All You Who Thirst

I would imagine that all of us have received over our lifetime invitations to a lot of different events. You probably have received invitations to weddings, baby showers, graduations, birthday parties, dinner parties, and the list could go on and on. Sometimes we receive these invitations and we’re very excited for them. It’s an event we want to go to. Even if we have something on our calendar already, we will change that because we want to go to this event. This is something that matters to us. Then we get invitations to other things that we are looking for any and every excuse as to why we can’t go to that thing. It is something that we are not interested at all, and we begin to makeup stuff, “My goldfish has a broken fin, and I gotta stay home and nurse him back to health,” or “I gotta rearrange my sock drawer that day.” There are things that we’re invited to that we absolutely want to be a part of; there’s other things that we’re invited to that we really aren’t interested in at all.

In the gospel of Luke, Jesus actually at one time told a story of a man who was throwing a party, a dinner party. He sent his servants out to invite the guests; and those guests, one at a time, began to come up with reasons why it was that they weren’t going to be able to attend. One said, “I bought some land, I need to go check it out.” Another said, “I bought some oxen, I need to go and test them.” Another said, “I just got married, so I’m not coming.” One by one they declined the invitation. That man, in his anger, sent his servants out to the highways and the byways to invite anybody that was willing to come because he wanted his house full.

Jesus, here in this passage, is going to extend an invitation. It’s not the only time that He extended an invitation. On multiple occasions throughout His ministry we find Him extending an invitation either to an individual or sometimes to a whole crowd. In fact, we could really look at His entire ministry as one big invitation to humanity, that they would come to Jesus, that they would find forgiveness, that they would find life in a relationship with God, that they would one day be able to go be with God in heaven for all of eternity. That is an open invitation, and here that invitation could not be made more clear in the verses that we’re going to take a look at.

I want you to follow along with me beginning in John 7:37, where it says, “On the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, ‘If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. 38 He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’ 39 But this He spoke concerning the Spirit, whom those believing in Him would receive; for the Holy Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.” I would imagine for many of us these verses sound very familiar—they are ones that are often quoted, a story that maybe we have read ourselves on multiple occasions—but I want to give some background on the time in which Jesus actually uttered these words because it adds significance to the meaning of what He was trying to get across.

At this time in Jesus’ ministry, He was growing in recognition. The news about this itinerant preacher was going throughout Israel, and many had very strong opinions about Him. In fact, if you look down in verse 12, it says, “And there was much complaining among the people concerning Him. Some said, ‘He is good;’ others said, ‘No, on the contrary, He deceives the people.’”

In my Bible, I’m reading out of the New King James Version, it uses the word “complaining” as if the people were complaining about Jesus. That really is not a very good translation of the Greek word. In other translations of the Bible it will say, “They were murmuring.” Others were saying that they were whispering, but the idea that is being given is the fact that they were keeping their conversations on the down low. We know the reason because in verse 13 it tells us that they were fearful of the Jews. That meant the Jewish leaders that were rejecting Christ and were in many ways persecuting or at least resisting those that had become followers of Christ definitely denouncing those that spoke of Him favorably, so those conversations that were happening were whispered. They were said behind closed doors because nobody wanted to bring the wrath of the Jewish leaders upon themselves.

The opinions were varied. There were some people that said, “This Guy’s a good dude. This is someone that we ought to be listening to. We ought to pay attention to His words. He speaks like no one else has ever spoken to us.” Others were saying, “No, I think He’s more of a deceiver. I think He’s manipulating us. I think that He has a false motive.” And, it wasn’t just the crowds that had these opinions about Jesus, even Jesus’ own brothers had strong opinions about Him. In fact, they’re talked about here in verses 3-5. I won’t go back to read those, but I will summarize what is being said.

Jesus and His brothers lived up in the Galilee region, which was in the northern part of Israel. His brothers began to urge Jesus to go down to Jerusalem. Why? Because Jerusalem was the place of the "movers and the shakers.” Those were the people of influence. That’s where the big crowds were, and if He wanted to make a name for Himself, they said, “That’s the place You ought to go.” I mean, if you wanted to make a name for yourself today, you don’t hang out in Tulsa, Oklahoma, you’re going to go to New York City or Los Angeles. You’re going to go to a place where you can have a bigger crowd and a bigger impact. His brothers were urging Him, “Go down to Jerusalem, if you want to make a name for Yourself.”

The passage tells us that they did this not because they believed in Jesus, what it looks like is that they were mocking Him, “You think You’re a big deal? Why are You hanging out up here? Why don’t You go down where the people are, if You think that You’re something special,” because at that time they did not believe in Him. Suffice it to say though that everybody was talking about Him. Whether it was favorable or whether it was critical, everywhere in every place, if Jesus was known, Jesus was being talked about.

Why did His brothers say that this was the time for Him to go down to Jerusalem? Because you’ll notice in verse 2 it tells us that the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles was at hand. This was one of the major feasts that the Jews celebrated every year. In fact, it was one of the top three feasts that all Jewish men were required to go to Jerusalem to celebrate. No matter where they were from, on these occasions, they needed to figure out a way to get down to Jerusalem to be a part of the celebration. Those three were: The Feast of Passover, which, by the way, is happening this week. Friday night through Saturday is Passover for our Jewish friends. While we’re in the process of celebrating Easter, they will be celebrating Passover. Fifty days after Passover is the Feast of Pentecost. That also was celebrated in the spring, and it was a feast that all of the Jewish men needed to come to.

In the fall came the Feast of Tabernacles. In Hebrew, they call it Sukkot, which means booths or dwellings, and it made reference to the way that they celebrated this feast, and I’m going to get to that here in just a second. It was not a day-long feast, it was a week-long celebration. And, I say, “celebration” because of all of the Jewish feasts and celebrations, probably the Feast of Tabernacles was more celebratory than all of the others. Why was that? Because it was a celebration of God’s past faithfulness to them, looking back at the time that their forefathers were in the wilderness for those forty years. That was a harsh environment for them to live. It was not easy to provide for your families out there in the wilderness, yet for forty years, God provided for all of the needs of all of His people that were wandering through that wilderness. When they were hungry, He provided manna from heaven, and at times, quail for them to eat. When they were thirsty, He allowed water to come pouring out of a rock. Their sandals did not wear out. God protected them from their enemies, so in part, the Feast of Tabernacles was a celebration and recognition of how faithful God was and how He provided for them in the past.

It was also a recognition of God’s faithfulness in their own time period. You see, this was a feast, as I said, that took place in the fall, which was during the harvest season for all of those farmers, so it is happening just after they have been able to harvest their fields, so it was a celebration of recognizing that, “God is providing for our needs. He has allowed the water to rain down from heaven that has watered our crops so our crops could grow, and now we have food to eat.” Part of the celebration was keeping an eye on the past, God was faithful in the past. Part of it was keeping an eye on their present, God is still faithful to us right now, so at the Feast of Tabernacles, tens of thousands of Jewish men would converge in Jerusalem to spend a week essentially camping out.

I made reference to the fact that this Feast of Tabernacles, or Sukkot, was a reference to booths or dwellings. They would make tents, which aren’t tents in our idea of what a tent is. Our tents today could be canvas or nylon or polyester, back then it was taking palm branches or branches of trees and basically making ‘lean-to’s’ or some sort of a makeshift shelter that they would live in for an entire week. Why? Because they were identifying with their forefathers who literally lived in such shelters for those forty years in the wilderness. It was a week-long campout with not only those Jews that were from the region, but also from wherever they had moved to. Even beyond just the Jews, there were those that were Gentiles that maybe had converted to Judaism that would participate in this as well.

If the Feast of Pentecost is any indication on how far and wide these people came from, we read in Acts 2 on the day of Pentecost that there were people that were Parthians, Medes, Elamites, people from Mesopotamia, Judaea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, Libya, Cyrene, Rome, Cretes, and Arabians to boot. We’re talking about a lot of guys, from a lot of different places, all converging in one location for a week-long period where they would be having a campout to celebrate God’s faithfulness.

One of the most significant parts of this celebration, what happened every day of the feast, where the priests would take these golden pitchers and walk down to the Pool of Siloam and dip these pitchers into the pool, fill them with water, carry them back to the temple area where the altar was. As they are pouring the water out upon the altar, they would quote from Isaiah 12:3, where it says, “Therefore with joy you will draw water From the wells of salvation.” The pouring of the water was to symbolize how God had provided water for them out of the rock in the wilderness because literally without that water they would’ve perished there in the wilderness. They had a great need, and that need was for water. God saw the need, and God supplied the need. They had much reason to celebrate.

But it draws our attention to something that I think we need to consider. I think that in our day and age we really take water for granted because it is so easily accessible to all of us. We’ve grown so accustomed to water being readily available to us that we don’t realize maybe how difficult it was in generations past, especially during biblical times. I mean, I would imagine that all of us are living in a home that has running water. Am I correct? Yes. Because it is within our house, we don’t have to go anywhere to get it. In fact, probably you have running water in most of the rooms in your house. You don’t have to walk but ten or fifteen steps before you’re at a faucet or a shower head or a hose spigot. We have it all over the house, we have it every day, and all we need to do is turn a knob and water begins to flow. We not only have cold water, we can make it warm, we can make it hot. Because we have it so readily, we don’t really think that much about it at all.

I was thinking about this, and I was going through all of the rooms in my own house and realizing that I have over twenty sources of water throughout my house, whether it be a toilet or a sink or a washing machine hookup or a hose spigot, we have a lot of them, and because of that we don’t really think about water too much—until we don’t have water.

Where my wife and I live, we’re not on city water, we’re on a well. When we built our house, we had to have a well dug. Our well is 480 ft down into the ground before they could actually find water, and we have a pump that pulls that water up and brings it into the house. Usually it’s no issue whatsoever. We have water just like you have water, until one day we didn’t have water. One morning I woke up, went into the bathroom, I was going to brush my teeth and turned on the faucet only to hear some gurgling sound and a couple drips come out, that was it. I thought, Well, that’s weird. I went into the kitchen to turn on the faucet there, and nothing came out at all. I went up to our well pump and found that it was not working. Long story short, we were going to need to get our well pump replaced, and it was going to take three to four days before that was going to happen. What that meant is we were going to have to go without water for three or four days. That doesn’t sound like that big of a deal until you’ve gotta go three or four days without water. You start forgetting the fact that you don’t have water. You literally will walk up to a faucet and try to turn it on, and it won’t go on, and you realize, “Oh yeah, we have no water.”

You can walk into the bathroom and do your business and then flush the toilet and it flushes fine, but then the tank does not fill back up, so you realize, “I can’t use this toilet again. Honey, how many toilets do we have in the house?” “We have four.” “Well, we have three now.” We had to go take showers at the gym. We had to go to the grocery store and stock up on gallons and gallons and gallons of water. It’s not until you are out of water that you realize how dependent upon water you actually are.

Now, back in biblical times, they knew how dependent they were on water. There wasn’t anybody that had running water in their house. Such technology did not exist, and if you were going to choose to live somewhere, you had to really think through, Is there what I need in that location that is going to allow me to live? And one of the main things was a water source. Is there a river? Is there a stream? Is there a lake? If none of those things are in existence, you’ve got to try and dig a well. If you do not find water, as you dig that well, you’re probably not going to be able to live there, you’ve gotta go someplace else because you cannot live without water. So, that is the process that they went through back in that day in order to even find a location where they could live. These are things that we don’t think about today, but they sure thought about it back then.

What that teaches us is that those Jews, as they are celebrating the gift of God, which was the water flowing out of a rock, and the fact that He gave rain so that their crops could grow, was truly a gift from God. It was a reminder to them that as dependent on water as they were, they were also dependent upon God. I think that was the point is that God created us for Himself, that we are to find our life in Him, and our need for water is simply a reflection of our absolute need for God. Scripture bears this out as we can read in the psalms of the psalmist testifying about their need for God in such words like in Psalm 42:2, “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.” In Psalm 63:1, “O God, You are my God; Early will I seek You; My soul thirsts for You,” so they understood that as their body craved water in order to live, so their soul craved God in order to live. The thing about that is if you don’t find your source in God, you will have to find it somewhere else.

In Jeremiah’s time, Jeremiah was called by God to go to the nation of Israel and preach to them whatever message God had placed within Jeremiah’s heart. It’s interesting that when God called Jeremiah, he was a very young man. It’s believed by scholars that he likely was a teenager at the time. In Jeremiah 1 is when God placed that call upon this young man’s life, and Jeremiah didn’t want the job. He said, “I’m just a kid. I’m just a young man. I don’t think that I’m the guy.” But the Lord said, “You are the one, and you will speak to My nation the things that I tell you to speak.” In Jeremiah 2 is the very first sermon that Jeremiah would ever preach. In that sermon, God speaks through Jeremiah about the problem that He saw in the lives of His people. You don’t need to turn there, but if you want to maybe jot this down, you could look at verse 13 because God points out two faults that He sees in His people. This is what He says, “For My people have committed two evils,”—here’s the first one—“They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters,”—and then the second one—“And hewn themselves cisterns—broken cisterns that can hold no water.”

Why was God saying this to those Jews back in that day? Because God had rescued them out of their slavery in Egypt, had brought them into the Promised Land, had given them His word with the intention that they would be fully reliant upon God and that God would be there to meet every need that they had. But that generation had turned their backs on God. They had forgotten God. In fact, they had gone after other gods, the gods that were worshipped by the other nations around them, which in fact are not gods at all. They were false gods, made up gods, gods that were made in the image of the men who created them; yet the Jews found those gods more appealing than the living God who not only created them but has been their provider all the days of their lives.

On top of that, not only had they forgotten God, they had neglected God’s Commandments, so they were not living according to the Commandments of the Lord, they were not worshiping God as they should, so now God likens what they were doing to these two evils—they had left the “ . . . fountain of living waters,” and have replaced God with “ . . . broken cisterns that can hold no water.”

Here’s the thing is that if you abandon God, who is the source of life, you have to come up with some sort of a substitute to take His place. If we don’t worship God, which we are intended to do, God created us to do that very thing; if we do not worship God, we must find a replacement because there is an inner need within all of us, a “thirst” for God. If we are ignorant of that “thirst” or we are neglectful of that “thirst,” we will try and fill that “thirst,” satisfy that “thirst,” in some other way. The illustration that God is drawing for them is if they had left a living fountain, which is a constant flow of water which is fresh—it’s alive, it’s clean, a good source of water—and they have chosen instead to carve out for themselves a cistern…now, maybe you don’t understand what a cistern is so let me explain that a little bit.

If you live in an area where you don’t have a water source, let’s say that there is no stream, there is no lake, there is no river; and maybe you’ve dug a well and not found any water, you have one other alternative, that is, to build a cistern. A cistern basically was a hole in the ground. It was either carved out of solid rock or it was an area created with stones or masonry in order to make a pit so that when it did rain, you could funnel the water into that hole or that pit in the ground that would become a container for the water that you needed. If you had a rainy season, and the water flowed into your cistern, you would have water until that water ran out.

Here is the problem: A cistern, though it may hold water, it is a completely inferior source of water to a fountain of living water. If you have a living spring that is near your home that is constantly bubbling up fresh water from the ground, that is cleaner, that is much more refreshing source of water than in a cistern. Why? Because whatever water flows into a cistern is going to stagnate in a period of time. It’s just water sitting there.

If you’ve ever had water around your house, maybe in a kid’s pool that was left alone for too long, or a bucket that was on the side of the house that it rained in in January, but now here you are in April and it’s still has water in it, you might want to take a look in that bucket because you’re going to see some wiggly stuff all over. You’re going to see the larvae of, chances are, mosquitoes or some other critters that are squirming their way through that water. It’s not clean anymore.

That’s what happens when you have a cistern. It’ll be maybe decent water for a little while, but after a while the water is not that great anymore. In fact, with a constant flow of rain going into your cistern, it is going to begin to accumulate mud on the bottom of that cistern that you’re going to have to contend with as well.

In fact, later in the book of Jeremiah, by the way, he’s got enemies, and his enemies wanted rid of him; so they, at one point, threw him into a cistern, and the Scripture tells us that his legs sank into the mire in the bottom of that cistern. It kind of draws a graphic picture for us what the water must’ve been like in a cistern such as what he was thrown into.

Here is what God is saying, “Why would you leave a living spring for, at best, a cistern with stagnant water, or at worst,” as He describes it, “a broken cistern that could hold no water?” Can you imagine spending much time creating a cistern for yourself so that you would have water when it did rain only to go out to your cistern after some heavy rains and look down hoping to see a whole lot of water, that’s going to provide your needs, and not see any water at all; and then find that there is a crack in the bottom of that cistern and all the water that flowed into it has simply dissipated into the ground beneath? You have nothing at all? That was the picture that God was drawing.

The people should have found their satisfaction in God, but they decided that they would try and find their satisfaction somewhere else, and God is telling them, “Whatever your source that you’re looking in is an inferior source at best, and it is an empty source at worst. It is not going to satisfy.” You see, the Jews that Jeremiah was sent to, God loved them enough to tell them the truth, and that truth is, “You’ve forsaken Me, your source; and when you forsake Me, you’ve got to get filled somehow. However you’re filling yourself, it is far inferior to what I offer you.”

In John 4, we get the story of the woman at the well, which I know many of us are familiar with. It’s a story about this woman who every day came out to the well to draw water. She would be able to draw enough water to supply her needs for that particular day, but by the next day she was out of water, so she would go back to that well. Again, she would draw water, and it would satisfy for a little while, but then the bucket would be empty, so she would have to go back again. That was a daily routine—every day grab the bucket, go to the well, drop the bucket in the well, pull up the bucket, use that water, run out of that water, I need to go back, I need to get water. Really, that routine was descriptive of her life because she was a woman that was searching for love, she was searching for satisfaction, she was searching for purpose, but she was looking for all of those things in a relationship with a man. She had been in relationships with many men, which all turned into failure. It never met the real need that she had.

There in the story in John 4 she meets a Man by the name of Jesus who says, “If you keep coming back to this well, you will thirst again. Woman, you keep coming back to the same well, and this well is never going to satisfy you. This well is never going to meet your needs,” and in the conversation she began to realize that Jesus was speaking more than just about that water that was coming out of the ground in her bucket. He was speaking to her about her life. As it was with that woman, as it was with the Jews back in Jeremiah’s time, there are still many, many people in our world that are doing the very same thing. They have forsaken God, and when you forsake the living source, you have to find another source. You have to find something in this world that is going to satisfy your heart, your soul; something that is going to fill you and make you feel like your life has some value, some worth, something to look forward to.

People today even are searching to fill that void in their life that only God can fill, but if you’re not finding it in God, you’ll find it somewhere else. There’s a myriad of things in this world that the world will offer people promising fun and happiness, excitement and joy, that might last for a period of time, but then they wake up the next morning and they’re empty again. They realize they need to go back. They need to go back to that source. Maybe the next time it will be better. Maybe the next guy or the next relationship will be the right one. Maybe the next high will really do it for me. Maybe another zero at the end of the money in my bank account will make me feel like I’ve arrived. Maybe that next car upgrade, and on and on it goes with people’s pursuits trying to fill a void that only God can fill.

Jesus said to that woman, “If you keep drinking from this well, you will thirst again,” but He went on to say, “but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give them will never thirst.” And, she said, “Give me that water.”

That brings us back to our passage here in John 7. The Feast of Tabernacles is happening. Every day of that feast these priests are going to the Pool of Siloam, filling up their golden pitchers, bringing them back to the altar, pouring them out on that altar, quoting Isaiah about the joy of salvation, and the next day they do it again, and the next day they do it again. But then we get to verse 37, “On the last day, that great day of the feast,” we are at the final day of this celebration. Remember, again, that there are thousands of people that are there in Jerusalem at this particular time participating in the Feast of Tabernacles. Because it is the last day, many of them the next day are going to pack up their belongings and head back to wherever they live.

But Jesus is in their midst. Jesus is there on that last day. And what’s interesting is that on the last day the celebration was a little bit different than on the previous days. On the last day, when the priest got their golden pitchers filled, they would bring them back to the altar, but before pouring them out, they would walk around the altar seven times. Only after the seventh time would they pour out on that altar, and then they would read from Isaiah 44:3 this time, a different passage, “For I will pour water on him who is thirsty, And floods on the dry ground; I will pour My Spirit on your descendants, And My blessing on your offspring.”

I don’t know for sure because the passage does not tell us exactly when Jesus cried out there in verse 37, but I believe that it was right as these priests are pouring out this water quoting Isaiah 44 about if you are thirsty that Jesus cried out there in verse 37, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. 38 He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.”

I want you to see one maybe really small detail that is mentioned here. This is one of the indicators, I think, that every Word of God is inspired by God, that each word has its purpose, and God is meaningful when He uses certain words because it tells us in verse 37 that, “ . . . Jesus stood and cried out . . . .” I want you to know because it’s the opposite of the way things are in our culture is that back in that day a teacher would not stand when he or she taught, he would sit rather than stand. We see that when Jesus gave His Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5, it tells us that Jesus was seated, “ . . . and when He was seated His disciples came to Him. 2 Then He opened His mouth and taught them, saying,” and began to give the Sermon on the Mount. But Jesus was seated.

Here it tells us that Jesus was standing. Why does it tell us that? Because Jesus is not teaching us something, He’s proclaiming something. You see, there’s a difference between a teacher and a herald. A herald was one who had an announcement to make to the city. They didn’t have cell phones back then that would give them alerts on their phone. They didn’t have e-mail. They didn’t have text messaging, those types of things. If the king of a kingdom needed to get a message to his people, he would send out a herald who would go into the town square and stand in the town square and proclaim out with a loud voice to as many as he could possibly reach with his voice what the message of the king was. What it seems here is that’s exactly what Jesus is doing. He’s not functioning as a teacher, He’s functioning as a herald making a proclamation. He is announcing, He is inviting, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink.”

Notice also that the message went out to “anyone.” This was not just for the religious people that were there. It was also for the down and outers that may have been there. It was also for any of the foreigners that happened to be there in Jerusalem at that particular time. The message was going out to all, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink.” It was very clear that what Jesus was doing was inviting them into a relationship with Himself, much like when we recite John 3:16, the “whosoever.” It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn't matter where you’re from. It doesn't matter what you have done. The message goes out to you. If you have sinned, you can be forgiven. If you’re broken, you can be made whole. If you’re thirsty, “ . . . come to Me and drink” because only Jesus can satisfy the deepest need of every human being. He is the only One that can forgive. He’s the only One that can give eternal life because He’s the only One who gave His life to save us, but we must come and drink.

Notice what He says. There’s three verbs really there in that one statement: thirsts, come, and drink. “If anyone thirsts,” you qualify as a thirsty person, you need to come and you need to drink. That word “drink” I think is a synonym for believe and receive. Why do I say that? Because the very next statement that Jesus makes, “He who believes in Me.” It’s not just enough to show up, you need to drink. We have the old saying, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”

There may be somebody that is here tonight by invitation. Maybe you have a neighbor that invited you to be here, maybe a friend, a coworker or something, “Hey, why don’t you come to church with me tonight,” and here you are. You’re here by that invitation. You came. But you need to drink, which means you need to believe and receive. Maybe you’re a person who has been searching. You’ve tried just about everything that this world has to offer, yet still you wake up in the morning saying, “Okay, what am I going to do today to fill that hole?” Because every day has become a pursuit of something that is going to be the ultimate, it’s going to satisfy, when in all reality only God can satisfy the soul. We can have a full bank account. We can have a terrific family. We can have a job that we love, and we can have an empty soul because God is absent. “He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.”

John finishes with a little commentary. These are not the words of Jesus, but these are the words of John who is commenting on what had just transpired because he was the author of the gospel of John. He says, “But this He spoke”—Jesus—“concerning the Spirit, whom those believing in Him would receive; for the Holy Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.” The “living water” that Jesus was making reference to was the Holy Spirit.

In Acts 2 was when the Holy Spirit would fall down upon the believers because it was after Jesus had been glorified. It was after Jesus had been crucified, buried, resurrected, and then ascended back into heaven; and you remember the promise that Jesus gave to His disciples, “Hang out in Jerusalem for the Promise of the Father, for not many days from now you will receive power to be My witnesses in this world.” In Acts 2, the Spirit of God fell upon those disciples, and ever since then the Spirit is the fountain of water that is in every believer because the Bible tells us it’s the Spirit that washes and regenerates us. It is the Spirit who baptizes us into the body of Christ all because of what Jesus did for us on the cross.

Do you want your life to be full? You’re not going to find it in the things of this world. You will only find it in a relationship with God. If you do thirst, you need to come to Him, and you need to drink from Him, that is, to believe and receive Jesus as Lord and Savior. If that applies to you tonight, maybe you do find yourself in here knowing that you have been searching elsewhere, but now realize you need to find your source in God. He is here. He is willing to receive you, forgive you, accept you, give you eternal life; but you need to turn your life over to Him.

I’m going to give you an opportunity to do that here in just a second, but I have one other thing I want to point out to those of us that are believers, that we know the Lord. Notice Jesus’ words at the end of verse 38. Let me read all of verse 38, but focus on the second part of the statement, “He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” Notice the way that He words it is, “ . . . out of his heart will flow rivers of”—this—“living water.”

Sometimes I think that we make the mistake of misreading what Jesus is saying. We realize that He will satisfy the thirsty, but we see ourselves more as a bucket that Jesus is going to fill my life, my bucket, with this “living water.” That’s not what He is saying. He’s saying, “ . . . out of his heart will flow rivers of living water,” not into your heart will flow rivers of water but out of your heart which means that it’s not just to focus on us being filled with the water that Jesus wants to give us in order to satisfy us, it is that we then become a source that is overflowing that now is touching the people that are around us.

It is an overflow of the Christian’s life. It’s not just to be contained within ourselves, it is to overflow from our lives so that it’s impacting other people because you know thirsty people. You know people in your life that are searching for something in this life that is worth living for, and they’re trying everything else but God. Let Jesus be the overflow of your heart towards them so that though they are thirsty, they might maybe see how satisfied you are, how your thirst has been quenched because of your relationship with God. It may just be what they need to see in order for them to come to the source as well. Let’s pray.