Water for Thirsty Souls - John 4:1-16 (03.22.2026)

Good morning. If you have a Bible, go ahead and open up to John chapter 4.

John 4 · chapter mention

If you don't, you should have scripture in the bulletin, and you can follow

along with us there, and also it will be up on the screen.

Let me pray one more time before we get into it.

Father in heaven, I thank you for the opportunity to share your word this morning.

Thank you that you do speak to us, that you are a God who speaks through your

word, that you have revealed yourself to us through your son,

Jesus Christ, once and for all, and that we can know you because of him.

Lord, I pray that you would be in my mouth today, that you would help me to say only what is true.

And Lord, help us, give us faith as we hear your word to believe it. In Jesus' name, amen.

So a couple of years ago, I read a fascinating story. It's the true story of the whale ship Essex.

It actually is the story, the true story, that inspired the great novel Moby Dick.

And so the story is that in 1820, the Essex was attacked and sunk by a massive whale.

And this whale followed it for days and then all of a sudden turns and it rams it and sinks it.

And they escape on open, small open boats.

They're the boats that they used to hunt the whales. They escape on these little

open boats into open water on the Pacific.

This crew, and days turn into weeks, and the sun is beating down on them,

and their skin is cracking, and they're starving, and most of all,

they're dying of thirst, and they're surrounded by water.

And a few of them, overcome with desperation, did the unthinkable.

They began to drink the seawater.

And at first, it was satisfying, some moisture on their lips.

But of course, when you drink seawater, all it does is it speeds up your dehydration.

And so they became delirious. They start seeing things, hallucinating,

and many of them died because of that decision. It's actually a really helpful

picture for us in our culture.

We are surrounded by things that we think will satisfy us.

It might be success or relationships or money or control or sinful pleasures,

and we're thirsty. And so we drink.

And we experience just a little bit of relief at first, but then that thirst

comes back and it comes back stronger.

And so we go back and we try and quench our thirst again and again and again.

And that's exactly where we meet this woman in John chapter four.

She's coming back again and again to try and quench her thirsty soul.

Five husbands now living with her boyfriend, still thirsty, and then Jesus comes into her life.

And he offers her something better and something that will fully and finally

satisfy her thirsty soul.

So let's walk through this passage. I want to explain some things,

help us understand some of the background that's happening here,

and then we'll get into some application toward the end.

So first of all, who is this woman?

What can we know about her? That's the first part of this sermon.

One thing that we know about her is that she would be an idolater,

someone who worships other gods.

So Jesus is leaving Judea in the south.

He's heading north to go to Galilee. And the story takes place in this place,

in this region in between called Samaria.

So if you were a first century reader of this gospel, you would have understood

a history that is a lot of background here, hundreds of years of hostility between Jews and Samaritans.

700 years before Christ, Assyrians had captured Samaria, taken them,

into exile, the Jews that lived there, and left only a small number of Jews.

And then they resettled the area with foreigners.

And so these foreigners married with the remaining Israelites,

which resulted in their cult practices being mixed with traditional Judaism.

And so, in that sense, the Jews looked at Samaritans as idolaters.

They would have also looked at them as heretics. So a heretic is someone with

wrong beliefs or incorrect theology.

Around 400 BC, the Samaritans erected a temple, a rival temple to the true temple

in Jerusalem on Mount Gerizim.

So Samaritans, they accepted the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old

Testament, but not the rest of the Old Testament.

So they had certain beliefs that were correct and then other beliefs that they

had thrown out and they, you know, started to kind of create their own thing.

And so Jews looked at the Samaritans and they saw them as these heretics.

The next thing that we can see about this woman, in verse six,

it says that she comes about the sixth hour.

That's the middle of the day. That's like probably noon, six hours from sunrise.

What does this detail tell us about this woman?

Okay, hey, this is a really unusual time to come to the well to get water.

It's in the middle of the day. It's in the heat of the day.

And traditionally, women would be the ones who would go and they would get water,

draw water for their families.

But they would go early in the morning while it's cool or they would go later

in the evening while it was cool.

And wells tended to be a gathering place for the ladies in the town.

It was like a place to socialize, to catch up, to find out what all was going

on. And so it's unusual that this woman...

Was coming in the middle of the day, in the heat of the day.

She's avoiding the crowds.

She's by herself. And it leads us to believe that she's socially isolated,

probably because what we find out later in the story, probably because of her shame.

What else do we know about her? Well, she is a Samaritan. So that means she's a Gentile.

Why this whole confusion when Jesus asks her for water, she says,

you know, how is it that you, a Jew, verse 9,

ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria, for Jews have no dealings with Samaritans?

Well, this would have been very unusual for a Jew to ask for a drink,

especially from their own vessel from a Gentile, because a Gentile and especially

their vessels would have been considered ritually unclean.

And so, this would have made any Jewish person who shared that vessel ritually unclean.

But of course, as we so often see, as we've already seen, Jesus,

He does surprising things. He does the things that we don't expect.

He's willing to break with the social norms and even the religious traditions

in order to go after someone who's far from God.

That's exactly what he's doing. That brings us to our second point.

What is it that Jesus is offering?

So Jesus' disciples have gone into town to get some food and he's waiting on them there.

He is resting, he's tired, and he's waiting on them to come back.

And then this woman comes up and he just, this is Jesus, he just can't help

but go after someone when he has the opportunity to help them to see the truth about who God is.

And so he starts this conversation and of course he has an intention and he

turns this conversation from natural water to spiritual water.

He says in In verse 10, if you knew the gift of God and who it is saying to

you, give me a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.

One thing is clear right off the bat, whatever this living water is,

is something that Jesus can give.

It's something that you have to go to Jesus in order to get it.

You need to ask him for it and he's willing to give it.

If we come to him and ask him for it.

The words gift, given, or give appear five times in these four verses, verses 10 through 14.

So we can surmise that this is a gift and it therefore cannot be earned.

It's not something that you can work for. It's not something you can be good enough to get it.

It has to be given to you freely or else it's not a gift.

So what is the gift? He says it's living water.

Living water. Now, there are a few places in the Old Testament scriptures that

talk about living water. One of them is in Ezekiel 37.

So Ezekiel sees this vision of the throne room and from the throne,

there are these river coming out.

And it's like living water.

Everything it touches springs to life.

People that drink from it come alive. The plants that drink from it flourish and bear fruit.

And so it's flowing through the city of God and it's just giving life everywhere

it goes. So that's one place.

But perhaps a more famous Old Testament reference to this living water is found in Jeremiah 2.13.

And I think this is probably where the Lord is wanting to point our attention.

Jeremiah 2.13, the Lord rebukes his people by saying this, My people have committed two evils.

They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns

for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.

Fascinating. So God calls himself the fountain, the source of living waters.

He's saying he's the spring of life who satisfies all who drink from that spring.

And the rebuke is not only that his people are not coming to him to drink,

but also that they're trying to dig out cisterns. A cistern was like a hole

in the ground that was designed to catch rainwater.

And he's saying, your cisterns are broken. They won't even hold water.

But not only will you not come to me, this constant fountain of fresh,

clean, life-giving water, but also you're trying to create a counterfeit.

You're trying to go to something that won't hold water.

It never will. And you keep going back to it and back to it.

And so the Lord rebukes his people there in Jeremiah 2 so in verse 14 we see

this this living water he says whoever drinks of the water that I will give

him will never be thirsty again,

the water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life it's,

eternal life.

Eternal life. When we think of eternal life, oftentimes we just think of quantity

of life, like it's life that doesn't ever end.

But eternal life in the scriptures refers to a quality of life. It's the blessed life.

It's the life that's reunited to our creator.

It is the good life that we're actually all looking for, that we're all actually

thirsty It's life in relation to God.

That's what he's offering. And she's still not getting it.

In verse 11, it says, the woman said to him, Sir, you have nothing to draw water with.

And the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? She's not following yet.

She is oblivious to the miracle that is about to happen in her life.

She thinks this is just another day at the well like thousands of others.

I wonder if the same thing might be true for you. Most of the time,

we are completely oblivious that God is about to do something really big in

our lives until the moment that it happens. And that's her.

She's sitting there, not following, not recognizing who it is that she is interacting

with, clueless to the fact that her whole world's about to get turned upside

down in a really good way.

Jesus is not thrown. He's not deterred by her confusion. He recognizes that

this is going to take some more conversation.

He remains persistent and patient.

So he says in verses 13 and 14, which I think are the most helpful,

the most important verses in our passage for today.

He says, everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again.

He says, but I'm offering you water that's going to quench your thirst,

the thirst of your soul, not just your body, your soul forever.

He spells out the problem. We keep like those sailors on those boats.

We're trying to drink things that are actually just making it worse.

And Jesus, frequently, he talks like this. As we move through the book of John,

we're going to see this again and again.

He's okay with pointing out to people that, hey, the life, the way that you're

living your life is broken.

You know it. You just have to stop. You have to pause for a moment and acknowledge it.

You're thirsty. and every well you're drinking from to try and satisfy you is failing you.

Can't you relate? I know I can.

What does the world around us tell us will satisfy our souls?

Maybe a nice house or fancy car, maybe a great spouse or success in our career

or the dream retirement.

But don't you see how those things fail to satisfy us?

Even the very best house or the best cars, the best career cannot fulfill the

void, the infinite void that's in our hearts.

But what happens many times is people get those things.

They get the great house. They get the great car. They get the spouse. They get success.

And they go, well, something must be wrong with this house, this car,

this career, this spouse.

Right? It's broken. It's not fulfilling me. And so what do they do?

If they have the means to, they go looking for another.

Maybe I need a better house. Maybe I need a better career. Maybe I need to get that promotion.

Maybe I chose the wrong path entirely. Maybe I need a new spouse.

If you've been around long enough, you know, deep down, you know,

it's impossible for anything on this earth to satisfy the deep longings in our souls.

And so, you know what we do? Let me just point to three things that I think

we do to try and fend that off.

One thing that we do is we try to numb ourselves with shallow wells.

There's a lot of different ways we try and do this. It might be a bowl of ice

cream every night and Netflix.

It might be living for the next weekend and your plans for the next weekend.

It could be alcohol or prescription drugs. It could be a number of ways that

we just try to numb ourselves so we don't feel that ache, that lack satisfaction.

And the result of all this numbing is that it actually...

It keeps us from being able to feel deeply about anything. You've probably felt that.

You've probably been in a situation where you know that you should feel elation.

And you're just kind of muted.

And you recognize it. If you slow down enough, you recognize it.

What is that? Why don't I feel more?

Why doesn't this stir me the way that it used to? It's the result of numbing

ourselves again and again and again.

That's one of the ways that we respond to that ache. The second thing I see

is that we blame ourselves.

We blame ourselves. If we'd only taken a different career path,

if we'd stayed in school longer or gotten into a different school,

or if we'd gone back to school when we had the chance, or if we hadn't blown

our shot at making it big, then we'd be happy.

If I had only married that person or hadn't married this person, we blame ourselves.

We blame ourselves for our decisions. We blame ourselves for all the failures.

And the result of that is it just leads us to self-hatred.

The third thing I see that we do is that we blame our lot in life.

It might be that you blame your parents, you blame your boss, You blame your kids.

You blame your spouse. You blame your bad luck. The result of all that,

blaming your lot in life, is that it just turns you cynical. It makes you depressed.

It makes people not really want to be around you anymore because of the kind

of person that cynicism makes you.

I think we've got to stop doing all of these things.

I don't think any of these things work. I don't think numbing ourselves is a

good solution. I don't think blaming ourselves is a good solution.

I don't think blaming our law in life is a good solution. I think we've got

to see that our problem is actually much bigger than any of these things.

What we really desire is infinitely greater than any of the things that we turn

to in this world for satisfaction.

The famous book by C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.

C.S. Lewis argues that every desire points to something real,

something real that exists for every desire in every creature.

It points to a corresponding object

so he talks about how creatures who

he says i'll just read you the quote creatures are

not born with desires unless satisfaction for

those desires exist a baby feels hunger well there is such a thing as food a

duckling wants to swim well there is such a thing as water men feel sexual desire

well there is such a thing as sex if i find in myself a desire which no experience

in this world can satisfy,

the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

I think he's actually onto something very true.

We all have deep, unquenchable thirsts for which we cannot seem to find the

solution, and the reason is because we were made for another world.

And Jesus comes saying, I have come from that other world.

I have the solution. I can give you water that will actually become in you a

spring, a well that wells up constantly to perpetually satisfy the thirst in you.

So you don't have to keep drinking from those wells that never satisfy.

Eternal life that Jesus is offering us is life reunited with God,

and it is the solution to the deep thirst of our souls. So that's what he's offering.

Now, the next point I want us to look at, why is Jesus prying?

Look at verses 15 through 19.

Verse 15, the woman said to him, sir, give me this water so that I'll not be

thirsty or have to come here to draw water.

She's still confused a little bit, but at least she's interested.

At least she's responding. At least she's saying, hey, give me some of that.

And I think if we were in this position and somebody does that,

we would have probably turned and said, okay, well, you're not quite getting it, but let me explain.

And we would have tried to kind of seal the deal, help them to understand the

gospel right that moment. But Jesus doesn't. And it's interesting.

Jesus does something. Once again, we don't expect, we wouldn't think he would,

we would do in that situation.

Verse 16, she's asking for water and he says,

go call your husband and come here and he knows exactly what he's doing if she's

asking for the water why distract her with a conversation about her love life

why dig why make her feel uncomfortable.

Is this a detour or is this actually the direct route to her heart,

And the answer is it's actually the direct route to her heart.

Jesus cuts straight to the heart and reveals the barrier to belief in him that

he knows must be dealt with in order for her to truly trust him.

And it's her sin. It's her shame.

It's the cistern that she's dug for herself.

For this woman to drink the water that Jesus offers, she must first acknowledge

the things that she's been running to, to try and quench her thirst her whole life.

She's been looking to relationships with men to satisfy her soul.

She needs to see that. And she needs to turn away from that in repentance.

The Lord saved me in college. It was between my sophomore and my junior year of college.

And man, I was running to, I was looking to satisfy my thirsty soul in all kinds

of ways that could not satisfy.

And I remember this is the first thing the Lord did.

He started to point those things out. He started to show me how empty they were.

Has he done that in your life? Has the Lord, maybe even right now, is he doing that?

Maybe even in this moment, he is showing you the things in your life that are

empty, that aren't going to satisfy you ever.

Remember John the Baptist, if you were with us earlier in the book of John,

John the Baptist calls Jesus the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Well, that means that he's going to die on a cross to pay the penalty for sin.

He's going to deal with the penalty for sin, but Jesus also deals with our enslavement to it.

He also sets people free from it, and that's what he's wanting to do for this woman.

He's wanting her to see the sin in her life.

Our sin can't be swept under the rug or else it will just erode our faith later.

So trusting Christ involves surrender. I remember as a college student,

as I prayed to the Lord after a year of wrestling with him, finally,

it felt like I was raising a white flag of surrender saying, okay, God, I'm in.

I'm in. I see how futile all my attempts are to satisfy my soul.

No one can drink of the living water that Jesus offers while they're still trying

to dig out cisterns that can't hold water.

And so faith in Jesus, it involves repentance.

It involves a conviction and a confession and a change.

And Jesus is graciously beginning that process for this Samaritan woman.

Your sin, no matter what it is, it is not worth keeping you from Christ.

At the end of the day, that's the realization we all have to have.

At the end of the day, until we turn to Christ, there's something or some things

that we are clinging to that have become precious to us.

And it's a shallow, it's an empty, it's a broken cistern that can hold no water.

So Jesus continues to pursue. He asks, go call your husband.

She says, I don't have one. You're right in saying that you have no husband.

And you've had five, you're living with your boyfriend now.

She says, sir, I see you're a prophet. Okay, she's moving in the right direction.

She's feeling uncomfortable. She changes the subject as an attempt to evade the topic of her sin.

And she asks him a question that she thinks is going to kind of end this discussion,

like agree to disagree, sort of a stalemate.

All right, well, you guys think that, and we think this, but we're not going

to be able to agree. That's what she's trying to do.

And Jesus gladly follows her into the topic of worship.

She says, our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem

is the place where you ought to worship.

And Jesus answers her, and he answers her in three parts.

First thing he says is, essentially, there's a day coming very soon,

and it'll be when Jesus is crucified and raised from the dead,

when the location of worship's not going to matter anymore.

And then the second part of it is he's affirming that the Jewish scripture is the authority.

Salvation is coming through the Jewish people, meaning that the Samaritans do

have their theology wrong.

And then the last part of it is, he says, the father is seeking worshipers.

He's hunting after people who will really worship him. That's what the father

wants. That's what he's after.

And that is actually what he is moving this woman to.

That's what he's been moving her toward all along. He wants to make her into

a worshiper of the one true God.

Why? This is the thing that will satisfy her soul.

We were all made to worship. And she was made to worship the one true God.

When we finally leave behind those broken cisterns and come to Jesus,

he makes us worshipers, worshipers of God. What is worship?

Worth-ship. It's ascribing worth to something.

We do this on a certain level with all kinds of things all the time.

We do this at a certain level when we rave about a restaurant that we found

with co-workers at work or with our friends.

We say, you gotta go check this place out. It's worth it, right? That's a type of this.

We do it when we talk about our kids or our grandkids and their accomplishments.

They're worth gloating over.

We do it when we show our friends a picture of a sunset from our vacation at

the beach. It's worth remembering. It's worth you seeing, right?

Worship. It's pointing to the worth of something. It's what we do when we see

something as worthy of attention, our attention, our admiration.

But only God is ultimately worthy of our attention.

Only God is worthy of our ultimate attention and admiration. That's worship.

Worthy of giving everything else to get him.

And when we drink from the fountain of living water, all our idols lose their appeal.

All those little things that we have a tendency to make ultimate in our lives,

they lose their appeal in the sight of who God is.

So the question for this woman and the question for all of us is,

do you worship God ultimately?

Do you worship him in spirit and in truth?

And in spirit, that means empowered by the Holy Spirit.

Have you been made alive by the Spirit of God?

Is the Spirit of God indwelling you? Is he stirring up admiration for the living God?

And in truth, in other words, Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

Worship in truth. It is worship in light of the Word made flesh, Son of God.

Do you come to the Father through true Jesus Christ that's worshiping him in truth.

The beginning of this sermon, the first part of the sermon, we looked at some

things that we could know about the Samaritan woman.

And we asked the question, who is the Samaritan woman?

But I want to come back to that question because there's another way to answer the question.

Who is this adulterous Samaritan woman with heretical theology looking to all

the wrong places to satisfy her soul.

I think John wants us to see she is us.

She is us. She is a type for the people of God.

Here's what I mean. Throughout the Old Testament, there are these stories about

people meeting wives at wells.

It happens over and over again. God meets Hagar when she runs into the wilderness.

And God meets her at a well. And.

Genesis 21. Isaac's wife, Rebekah, is met in a foreign land at a well.

Jacob's wife, Rachel, is met in a foreign land at a well.

Moses' wife, Zipporah, is met in a foreign land at a well.

So readers of this gospel, if they're familiar with the Old Testament reading

through John, might catch this literary echo.

And interestingly, right before this story, I mean, right before John chapter

four, in John chapter three, verse 29.

It says, John the Baptist says, the one who has the bride is the bridegroom.

And it primes us to think, who is the bride of Christ?

That should be on our minds as if we're reading this through as we get into chapter four.

And chapter 4 begins with Jesus sitting in a foreign land, Samaria, at a well.

We know Jesus didn't ever marry.

I'm not saying that Jesus was looking for a woman to marry. I'm saying,

I think John might be pointing us to something deeper.

The bride of Christ, according to Ephesians chapter 5, is the church,

Ephesians 5 · chapter mention

the redeemed people of God.

That's us. That's us.

And if we were picking a bride for Jesus, we would pick a pure,

righteous, faithful bride.

But the Samaritan woman represents the kind of bride that Jesus comes for.

One who's been with other lovers, with a broken past filled with idolatry and adultery and guilt.

Jesus comes not for a pure bride, but for an impure bride, and then he makes

her pure through his sacrifice.

Jesus came, in other words, to save people like us. We're the Samaritan woman

in the story, dying of thirst, drinking salt water out of desperation.

Jesus offers us living water that will fully and finally satisfy the longings

of our souls if we'll come to him and ask him for a drink.

How, let me just close with this, how do we drink this water?

Friends, it is so simple that even a child can do it.

We're going to celebrate the baptisms of a couple children here in just a minute.

In fact, Jesus says, unless you become like little children,

you can't enter into the kingdom of heaven.

You know, as adults, the older we get, the harder time we have of just trusting,

just believing, become jaded, cynical.

And Jesus says, until you become like a child again and say, all right, I trust you.

I trust you. I don't have to be in control all the time.

Until we do that, we can't believe. But if, if we do that, we can come to Jesus.

We can drink living water by believing in him, by trusting in him,

by trusting that what he did for us on the cross, by taking our place,

by dying for our sin and his burial and resurrection to offer us new life,

that He's done everything that we need to be right with God,

and we can be forgiven, and we can be restored into relationship with our Creator.

And just like the Samaritan woman, we don't have to have all of our theology

perfectly figured out, ironed out.

We just need to see Jesus, and we need to come to Him.

So, we turn from our sin, those broken cisterns that can hold no water.

We turn over the control of our lives to him.

And when we do, everyone who has knows the experience of the freedom and the

joy and the peace that comes.

So this morning, will you come to him?

Will you come to Jesus and drink,

drink this living water and enjoy the eternal life that he offers you?

Pray together. Lord, we thank you for this story.

We thank you that it's true and that we can trust it, that your word is reliable.

I pray, Father, for every person in this room that you would meet us where we

are, each person, and that you would minister to us and grant to us the gift

of faith that we might have life in your name. And it's in your name we pray. Amen.