Rivers of Living Water — John 7:1-39 (05.31.2026)

John 7, 1-39. After this, Jesus went about in Galilee.

He would not go about in Judea because the Jews were seeking to kill him.

Now the Jews' feast of booths was at hand, so his brother said to him,

Leave here and go to Judea, that your disciples also may see the works you are doing.

For no one works in secret if he seeks to be known openly.

If you do these things, show yourself to the world, for not even his brothers believe in him.

Jesus said to them, My time has not yet come, but your time is always here.

The world cannot hate you, but it hates me, because I testify about it that its works are evil.

You go up to the feast. I am not going up to this feast, for my time has not yet fully come.

After saying this, he remained in Galilee. But after his brothers had gone up

to the feast, then he also went up, not publicly, but in private.

The Jews were looking for him at the feast and saying, Where is he?

And there was much muttering about him among the people, while some said,

He is a good man. Others said, no, he is leading the people astray.

Yet for fear of the Jews, no one spoke openly of him.

About the middle of the feast, Jesus went up into the temple and began teaching.

The Jews therefore marveled, saying, How is it that this man has learning when he has never studied?

So Jesus answered them, My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me.

If anyone's will is to do God's will, he will know whether the teaching is from

God or whether I am speaking on my own authority.

The one who speaks on his own authority seeks his own glory,

but the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true,

and in him there is no falsehood.

Has not Moses given you the law? Yet none of you keeps the law.

Why do you seek to kill me?

The crowd answered, you have a demon who is seeking to kill you.

Jesus answered them, I did one work and you will all marvel at it.

Moses gave you circumcision, not that it is from Moses, but from the fathers,

and you circumcise a man on the Sabbath.

If on the Sabbath a man receives circumcision, so that the law of Moses may

not be broken, are you angry with me because on the Sabbath I made a man's whole body well?

Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.

Some of the people of Jerusalem therefore said, Is not this the man whom they

seek to kill? And here he is speaking openly, and they say nothing to him.

Can it be that the authorities really know that this is the Christ?

But we know where this man comes from, and when the Christ appears,

no one will know where he comes from.

So Jesus proclaimed, as he taught in the temple, you know me and you know where

I come from, but I have not come of my own accord.

He who sent me is true, and him you do not know. I know him,

for I come from him, and he sent me.

So they were seeking to arrest him, but no one laid a hand on him because his hour had not yet come.

Yet many of the people believed in him. They said, when the Christ appears,

will he do more signs than this man has done?

The Pharisees heard the crowd muttering these things about him,

and the chief priests and the Pharisees sent officers to arrest him.

Jesus then said, I will be with you a little longer, and then I am going to him who sent me.

You will seek me, and you will not find me. Where I am, you cannot come.

The Jews said to one another, where does this man intend to go that we will not find him?

Does he intend to go to the dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks?

What does he mean by saying, you will seek me and you will not find me,

and where I am, you cannot come?

On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out,

if anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.

Whoever believes in me, as the scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.

Now this he said about the Spirit whom those who believed in him were to receive,

for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.

This is the word of the Lord. Good morning, church.

Man, good morning, church. All right. It is so thrilling to be with you.

We're in a season where we live away from people who are having babies,

and when we see them for the first time, we were praying for them for a long

time, or maybe we've been friends for a long time, and they had been waiting

to have a baby, and they finally came.

And meeting these babies is like this emotional moment of praising God for His

goodness. And I feel that way this morning with you.

Ben and Tiffany and I have been friends for 20 years. So obviously we met when we were five.

And it's been a long and sweet journey of a lot of ministry together,

of planting churches near each other.

And as my mom would say, we knew about you when you were just a thought in Father God's heart.

And it's sweet to be here with a church born and present.

I am thrilled to get to preach through John chapter 7 and for us to be in the

John 7 · chapter mention

Word together this morning.

There are a lot of places in scriptures, they all speak of Jesus,

and sometimes you have to think creatively, how does this passage speak to Jesus? This is very easy.

So every single point this morning has to do with who Jesus is as our righteousness.

His righteousness, His perfect obedience and submission to the Father is your salvation.

That's what it consists of. If He ever wasn't righteous one time,

we're all damned and dead in our sins.

And so, our heart and goal this morning is, like Paul says in Philippians 3,

we are those who glory in Christ Jesus.

That's what we want to do this morning. Last week, you guys saw that Jesus is

this heaven sent bread from the Father, that in Him is true satisfaction and true life.

And I'm sure you're exhorted to be satisfied in Jesus.

And so the question for us is to take inventory this morning as we come in is, how was your week?

Were you satisfied in Jesus this week?

And I think if we're all honest, we find we're a lot like each other and that it was a mixed bag.

There were times where you found great satisfaction and joy in Jesus and you

experienced his peace and his fellowship.

And there were other times where you were like one who looked in the mirror

and walked away and forgot what you looked like.

And you were a hearer of the word and maybe you didn't do it or you gave in to your anxieties.

And so by God's grace and his kindness, he's bringing us to the same truth again

this week. to look at Jesus's unique qualification to save us and to satisfy us.

Everyone's greatest need is to come to Jesus as he is on his own terms.

Now, I think it's special. We live in Vermont now, and it feels like Vermonters

hear from Vermonters better than they would maybe an outsider.

I don't know if that's the case in Georgia, but I just want you to know I was

born in Decatur. I grew up in Marietta, so I am one of you.

And I understand the Bible belt. I understand cultural Christianity.

I understand the temptations to have the form of godliness and not the substance of it. Anybody?

It's all around us. Jesus said it's hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

And I think in our affluent culture in suburban Atlanta, it's hard.

There are so many thorns and things that could come and choke out the word.

And I think one of the most subtle and insidious ways the enemy tries to lead

God's people away from Jesus is to still have Jesus.

As our God and then just syncretistically just kind of add things into it or maybe change who he is,

where we have Jesus as we've come to understand him in our own mind or based

on how we grew up and we don't keep coming to the word to trade out our view

of Jesus for the one that's given to us by the revelation of God in the scriptures. And so.

That becomes for Christians a kind of what God warns of in Jeremiah 2,

that my people, be astonished at this, O heavens,

that my people have traded out me, the fountain of living water,

for broken cisterns that can't satisfy.

And that's what the enemy tries to get us to do again and again.

You hear a message on being satisfied in Christ last week.

And then the temptation is to trade out living water, heaven-sent bread,

for broken cisterns that can't satisfy.

And the most mature of Christians does it.

And so God graciously is bringing us again to our Lord Jesus to say, are you thirsty?

You have as much of satisfaction in Christ as you want.

And that's true for all of us. And if you're frustrated in life and you feel

like you keep running into roadblocks of your own strength and your own wisdom,

we have as much of His enabling as He wants.

And He promises us this morning this satisfaction and life to all who come to

Him, but it's only the real Jesus who will satisfy.

And so our main idea for our text this morning is that both as our substitute and our example.

Jesus lived in perfect submission to his Father,

and he has provided for us to walk in his steps by his all-satisfying Spirit

as we come to him in faith. That's a mouthful.

Jesus is your example. And based on where you grew up or what was focused on,

in church, as you've heard different messages, I think sometimes people can

focus on following Jesus' example from a distance without the power of His Holy Spirit.

And so it's just all, let's follow, what would Jesus do? And we're following Jesus' example.

And then maybe you've been taught, no, no, no, no, it's not about following

Jesus as an example. It's about abiding in Jesus and resting in Him. But He is both.

He is our substitute as our righteous Savior, and He empowers us by His Spirit to follow His example.

So very quickly, before we jump into the text, just a one-minute theological

housekeeping, because as pastors, we are jealous for God's church to know Him

in truth and to have doctrinal discernment.

And you would have heretics or false teachers who would use a text like this

to teach that Jesus is somehow lesser than the Father because it's all about

His submission to the Father.

And Scripture is clear that the will of the Son and the will of the Father are the same.

When the Word talks about Jesus' submission to the Father, it's talking about

Jesus in His earthly mission.

Jesus as a mediator for you as a man, perfectly submitted to the Father,

and accomplishes the righteousness that you could never achieve on your own.

And so in that way, this text is all about Him obeying the Father,

all the way to the point of death on the cross, submitting to the Father.

But don't be confused and that the son is of the same essence with the father

equal in power and glory he shares the same will with the father and the same

perfections and so this morning,

elijah and kayla and i just got back from epcot there was this cool new ride

came out last month and it was called soaring across america and that just sounds

lame by itself you know it was like It sounds like a field trip,

but it was actually very neat.

We got in like this kind of Batman rollercoaster type machine and it took you

into this IMAX setting where there was this panoramic view and you're like soaring.

You felt like you're moving and soaring through all these vistas of the U.S. and.

They made all the preparations. They made all the video. The scenery was incredible by itself.

The job of the machine was just to lift us up and just make us feel like we were there.

And that's what I'm praying happens this morning. The scene has been set.

The vistas are incredible. You love Jesus.

And so what we get to do is see Jesus and his righteousness,

his glory on display in different ways.

And we're gonna soar through from one coast to another in John chapter seven.

So the first truth that we want to glory in about our Lord Jesus this morning

is that Jesus lived under the Father's time and direction.

Jesus lived under the Father's time and direction. You can see this at the beginning of our text.

You've noticed in John, he's made enough trouble in Jerusalem.

The text begins by saying he didn't go to Jerusalem because people there wanted

to kill him, and his hour had not yet come.

And you keep seeing language like this in the Gospel of John.

Jesus' hour had not yet come.

And so the scene that is being set is in Jerusalem, there's this huge feast.

Josephus says that this was the favorite and most sacred of the principal feasts

among God's people in that day. It was like Christmas and Thanksgiving combined.

So there were three feasts where all the able-bodied men of Israel would descend upon Jerusalem.

And in this particular case, this was the Feast of Booths, or maybe you've heard

it called the Feast of Tabernacles.

And this feast had a past and a present and a future element to it.

As they look to the past, they're remembering God's deliverance,

His redemption out of the land of Egypt.

And you remember when they were in the wilderness, they would set up these booths,

and there were these leafy branches, and they basically set up a huge camp.

Where they dwelt with God after He had brought them out of their slavery,

and this leafy branches was their protection from the noonday sun.

And so, to commemorate God's deliverance and to celebrate His presence with

them as they're gone, they would set up this same camp every year in Jerusalem.

They would all make these leafy branched tents, and they would go there to celebrate

the provision of God at harvest time. So, that was the present element.

This was a big Thanksgiving. They were feasting. It was a seven-day-long celebration

as they rejoiced in God's goodness.

He had sent the rains again. He had provided the harvest again,

and they were rejoicing at the provision of God and at the presence of God.

But always there was this longing, this ache,

because though they already had the presence of God as His people,

they longed for the day when it wasn't just the physical reigns that God provided,

but there was these spiritual reigns when the Messianic age would be ushered

in and God would come and be their God in person at last, and they would be His people.

And so they would always be with the Lord.

So that's the scene in Jerusalem.

And Jesus' brothers, probably knowing that everybody in Jerusalem wanted to

kill Jesus, everybody's against Him. That's what's being painted.

It says, even his brothers didn't believe on him.

And so they say, all right, Mr. Prophet, go show yourself to all your people.

If you want recognition, if you love the honor and approval of man.

And then Jesus says this confusing thing.

Maybe you didn't catch it when Ben first read it, but after you see what happened,

it's like, wait a second.

He says, my time has not yet come, but your time is always here.

The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify about it,

that its works are evil. You go up to the feast.

I am not going up to this feast, for my time has not yet fully come.

Now, some translations, just to be kind to you and not like really confuse you, add a yet there.

So you hear Jesus saying, I'm not going up to the feast there,

but it's not there in the original text.

And Jesus's point was not that I'm not going at all. Context shows that.

And he didn't lie to his brothers.

But he was drawing out this truth that they could go whenever they wanted.

He was living under the Father's time and direction. And so in the book of John,

so far you've seen, my hour has not yet come.

My hour has not yet come. And that hour refers to the moment of Jesus redeeming

the universe as he would go to the cross and begin to ascend to the Father through

death and through resurrection,

this language is different than that hour.

This was point-in-time language, and the point was, this was this precise moment-by-moment

depending on the Father.

And so he's saying, it's all that

same language. I always do all that the Father has commanded me to do.

The words that you speak, I speak. The words that you hear me say,

I'm saying and doing what I've received by command of my Father,

and I'm living under His divine appointment, and I am not living under the command

of my brothers or the pressures of anybody else.

So four different times in our passage, you heard this language of Him who sent me.

I do the will of Him who sent me. I speak the words of Him who sent me.

And so Jesus was always, always mindful of His commission from the Father.

And he was undistracted and undeterred.

No one could get him off of the purpose and the mission that God had given him to do.

And he always lived under God's proper time for everything under the sun.

And so that's why he indicts his brothers. You're not living under such constraints.

You don't even believe in me yet.

And just as an aside, the Lord in his grace converts his brother.

And later in the book of James, James would write things like,

Come now, you who say, today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town

and spend a year there and trade and make a profit.

Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life?

For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.

Instead, you ought to say, if the Lord wills, we will do this or that.

And so James picked up on the lesson between John 7 and when he wrote this book

of, okay, no, no, no, no. I need to live my life under the authority of the Father.

And we all fail at this all the time.

Jesus never did. The second way we see his perfect submission to the Father,

and him as our righteousness in this text is that Jesus spoke the Father's words. Look at verse 14.

It says, about the middle of the feast, Jesus went up to the temple and began teaching.

The Jews therefore marveled, saying, how is it that this man has learning when he has never studied?

So Jesus answered them, my teaching is not mine, but his who sent me.

Okay, let's see if we're awake. Why are they marveling at him?

It's not because he's got this boldness. It's not because, oh my gosh,

they want to kill this guy and he's here. That's not why they're marveling,

even though that's a reason to marvel.

They're marveling because of his teaching.

Now, what's incredible is that all the other rabbis quoted other rabbis in order

to be seen as scholarly or having studied in the academy.

And so they treated each other's teachings, prominent rabbis, like Christians.

Ben and I and the other pastors treat the word of God. It's like walls of a pool.

And you kind of get out here and you come with an illustration or you got a

little cute story or something like that.

And all of a sudden you're like, I got to get back because I don't know how

to swim and I don't have anything to say.

This is life. This is our message.

The Pharisees treated each other's

teachings like that, where I would be teaching something of my own.

And it's like, oh, as Rabbi Nicodemus says, and they're like, Nicodemus.

And they would lace their teachings with each other's scholarly studies.

They feared each other and sought each other's praise so much that their teaching

came from each other and Jesus didn't do any of that.

And so what they're marveling at is, here's the word in the flesh and he is

proclaiming the words of God with power and with authority and he's not quoting

any other rabbis. This man can swim.

He doesn't need the walls. of the pool. He frequently would say things like,

truly, truly, I say to you, or you have heard it said, but I say to you.

Because here is the word. He taught with authority and with anointing and with life.

Even later, when the religious leaders send people to go arrest him,

they come back empty-handed.

And when they're questioned about what happened, they say, no one ever taught like this man.

Because when Jesus opened his mouth, God spoke.

When we go to him and his word, it is the words of the Father that are coming out of his mouth.

So, Jesus lived under the Father's time and direction, and he spoke the Father's words.

The third thing we see in the text is that Jesus sought the Father's glory.

In verse 17, he says, If anyone's will is to do God's will, he will know whether

the teaching is from God or whether I'm speaking on my own authority.

The one who speaks on his own authority seeks his own glory,

but the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true.

In him there is no falsehood. Has not Moses given you the law?

Yet none of you keeps the law.

Why do you seek to kill me?

I hope you can see in this text the strength of Jesus.

I know we often emphasize his love, his kindness, and his compassion,

but the source of this kind of strength, to go among people where he is wanted

and they want to kill him. People are wondering where he is.

And for fear of the Jews, the people aren't talking about him above hush tones.

And then Jesus stands up and says, why do you not keep the law?

And why do you seek to kill me?

Here is a man with perfect authority and perfect strength.

His only desire is to please the father who sent him.

He doesn't desire the praise or approval of people. He's not afraid of them.

He can go up and stand in front of them like light piercing into darkness without any kind of fear.

And the reason why is he prized the Father's glory above himself,

above his safety, above his comfort.

He had already told his brothers that the world hated him because he testified

about them that their deeds were evil.

People don't like that. I don't know if you've tried that recently in Alpharetta, Georgia.

People do not like hearing that their deeds are evil and that they need a savior

and that he does so with boldness and with clarity.

He essentially tells them, you are coming to my words as if you were a judge.

And if you were coming to me, speaking truth, as though you're judging what

I'm saying, what ground do you have to stand on?

My dad, when talking to an atheist, will often ask them to draw a kind of circle,

like a pie chart, and then to draw a sliver inside that circle if they could

estimate what percentage of all knowledge that they think that they have.

And you can meet some pretty pretentious atheists out there.

You know, they're fools saying in their heart there is no God, but they don't know it.

So they're like, maybe 5%. You're like, 5% of all knowledge.

Man, congratulations. You must have gone to the University of Georgia. So...

He'll then say, do you think in that 95% that you don't know,

that there's a possibility that there is a God and that you're not him and that

you're accountable to him?

And Jesus is essentially doing the same thing here. He's saying,

look, you're coming to my word.

I'm preaching truth to you and you're judging my word.

But if you're judging my word, you're not going to be able to hear it.

And so far from preaching to appease people, to tickle their ears,

he's coming to them and actually judging how they're listening and telling them

and calling them to account.

And he's doing so for the Father's glory.

He says, none of you keeps the law. Why do you seek to kill me?

So here again, he's testifying to them that their deeds are evil.

They think they love Moses and they think they love the law.

And he says, you actually despise the law and Moses, because if you were like

him, you would worship his God.

So Jesus is confronting them in their sin without desire for their respect or their approval.

And I think this is one of the most conspicuous ways that the church of the

Lord Jesus Christ today needs to be conformed into his image.

If you could just look across the landscape, this is even among kind of a solid,

word-saturated, Christ-exalting evangelical church.

We have a very hard time with loving the praise and approval of man.

The problem is God sends forth His Holy Spirit to convict the world of sin and

righteousness and judgment.

And if we're to love people, then we're going to have to help them to see that

and help them to see their need for a Savior, and they will hate you for it.

Jesus says things like, if they hated me, they'll hate you.

We so love our comfort and safety or the glory and approval of men,

and we need a bigger vision of God,

a greater fear of God that would actually send us in love to our neighbor and

tell them things that they don't want to hear like our Savior in order that

they might escape the snare of the enemy and repent and turn to Christ.

So Jesus not only proclaimed the truth with boldness, but he lived it with true righteousness.

Jesus obeyed the Father in truth. You can see this in verse 20 through 24.

The crowd answered, you have a demon, which was their colloquial way of saying you are insane.

Who is seeking to kill you? Jesus answered them, I did one work, and you all marvel at it.

Moses gave you circumcision, not that it is from Moses, but from the fathers,

and you circumcised the man on the Sabbath.

If on the Sabbath a man receives circumcision, so that the law of Moses may

not be broken, are you angry with me because on the Sabbath I made a man's whole body well.

Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.

So here the Lord Jesus is highlighting the hypocrisy of the religious leaders.

Circumcision itself was designed to represent this wholeness.

It was always representing a circumcision of the heart, which was the regeneration

of God and God bringing actual the beginnings of shalom and wholeness to your whole person.

And so he's saying, look, you will actually do this thing that represents wholeness

on the Sabbath, and you've elevated circumcision as a willingness to break the

law for this wholeness, and here I am making a man's whole body well,

and you're getting on to me about it.

You don't realize that the Sabbath was actually made for rest and for wholeness,

to actually bring people into the life of God.

But what I want to highlight here is, we've been talking about Jesus obeying

the Father, but the emphasis right here is in truth, because he's ending this

section by saying, do not judge by appearances,

but judge with right judgment.

Beloved, you are saved because Jesus, in every single situation,

if there was any moral ambiguity,

if there was any lack of clarity about what the will of God was in any situation

or what truth was or what was right and good and beautiful, Jesus knew it and

saw with perfect clarity and perfect discernment and was able to navigate it

and proclaim what is right and true.

He always kept the law with right judgment under the leading of His Father.

And because he did, we can be saved.

The fifth and final thing we see of our Lord Jesus in this passage is that he

lived anointed by the Father's Spirit and he offers him to all who come to him in faith.

The Feast of Booths had this amazing ritual that accompanied it with this week-long feast.

And I've written it down from a commentary because I don't want to miss any details.

So if you'll let me, I'd like to read to you the nature of this ritual and then

give you its significance because it packs all the power of what comes next

in Jesus's words in verse 37. So.

On the seven-day feast, there was this golden pitcher that was filled with water

at the pool of Siloam, and it was carried in a procession that was led by the

high priest back to the temple.

And in this procession, all the people following would be singing and reciting

Isaiah 12, 3, as the priest drew water, with joy, you will draw water from the wells of salvation.

And this procession would approach this water gate on the south side of the temple.

There would be three blasts of this trumpet that marked this joyful occasion

and they're rejoicing and everybody is shouting as they do.

They're reciting the Hillel all the way through.

But as they come to this crescendo and the choir reaches Psalm 118,

every man had in one hand this leafy myrtle thing that they made the tents with,

and it's representing the presence of God, and he would have a piece of fruit

from the harvest representing the provision of God, and they would shake both

in their hands, and they would cry aloud all together,

give thanks to the Lord, three times.

Then the water was offered to God at the time of the morning sacrifice,

along with the daily drink offering of wine, and they would do this every day,

this joyful procession, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good.

He has provided for us again. He is with us.

We should rejoice in Him.

Now, the significance of this ritual is that in Jewish thought,

the Lord's provision of water in the desert was represented by this pouring,

but it also represented the pouring out of the Spirit in the last days.

That it represented this symbolically, the Messianic age being ushered in,

in which a stream from the sacred rock would flow over the whole earth.

So this is that future-looking aspect of the feast.

They're praising God for his provision. They're celebrating his presence,

but there's also this ache, this longing.

For the day when God would come and rescue his people and usher in him dwelling

forever with his people as their God and them with him as his people.

And we would have Ezekiel's river that flows forth from the throne and it just

everywhere it touches, it brings life and it gives life.

And it would be a time of reviving when God would come and pour out his spirit on his people. And so,

on the last day of the feast. This is verse 37.

The priest on this last day, instead of circling the altar once,

he would circle it seven times.

And there would be this great hush, you can imagine, as the priest gets ready

to pour this final water on the altar at the time of the sacrifice.

And as he comes to, circles the altar seven times, and as he comes to pour the

water, Jesus stands up in the midst of a sea of people who are wanting to kill him.

And he cries out in a loud voice, if anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.

Whoever believes in me, as the scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.

Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive,

for as yet the spirit had not been given because Jesus was not yet glorified.

Jesus is also crying out with this future looking reality that in just a moment,

we were at John chapter seven, around the corner was coming this redemptive

hour that he had said, my hour has not yet come.

My hour has not yet come. But the hour was coming when Jesus would go to the

cross and he would begin to ascend to the father through the humiliation of death on a cross.

He would display the Father's glory of a God who loves and dies in the place

of sinners, who offers up his perfect righteous life for us in his death.

And then as a proof that the Father accepted his payment, he's raised victoriously

from the grave and he ascends to the Father where he as the high priest pours

out his spirit on his people.

And Jesus is saying, if you want to be satisfied.

And you want to be made a source of satisfaction, come to me.

Here was the ultimate provision of God, the ultimate presence of God,

God Himself in the flesh, the fullness of all that the Feast of Booths had ever pointed to.

He will give God to all who come to Him.

He who was our perfect example became our perfect substitute so that He might

fill us with His own Spirit as we come to him in faith.

And his promise is that if you come to him in truth, this is where we go back

to the beginning of what we talked about. Mascot Jesus doesn't satisfy.

Vending machine Jesus that we saw just with the feeding of the 5,000,

they were following him because of what they could get out of him.

If you're following Jesus for what he can do for you, what you can get out of

him as an add on to your life, that Jesus doesn't satisfy.

But he says, you come to me in truth.

This water is so satisfying, it's so life-giving, He will turn your life from

a wilderness into a well.

That you will go from being a place of dry and thirsty to being a source of

refreshment for others as they find Jesus in you.

There's a scene from Lewis's silver chair that captures both the nature of Christ's

offer and the idea of coming through him and bowing to his lordship as we do,

coming humbly on his terms and not our own.

There's the lion Aslan, who of course serves as the allegory of Christ in Narnia.

If Jesus lived in Narnia, what would he be like was Lewis's aim.

And there's a girl named Jill that approaches him in this scene.

And the lion says, are you not thirsty?

I'm dying of thirst, said Jill. Then drink, said the lion.

May I, could I, would you mind going away while I do?

The lion answered this only by a look and a very low growl.

And as Jill gazed at his motionless bulk, she realized that she might as well

have asked the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience.

The delicious, rippling noise of the stream was driving her nearly frantic.

Will you promise not to do anything to me if I come? I make no promise, said the lion.

Jill was so thirsty now that without noticing it, she had come a step nearer.

Do you eat girls? She asked.

I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors,

cities and realms, said the lion.

It didn't say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry,

nor as if it were angry. It just said it.

I daren't come and drink, said Jill. Then you will die of thirst, said the lion.

Oh dear, said Jill, coming another step nearer. I suppose I must go and look

for another stream then.

There is no other stream, said the lion. Then, of course, Joe comes and she

drinks deeply of the most refreshing water she ever tasted.

So the question for us this morning, whether you've walked with the Lord for

a long time, or whether you're new to the faith or new to the church,

is will you come to Him and drink?

And will you remember that when you come to Him, will you come to Him as He is? He is a lion.

When you come to Him, you are not in charge. You're not in charge of your finances, your schedule.

We're talking about, I say this to our church all the time, we need a earthy,

lived out, applied theology. We cannot be people who come and hear messages

and who delight in God's word and go out and live lives that are divorced from what we hear.

So we cannot claim to delight in Christ and then love him in our devotional

time and then go out and live our schedule however we want.

He doesn't allow us to do that. That may be a Jesus that we have embraced culturally,

but it's not the Jesus of the New Testament who demands preeminence in everything.

And so when we come to him, we have to remember we're coming to him as he is.

He's not a safe lion, but he is good.

He might swallow up something very precious to you and he will be good and he will satisfy you.

He is the only stream, the only place where you can find satisfaction in life.

And he promises if you come to him, he will give you his own joy and his own Holy Spirit.

So as at the Feats of Booths, Let's praise God for the wonder of His provision

to us, the wonder of His presence,

to say give thanks to the Lord and to recognize that He is the fullness of everything

that the Feast of Booths ever pointed to. He is the provision of God.

He is God in the flesh.

And He gives us His presence now with His Holy Spirit as a down payment,

but He also has given you the promise of the new creation.

And you have it forever to look forward to And so if you are thirsty, come to Jesus.

You are as satisfied as you want to be. Let's pray.

Father, we rejoice in our Lord Jesus. We want to cry, hallelujah, what a Savior.

Lord, the reality is our hearts, our minds, we can hear messages like this and it can feel stale.

It can feel dry because we're far off, because we're accustomed to glory.

We're so used to living at the edge of the Grand Canyon and seeing stunning

sunsets that it has failed to capture us.

And I pray that this morning we would have hearts that are humble and tender

before you, that we would be blown away by the mercy of God in Christ,

that you have provided for us such a Savior.

We praise you, Lord Jesus, for your perfect submission to the Father in the days of your flesh.

And because you lived the righteous life that we could not live,

You satisfied the Father's wrath in our place and you were able to bring us to God.

Thank you that you have cleansed us once and for all by your single sacrifice.

And now you give us your Holy Spirit so that we can follow your example.

Please help us, Lord. Help us to be not just hearers of the word,

but those who go forth in the power of the Holy Spirit to obey you. In Jesus' name, amen.