8-1-10 Baptism: Are You Thirsty?

8-1-10 Baptism: Are You Thirsty? (edited from Shane’s Hipp’s sermon called Stay Thirsty)

Is there anyone here who is thirsty? Why do you drink water? Because you’re thirsty, right? What makes you thirsty? It’s because your physical body is 70 percent water and it needs to have a fresh source of water all the time in order to stay healthy. We all know this, right? But what happens if we don’t have any water or enough water? We get dehydrated and eventually die is the condition persists, right? Our physical bodies need water.

A couple of weeks ago Jesus made it abundantly clear that there are two parts of our body.  We are called to be born again. We have a physical birth, but we are incomplete without being born of the Holy Spirit. We can be born physically, but we must also be born or “born again” spiritually.

 The physical body we know needs water in order to stay healthy, but what does our spiritual body need? What does it need in order to stay healthy? Is it ever thirsty? Does it have a strong desire that needs to be satisfied? If we ignore the desire of our spiritual body can we also become really unhealthy and die? These are some the questions that I’d like to look at answering today.

One day Jesus said something really unusual. He was in the temple area that was filled with people and he cried out in a loud voice,  

Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” John 7:37-38 (NRSV)

What does Jesus mean by that? Is Jesus talking about physical water or something else? And when we come to Jesus, what are we supposed to drink? How does that all work? And what does it look like for a believers heart to have streams of living water flowing out of it? Those are some of the questions that we’ll be answering in this series as we approach our baptism gathering here in just a couple of weeks.

Before we jump into today’s message, I want to give you a little historical context, so that the story I’ll be sharing with you makes more sense.

Jesus is traveling through Israel, and Israel at that time was divided into three parts. Israel is not real big as you know, so it’s kind of like the U.S. having three states. These three regions or states were Judea, Samaria, and Galilee. Galilee was in the North, Samaria was in the middle, and Judea was in the South.

Judea was where Jerusalem was and it was the religious epicenter of their country, because it was where the temple was. Jesus was there often. Galilee was also a heavily populated Jewish region and that’s where Jesus grew up and where he did a lot of his ministry. And Jesus would occasionally make trip between these two regions.

Now between Galilee and Judea was Samaria. This was populated by people called the Samaritans. Galilee was to the North and Judea was to the South and Samaria was in the middle. Israel at this time is essentially a Samarian Sandwich, but they are not understood as the crème of an Oreo cookie. Samaritans were thought of as the anti-crème of an Oreo cookie. How many Oreo double stuff lovers do we have here today? Yeah! We love the double stuff, right! The  Samaritans were the anti-double stuff. They were despised by the average Jew.

Samaritans were former Jews, they were of the same heritage as the people of Galilee and the people of Judea, but when they were captured by the Assyrians, these Jews chose to intermarry with the Assyrians and these therefore they were not pure bred Jews any longer, and because of this they were hated and despised people by the Galileans and the Judeans. The Samaritans were hated because they were believed to have sold their soul to the devil, because the Assyrians were not godly people. They had intermarried with these people who God had told them not, because God feared that these people of many gods would lead the Israelites astray in their belief and their trust in him. 

The Jews did not like the Samaritans and the Samaritans did not like the Jews. There were lots and lots of hatred between the Jews and the Samaritans. There was a lot of abuse and violence that went on between these two groups of people.

Jewish rabbis’ or teachers of the Law, would often choose to double their route and walk around Samaria, rather than interact with any Samaritans. But Jesus, who is a rabbi, says, “No, I’m going to walk straight through Samaria. So he is on his way from Judea to Galilee, from the south to the north and he’s walking through Samaria and he arrives at the town of Sychar at a well that Jacob, one of Israel’s forefathers, had dug, and we pick up the story there.

Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour (which is sometime between 6 and 9 oclock in the morning) 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, which is quite an understatement) 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? John 4

Now, this little interaction opens up a theme throughout the book of John, which is a tension or contrast between the exterior of things and the interior of things. In Johns gospel, Jesus is always having conversations with different people in which they are focused on the external, physical things in life, things that you can see, taste, touch, or feel, and Jesus is always interested and teaching into the interior of life, things that you cannot see, taste, touch, or feel, but that are no less real.

So this whole interchange where Jesus says that I have water to give you, and she says, how because the water is deep and you have nothing to draw with, is one that Jesus deliberately sets up.

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water (pointing towards the well) will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I 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 won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” Again, Jesus is focused on the internal and the woman is focused on the external.

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.”

Ok, so a couple of things about this passage that are important for us today.

Jesus, as we’ve already said is talking about spiritual, internal things, and the lady is talking about physical external things, and Jesus in verse 13 Jesus creates a metaphor to bridge that gap. Jesus is intentionally contrasting two images in an effort to help this woman understand her needs at a fundamentally different level. She knows that she gets thirsty and that she needs water to meet that need. This woman understands that no problem. We all understand that no problem.

What Jesus is fundamentally saying to this woman is “I don’t offer you a well, I’m offering you a spring.” A spring is different from a well in a couple of very powerful ways. A well requires a certain kind of technology to access the water. You have to dig a well or find one that’s already dug. That takes work. It’s also down in the ground and you have to have a means to get the water up and out of the well. Not everybody can get water from a well. You have to invest great amounts of effort to dig a well. You have to have rope and a bucket to get the water out. The well has be maintained. That is to say, you have to have a certain degree of technology in order to access the water from these wells.  If you’re not at a well, or if you don’t have a rope or a bucket, you don’t get any water. In fact you could be at a well, within just a few feet of the water and die of thirst.

But a spring or a fountain requires no technology to access the water. There is no labor involved. The water comes to you; you don’t have to go to it. A spring is both effortless and endless. A well requires you to use your power to draw it out, but a spring comes to you of its own power.

So the first thing that Jesus does is he shifts the woman’s attention to the interior and he uses the water metaphor to do that.  The next thing Jesus does, this is a very important thing, and the gospel of John talks about this all the time, he says, “this is a spring that will well up to eternal life.” The gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke love to talk about the Kingdom of God, but rarely talk about eternal life. In John’s gospel, he likes to talk about eternal life, but almost never talks about the kingdom of God.

So, eternal life gets used all the time in the gospel of John, and in Christian popular imagination, eternal life is usually associated with when you die. Popular Christian thinking is that eternal life is something that happens after you die. Also in popular Christian imagination is the idea that eternal life is strongly associated with the idea of heaven.

This is NOT how the writer of the gospel of John thinks about eternal life. It is NOT how Jesus speaks about eternal life. Jesus uses a verb to speak about eternal life that is very, very revealing. The verb or action word is the word, “Welling up”.

Now, as we’ve said before, the Bibles that we have today are translations from Hebrew, the original language that the Old Testament and Greek, which is the original language of the New Testament. In Greek, we can tell by the beginning or the ending, if the word is written in, past present or future tense, and if it’s a participle, like this one is, then it means that it is on-going. Here Jesus is telling us that eternal life is present, but on-going.

Eternal life is something that can begin in the present, but that will be on-going. Jesus is saying that eternal life is welling up right now and always.  Eternal life is not something that you get in the distant, unknown, murky future when you die. This means that the possibility of eternal life begins when you’re born, not when you die. That is a shift in our thinking that needs to take place.

You might say “How can this be, because after all everybody dies right?” That’s true in a manner of speaking. However, we said a couple of weeks ago that you and I are created to be born twice, once physically, and once spiritually. We are born again spiritually, as we said a couple of weeks ago with a seed that is placed there by the Holy Spirit. That seed is an eternal seed that is give to you and I only when we confess our sins and ask Jesus to forgive them and begin to follow him as our Lord and as the prototype of who we were created to be.

So the next question that we need to ask is, if eternal life is available right now, from this welling spring, what do I need to do in order to get it? How do I access it? Do I need a rope and a bucket? These should be our next questions, and in fact, the woman at the well begins asking some of these questions to Jesus. She says:

Sir, give me this water and Jesus gives her this simple instruction:

“Go, call your husband and come back.” Of course??? That makes perfect sense, right???? We have to ask at this point “Is Jesus smoking something?

We expect Jesus to say something like, “Believe in me” or “Read your Bible more”, or “The answer is pray more”, or “The answer is act differently”, or “The answer is pursue justice”. Right? But Jesus doesn’t say that.

I mean, the woman at the well thinks to herself, “If I have to have a man help me get this water, no thank you.” I mean, because in the ancient world, women were the only ones who went to get water. They were beasts of burden, carrying heavy clay jars great distances while the men sat around. And I imagine that she thinks that Jesus is saying, “Bring your man back here, and he’ll help you get the water and she doesn’t want any part of that, because her man won’t be happy with her if she doesn’t get the water herself. Women, in this day and age, are just a little higher than a hired slave. But Jesus said this to get at the real issue.

Jesus tells this Samaritan woman to go get her husband, but the woman says, “Forget that, “I have no husband,” 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.

What’s very interesting in this interchange is that there is no judgment in Jesus’ statement. We might read this as Jesus confronting this woman with her sin as a way of telling her to shape or else, but that’s not what Jesus is doing here at all. All he says to her is, “You’re right! You’ve accurately stated a simple truth and then expounds upon it.

Now, how did we get from, “How do I get this eternal water” to “I’ve had five husbands and I don’t have one now?” I mean that seems like a big jump, doesn’t it. There doesn’t seem to be any connection does there?

But there is something very important that Jesus is trying to point out about how we go about quenching our thirst.

When I was in high school, after a really hot football game, a game in which the temperatures where in the upper 80’s, in which we just drenched in sweat, a well meaning parent brought in this huge cooler full of ice cold Coke, Pepsi and Mountain Dew. It was hot and the beverages were ice cold, and we were really parched, so we chug-A-lugged down a couple of pops each. We were deeply thirsty, and this family that brought the pop thought it was a gift that would quench our thirst.

However, that pop was full of caffeine and sugar, which actually works in the opposite way that you would think, and instead of quenching our thirst, actually dehydrated us and made us thirstier.  It gave the illusion that it was quenching our thirst because it was a cold liquid that felt good going down, but on the inside it actually dehydrated us and made us more thirsty. It did nothing to quench our thirst and in fact it masked and intensified our thirst instead of quenching it.

What Jesus is trying to do with this woman in the story, is to show her how thirsty she really is – that she has only been masking her thirst with things that are really making her more thirsty. The string of men in this woman’s life, don’t just reveal her sin, but her thirst.

Jesus might as well have said to her, “You are a woman who is thirsty and who is longing for deep connection and you’ll notice that your strategy so far has not been very effective in quenching your thirst. It has only made you more thirsty.”

Jesus says to you and I, If you want the water that I have, you have to be thirsty. This water is not for you if you’re not thirsty. Your thirst is what drives you to quench it. We often times try to use the external things in this life to try and quench a thirst that is internal. This internal thirst can only be quenched by an internal source.

So Jesus says to this woman, “You can keep finding more husbands, you can keep having these relationships, but I want you to know that everyone of those is sort of like drinking from this well. You will be thirsty again. No man can offer you what you are thirsting for. What I want to offer you is something so incredibly powerful that you will never thirst again. But in order to get it, you have to find that thirst.

King David had that thirst. He says

As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. Psalms 42:1-2 (NIV)

Dave thirsted had this intense thirst for this living water that only God can supply.

There are all kinds of things that we are thirsty for, that we are longing for, and what’s interesting; we have all kinds of strategies for quenching that thirst. Some of us might have a thirst for success, some of us might have a thirst for significance, some of us might have a thirst for security, some of us might have a thirst for connection, relationship and love, and we use all kinds of things to try and fulfill these deep longings and desires or thirsts. We use jobs to try and meet these thirsts, we get married, we get promoted, we climb a mountain, and on and on it goes.

But the thirst or desire that Jesus is talking about is the mother of all thirsts. It is the most fundamental thirst. It is the most basic thirst. It is the thirst for deep, deep, joy and peace and love in this life. It is a thirst for abundant life while you’re here on this side of eternity, not just wanting it for when you die.

This fountain that Jesus is speaking of that quenches that deep thirst inside of you and that makes all the other thirsts, all the other desires in your life seem insignificant comes from the Holy Spirit or God’s presence in you. We’ll look at that more fully next week. How aware are we of that really deep thirst inside of us? How aware are we of the things that we use to mask the deeper thirst of life with more superficial kinds of thirst?

Are you aware of the strategies that you’re engaged in to quench that deep seated thirst? This is what Jesus wanted to show this woman at the well. It is what Jesus wants to show us. If you’d like to continue to try and quench your desire with this string of relationships, that’s fine, but Jesus says, I have something better, but in order to get what I have, you have to be thirsty for what I have.

This is an all or nothing kind of thing. If you are thirsty for me, then come and drink deeply and out of you will flow streams of living water.

Jesus is only interested in this question, “Are you thirsty for what I have? Are you thirsty for the things of God? How thirsty are you?”

In the book of revelation, Jesus makes this very startling statement as he inverts the tables, and compares our desire for him by our temperature.  He says:

I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. Another way of saying this is “I see your life, your actions, and you are just a little thirsty. And then this startling statement comes from Jesus’ mouth, “I wish you were either one or the other! I wish that you were either really thirsty or not at all. So, because you are lukewarm–neither hot nor cold–I am about to spit you out of my mouth. Revelation 3:15-16 (NIV)

Jesus is contrasting hot and cold water in the same manner that he is contrasting thirsty and not thirsty. He says I wish that you were either hot or cold in your desire for me. I wish that you would either be really thirsty for me or not thirsty at all, because going after me is not a half way kind of thing. It is all or nothing. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to get it right all the time. It doesn’t mean that you have to be perfect any of the time. What it means is that you either desire the kingdom of God or you don’t. We cannot thirst for this world and the kingdom of God. It is not all the other desires and the kingdom of God. It must be all or nothing. It must be a complete transfer of allegiance from the kingdom of this world to the kingdom of God. It must be a complete transfer from all the other cravings and appetites and desires in this life to being thirsty, truly thirsty – As a deer pants for streams of living water, so my soul pants for you, Oh God.

You might think that this is an extreme view, but if I tell my wife that I’m going to partially committed to her, but I’m also going to love another woman, how well do you think my marriage will go? My wife, and rightly so, expects that I will be completely devoted to her. So it is with God. Jesus calls us to thirst for him or not. He says, “Don’t play games with me, either you love me or you don’t. Don’t mess with me like that. Make a commitment to be really thirsty for me, Jesus says.

If you’ve never made that kind of commitment to God, then I invite you today to make that commitment. You might say, “I’m not there yet. I don’t have that kind of thirst for God yet, but I want to have that. Then draw a line in the sand today and say, “I’m going to go after that. I’m going to pray that I would be really thirsty for God and I’m going to read my Bible and I’m going to ask questions and I’m going to seek the things of God with all that I am. I’m going to make God and his kingdom my most passionate goal in life.

I ask you again, is anyone here thirsty? If you are thirsty for Jesus, he will meet all your thirsts and streams of living water will flow out of you. We’ll look more into what that phrase means next week.