Worship Jesus, Open a Spring
12 Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.”
13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again,
14 but 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.”
John 4:12–14 (ESV)
37 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.
38 Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’ ”
39 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.
40 When they heard these words, some of the people said, “This really is the Prophet.”
John 7:37–40 (ESV)
You can’t just copy and paste parables together and claim they all mean the same thing, but in this case, you can. When Jesus told the woman at the well that He could give out living water that would be like a spring welling up to eternal life, He was talking about the Holy Spirit.
Good ole John! In case you missed it the first time, he tells another event about Jesus and explains more about this Living Water business.
Not only is Jesus better than Jacob, but He is also going to be fully glorified by God. That’s a big deal. God doesn’t go about glorifying people much in the Bible.
It’s not a thing. Ever.
Only God gets the glory. It’s His glory and He doesn’t share it much. When His glory first filled Solomon’s Temple, the priests ran for their lives because they thought they were all going to die.
So John mentions two things in here that would blow His readers’ minds. One is that Jesus, as the Son of God, was going to be glorified by God. Second, the Holy Spirit that was upon and in and with Jesus was coming to all of His believers.
All of us who would believe in Jesus.
And while it’s hard to explain what the Holy Spirit in your life is like, one way that Jesus liked to explain it was a spring of living water. They didn’t have the Evansville Water and Sewer Utility in Jesus’ day. (May God bless every one of those folks!) There were rivers where you could get some muddy water right next to your cows. There were cisterns that held religiously non-valid water left from the rain running off of the streets.
But if you found a spring, you found a good thing. Clean, often cool water gushing out of the ground non-stop. There is no faucet or control, it just keeps on flowing and washing. It has to go somewhere, and it will.
And it will keep on flowing.
As we worship Jesus, we seek to find out what that spring of living water in our souls is like. Oftentimes, we find out.
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