The Gift Of God

The Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 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.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

John 4:9-14

Imagine yourself digging a cistern, winter and summer, hot and cold. After years of hard toil you get the job done, but you find out that this cistern, and in fact all cisterns will leak. It is their nature to leak. The story is a picture of our futility in finding satisfaction in life.

Only God can satisfy our heart.

Everything else will deceive and disappoint.

Only Living Water

can quench the driving thirst of the soul.

Our Daily Bread – August 25, 2005