sunday sermon snippet 31 May 2026
Jesus answered, “If you knew the gift of God, and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would ask him, and he would give you living water.” (John 4:10)
This week’s posting of the Sunday Sermon Snippet comes from the first sermon in a new mini-series we’re doing in John called “Jesus and the Samaritan Woman,” from John 4:1-42. As we study this story together, we’re keeping our eyes on the lookout for answers to two questions:
Who is this man, Jesus?
Who are we, as we see ourselves in this woman?
In this first sermon, we study vv 1-15, and I’ve entitled it “Living Water for the Thirsty,” showing how the story answers those two questions. See below for a snippet…
…and if you’d like to check out the whole sermon, just click here.
Who is this man, Jesus? He is Living Water for the Thirsty.
“Give me a drink,” Jesus said to her.
“How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” she asked him.
Jesus answered, “If you knew the gift of God, and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would ask him, and he would give you living water.”
“Sir,” said the woman, “you don’t even have a bucket, and the well is deep. So where do you get this living water?”
Don’t you just love this? This is us, family!
Jesus: “You must be born again.”
Nicodemus: “I should crawl back into my mother’s womb?”
Jesus: “If you’d ask me, I would give you living water.”
Samaritan Woman: “Where’s your bucket?”
And as I said before, I think there’s something disarming about what Jesus is doing. There’s a kind of wise, intentional, playfulness because of how well he knows them, that he’s able to Good News them in a way that catches them out. Gets them off-kilter, so he can help them. And for the Samaritan woman, he’s using the water she’s come for as a metaphor for the living water that she needs — “If you only knew the gift of God.” That’s what he’s after — for her to know what she really needs. And it’s brilliant.
I love how one writer presses into this:
“Since the human body is made of 50% or more of water, to be deprived of water is an agony, and to die of thirst and dehydration is a horrible agony. Thirst is a physical deprivation because you’re made of water, therefore, you crave it and you need it. Jesus is saying, ‘Your soul craves for something, and I’m the only one who has it.’
“What he means is, ‘If you don’t get what I have, you’re dead.’ And what he’s also saying is, ‘Because you’re looking to quench your thirst in all these other places, you’re actually not finding what you’re looking for. You are spiritually thirsty for what I have and you may not recognize it, but when you go after [sex, and another relationship, and another relationship,] and you’re driven to those things, it’s really thirst, and you don’t [even] recognize it.’”
Friends, she’s so desperately longing for something more, craving something more, and until she came to this well, she very well may not have been facing that. Maybe too overwhelmed by her circumstances — as an emotionally alienated woman who felt unsafe — to even contemplate it. She could be depressed, chronically anxious, excruciatingly lonely. And she’s simply coming to a well for what may be the only time she has alone to find a little respite, and here, now, the Light of the world is slamming into the darkness in which she is living. This thirst operating underneath all of the rest of her living. And Jesus says, “I have what you’re looking for.”
Actually, he goes a step further, doesn’t he? John 4:13-14, “Everyone who drinks from this water will get thirsty again. But whoever drinks from the water that I will give him will never get thirsty again. In fact, the water I will give him will become a well of water springing up in him for eternal life.”
Stunning. I love his message for her, for us, for those around us — The free gift of God, the gracious gift, is living water. It is the thing that your soul craves for, and when supplied, satisfies your every craving. But more than this, it will satisfy in such a way that it will spring up in you for eternal life — for yourself, and Jesus will later teach, for others.
Do you see? She was coming to a well that was actually fed by a spring, to get something to give temporary, physical relief. And Jesus says to her that he can put a spring inside of her that will not only give her eternal relief, but be a spring from which others may draw life. That this is true of her, and true of us!
I’ve learned so much from Tim Keller about what it looks like to evangelize like Jesus, in so many of his writings. Years ago he quoted one of his favorites, L.R.R. Tolkien, to make some sense of this.
There’s this scene in The Return of the King, after the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. Aragorn has come in secret to minister healing to the wounded in Gondor, fulfilling the old saying: “The hands of the king are the hands of a healer.”
Well, people begin to perceive who Aragorn truly is —not merely a ranger or captain, but the rightful king. And Tolkien writes of his face bearing the marks of hardship and long labor, yet beneath them there is a profound hidden joy and vitality. Listen closely now….
“For though Aragorn was now by age nearing his full stature, he seemed to men in the prime of life, and they beheld first only the care and weariness of the world upon him. But when he spoke, many remembered the light in his eyes: keen as the eyes of a king who has known many dangers and long endured. And then they perceived that under all there was a great joy in him; a fountain of mirth enough to set a kingdom laughing, were it to gush forth.”
And Keller wonderfully grabs hold of this and applies it for us:
“You see, there are so many around us who on the surface are laughing, but underneath there is an abiding sadness.” In other words, they’re desperately craving something, trying to hide it, without being truly satisfied. He goes on: “And Jesus is saying, ‘I can change you so completely that even though on the surface there will be sadness, which is inevitable in this life, underneath there is an abiding joy. A river of it! A spring of water welling up into eternal life!…Do you see? Christianity is not a philosophy….It’s something much greater and far more radical than that. Jesus is saying, ‘I have that which every human soul longs for, and I will not just satisfy you with it, but I will change your insides so much your very soul and heart are new. You will have a whole new purpose, a whole new joy, a whole new dynamic in your inner being.”
This makes a flippant rejection of Christianity like — “Hey, if that works for you, that’s fine” — utterly ridiculous. This is not about whether or not this “works for us,” this is fundamentally about the truth that what Jesus has on offer is the only thing that will satisfy. Nothing else will sate the craving, the deep soul-thirst of human beings in this world — not sex, not money, not power, not possessions, not another human, nothing. Jesus, and only Jesus, is living water for the thirsty.
“If you only knew the gift of God…” (v. 10)
Friend, do you? Do you realize that God is graciously offering living water to each of us in Jesus, today? Are you living in that reality? Are you drinking that in, drinking him in? And having done thus, are you quenching the thirst of others this way, uniquely understanding who they are, bringing them one step closer to Jesus, Good News-ing them, making them aware of their cravings, and describing how they may be satisfied? So that they may say, along with the Samaritan Woman…
“Give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and come here to draw water.” (v. 15)
She seems to respond, doesn’t she?
She seems to understand.
This seems like great progress, like she’s opening up.
Which is why we are probably right to be really surprised at what Jesus says next….
If you’d like to check out the whole sermon, just click here.
