiritual thirst that she must become a true worshipper of God. It isn’t about where you worship but how you worship. Jesus was giving her the invitation to enter into true worship. Worship that transcended the racial and cultural barriers set up by the Jews and Samaritans. This was worship would quench the thirst in her life.
We have a similar invitation in our lives. We have the invitation to worship him in more than words, but with our lives. He wants us to come in truth; in sincerity. We have been invited into the throne room of God, something that none had never been given prior to Jesus. It is an experience that leaves us fulfilled. True worship fills us up. True worship quenches our thirst.
I read part of a verse from John 7 earlier. I want to finish the verse now. These are the words of Jesus: “Anyone who is thirsty may come to me! Anyone who believes in me may come and drink! For the Scriptures declare, ‘Rivers of living water will flow from his heart.’” (When he said “living water,” he was speaking of the Spirit, who would be given to everyone believing in him”
We have been given the opportunity to be filled by the Spirit. To have our thirst quenched. To have our empty lives overflowing.
This morning, I want to close our time together by encouraging you to come to the fountain. Jesus has called to us: “Anyone who is thirsty may come to me!”
He wants us to live our lives to the fullest: abundant life, life overflowing with rivers of living water.
This morning, there may be some here who would say, “Jordon, I’m running on empty this morning.” Maybe you’ve never had God fill your life. Maybe you’ve never known what it’s like to have that life to the fullest Jesus was talking about. Maybe you’ve never know Jesus in a personal way.
But maybe you have, and you have just spent a little too long away from the Source.
This morning, Erica and the worship team is going to come back up and share with us the song Hungry. The chorus of the song goes like this: “I’m falling on my knees, offering all of me. Jesus, you’re all this heart is living for”.
It’s a song of offering; offering Jesus our hearts. Offering Him our lives. Asking Him to fill us, to give us that abundant life, to give us those rivers of living water, to quench that thirst that we’ve been feeling inside.
Give an altar call
Would you stand with us as we sing?
