Looking in the Wrong Places

need to always remember the remarkable work that gets put into everything that we're doing here and that we do this together and it's not just one of us standing up front with a microphone. So thanks to all of you guys. Appreciate you. And thanks to you guys for being here. Good to see your faces. Happy Sunday. Glad you're joining us at Midtown. All right y 'all, it is spring break 2013. 11 years ago. Yeah, 2013. Something about 2013 hit somebody hard back there. I hit the milestone age of 18 that year, which meant I was filled to the brim with maturity and self -control and intelligence and wisdom.

Now truthfully, as is the case with many male human beings that age, I had one priority on my mind. I wanted to impress a girl. For the sake of anonymity, we'll call her Emily. Yeah, yeah. Clearly it worked. She stuck around. I did something. Or I mean, maybe it's just pity. Either way. We had been dating at this point in 2013 for just a few months and we planned a trip to one of the most amazing spots in Arizona. It's a hidden gem. It's called Fossil Springs. Anybody been to Fossil Springs? Arizonans? Yeah, a few of you.

Oh man, it's just tucked in the hills outside Payson. And when I say hidden gem, I mean it. The trailhead starts here. It looks like this. Just kind of desolate, desertous, rocky terrain. It's hot most of the year. And it's honestly, when you get there, kind of disappointing. Like, what's going to end up here? And then you keep hiking down and down and down. And it doesn't seem like things get better. The whole trail is pretty much indirect sunlight. And it all looks like this. Rocky, desertous, desolate.

But eventually, if you keep going and keep going, you get to this. A beautiful, beautiful creek and waterfall open up. You walk multiple miles and suddenly you can swim. You can cliff jump. There are beautiful fish you can see. It's this hidden natural wonder in an otherwise desolate area. And that's why we went. We got a group of people together. 2013. We arrived at the trailhead. And remember, I'm 18. My brain's not fully developed at this point. Right?

And so I think the most important thing about this hike is impressing this girl. I have to show that I'm a strong and capable man or whatever I thought would impress Emily on this trip. So water? I mean, come on. I'm an athlete. Right? I'm strong and capable. I brought one little plastic water bottle for our hike in direct sunlight walking down. And it didn't take long before thirst set in. Right? I started to get that cotton mouth thing where you're like, your tongue is super dry. I was leading like a brilliant trail guide that I wasn't. And pretty soon, I ran out of water.

But the interesting thing is everyone else on the hike underestimated things as well. So we were out of water by the time we got to the bottom. Real problem for us. But when we got there, we get to the waterfall. And it brought us a lot of joy. Distracted us from our thirst. We jumped into the water. We swam. We played. We enjoyed time together. But then eventually, we realized we've got to get out of here. We've got

to get out of here. We're stuck. In the direct sun. In the desert. Without water. We were stuck. And at this point, one of my good friends who was there, his name is Kyler. He's now a firefighter. So actually a strong and capable man. Like somebody who understands these things. And he remembered from his research beforehand, research beforehand, smart dude. He remembered that this whole creek was fed by a natural perennial spring. And so he thought, well, if I follow, if we all follow the creek back up to the spring, we can fill up our waters there. This is natural spring water and so we do. We trace the creek looking for the spring back. And so we get to the top of the waterfall. And we see a lot of rushing water that looks clear and clean. But you know that that's been traveling a while. It's probably collected some junk that you don't want to ingest or drink. So we keep moving. That water is not going to be good enough. It's dirty. We keep moving. And the creek keeps thinning out and thinning out and thinning out. It slows down. It gets tepid. It's water. But we're like, that's not the water we want to drink. Right? And as this is happening, I'm losing confidence. I haven't had water for like over an hour at this point. And I'm like, I'm thirstier than I've ever been. And I didn't think we'd ever get to solve this problem. I thought we'd be stuck down there and we'd be the like stupid college kids on the news who have to get hellevacked out of the place. Right? Like I was like, this is not what I want. But eventually, we arrived at this amazing little alcove that stuck out like a sore thumb in this desolate part of Arizona. It was this canopy of dark green desert trees leaning together. And they created this sort of protective awning from the sun. And the bushes on the ground were well fed. There were squirrels and bunnies jumping around. And right in the center of that alcove, welling up from the ground perpetually, was the spring. Fossil spring. Real water. Clean water. Sustaining water was right in front of us. Bubbling up endlessly. And so we all collapsed at the spring in joy. Right? And the water kept coming. We filled up our water bottles and the water kept coming. We drank and drank and drank and drank. And the water kept coming. We had made it past the deficient sources. We had made it past the tepid water. The water that wasn't good to drink. And we found a real lasting spring. And I remember our hike out, as challenging as it was, heading uphill after we were all very tired, we all had this abundant joy in us because we had found this amazing spring. It was this awesome experience for us together. And it gave us the strength to navigate our rocky hike back. And this was certainly an adventure for Emily and I and a pivotal moment in our relationship. But beyond that adventure, I think it's also an apt metaphor for so many of our lives. See, the truth is, all of us, in our own ways, are thirsty. I'm not just talking about the thirst that sends people to Tinder or Bumble. That is a type of thirst that is connected. But more than that.

talking about that gnawing sense in us. That inconsolable sense of longing that exists in each and every one of us. We have a deep inner desire for some unnameable something. We're all wandering a rocky and desertous world looking for lasting peace, or joy, or meaning, or purpose. We're all thirsty for that. Frederick Bietner describes it this way in his book On Longing. He says, Our stories are all stories of longing. We long for a good self to be and for good work to do. We long to become human in a world that tempts us always to be less than human or looks to us to be more. We long to be alive and to be known. We long to be part of a newcosmos. We long to have hope. We long to love and be loved. And in a world where it's often hard to believe in much of anything, we long to believe in something holy and beautiful and life -transcending that will give meaning and purpose to the lives we live. The word longing comes from the same root as the word long, in the sense of length in either time or space, and also the word belong, so that in its full richness, to long suggests to yearn for a long time for something that is a long way off and something that we feel we belong to and that belongs to us. We are longing, thirsty people, and the truth is, whether implicitly or explicitly, all of our choices and behaviors flow from this longing. We are people who rush around busy lives, constantly chasing satisfaction for our longing, quenching for our thirst. In the U .S., we love to do this through material possessions. Perhaps more than any other culture in history, we love our stuff. We just talked about this a couple weeks ago in a series. We love our stuff. We love our stuff. We love our stuff. We love our stuff. In a sermon on materialism, there's a term that psychologists in the U .S. are using to describe American spending habits now. They're calling it retail therapy. Sixty percent of Americans say that if they could just buy one more thing, they'd be happy. Retail therapy. For just three easy payments of $19 .99, you can have the life you're looking for. But despite having more access to stuff than any culture in history, but despite our comforts not having satisfied our deep longing, we continue. And study after study shows the result is a culture that's more exhausted, more tired, more empty, more anxious than ever. And so sometimes we move on from material comforts. We're like, well, that's not really going to satisfy us. We move on to politics, to social involvement, to civic engagement. Have you guys ever noticed that every election that ever happens is the most important election that's ever happened in history? And if you don't know that, you will get 13 texts today from different numbers so that if you opt out, you'll still get another one later. And they will remind you, this is the most important election ever. And if you want peace, if you want lasting joy and satisfaction, and security, you better get out and vote for the right person, or else you will be miserable. We are people who pursue political ends to satisfy ourselves, and it is not working. A Pew Research found that 70 % of Americans are completely worn out by our political culture, and fewer than 7 % of people, according to a Gallup poll, trust in the American Congress to get things done. So we turn to other things. We turn to relationships, right? That's an easy one for us. Everywhere we look, we're being fed the notion that our relational intimacy can satisfy us. And it's all over our media. Just look at what we consume, right? The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, The Bachelor in Paradise, The Golden Bachelor,

Indian Matchmaker, Farmer Wants a Wife, Married at First Sight, Dating Naked, Are You the One, Love at First Sight, Love Island, Love is Blind, Crazy Stupid Love, Love Actually, The Rock of Love, Love on the Spectrum, Love, Love, Love, Love, Love, Love, Love.

It's all over the place. Find your soulmate, and then you'll be satisfied.

Spoiler alert, friends, it's not working. Study after study shows that no one likes our current, current state of the dating world. It's constantly disappointing us. And so many of us turn to work. It's an easy one. We spend a lot of time at work. We want work to satisfy that deep inner longing. There's a great journalist named Derek Thompson who explored this in The Atlantic a couple years ago with an article on workism. He said that the modern American religion is workism. And for many millennials and Gen Zers, work has become not just something that pays the bills and uses our talents, but is actually the centerpiece of our identity and purpose. And so the result is that we become people who overwork, trying to find identity in our work, or we become obsessed with finding the perfect job. The job we're in right now is never quite good enough. And workism isn't working. Seventy percent of Americans are unhappy or disengaged in their jobs, and the World Health Organization now classifies burnout as a disease. As Derek Thompson puts it, our desks were never meant to be our alters. And the list goes on and on and on, friends. Western culture offers us more things than ever to quench our thirst, but the result has not been deeper satisfaction. It's been deeper disappointment. The Pulitzer Prize -winning author John Cheever put it this way, the main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth and education and culture is disappointment. So what is it for you? What's the thing that you have chased, the thing you have clung to, to satisfy your soul that's disappointed you? Where have you gone to quench your thirst? Where are you going to quench your thirst? Because the truth is, all of us are moving along a creek of our lives, constantly settling, for dirty water, disappointing water. We are thirsty people in need of the spring. We need living water in desert lives. And that's not a new need. That's actually a universal human need. It's so important that Jesus himself spends an entire chapter in the longest conversation, single conversation he has with one person anywhere in the Gospels, in John chapter 4, talking about living water. He meets a woman at a well, and this subject he seems to think is crucially important. And John, the author of the Gospel, spends an entire chapter on this topic. And this was a woman, as Brittany said earlier, who did not know what she was longing for. She was showing up, completely expecting a normal, everyday errand. And she encountered something that changed her life. And so for the next four weeks of Sundays, we're going to explore the conversation Jesus has with that woman. We're going to explore, in our gatherings together, what their conversation teaches us in our own time, what their conversation and Jesus' conversation with the disciples teaches us in our own time. About our own longings. And what we find is that we're very much like this woman. We're very much like the disciples. We're people in need of a source, a spring. And we can come to the well to find Jesus waiting, inviting us. So friends, if you have a Bible, open it with me to the book of John. John is the fourth book in your New Testament, if you're flipping there. We're gonna be in John chapter 4. We'll read the first 18 verses in John chapter 4. 1 through 18 is where we'll be. If you don't have a Bible, by the way, that's okay. The words are gonna be behind me on the screen so you can follow along there. John chapter 4, starting in verse 1.

Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John, although it was not Jesus himself but the disciples who baptized, Jesus left Judea and started back to Galilee. But he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, give me a drink. His disciples had gone to the city to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him, how is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria? Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans. And Jesus answered her, if you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, give me a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. The woman said to him, sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us this well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it? Jesus said to her, everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give them will become in them a spring of water, gushing up to each other. The woman said to him, sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water. Jesus said to her, go, call your husband, and come back. The woman answered him, I have no husband. Jesus said to her, you are right in saying I have no husband, for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

When we come to John 4 here, we find Jesus and his disciples in Judea, which is the name for the southern region of Palestine in the first century. And what we quickly learn is that through his disciples, Jesus has been baptizing more people than John the Baptist, who himself was baptizing a lot of folks. It's in his name, right? So Jesus' ministry is incredible. The disciples are killing it here. It's growing, it's expanding, and so Jesus decides naturally that it's time to get out of town.

What? That's curious to us, or it should be, right? The text doesn't really say that. It doesn't really mean that Jesus is having a successful ministry and then he leaves it behind, right? No, no, no, no. No, we know that Jesus, in this sort of situation, would get his disciples together and they'd build a massive healing center that would have drive -through healing and people could come through and then they'd build brands, right? They'd have t -shirts and mugs and hats so that everyone could see what they're doing. That's how we think of ministry. They'd start a worship band and a label and the rest. They would figure out a way to maximize their ministry. But that's not what Jesus does. That's what we'd do. I talk with pastors around the country every week, and I've never once heard a pastor say, our ministry was so successful, I had to leave.

Jesus' behavior seems really odd to us, but it's worth noting why he does this, friends. Jesus does not measure his success by the number of conversions by the size of the crowds or by how well he was able to refute those Pharisees because he knows the voice of the people is not equal to the voice of God. A .W. Tozer talks about this dynamic in his book, The Pursuit of God. He says, religion has accepted the monstrous heresy that needs to be heard. Noise, size, activity, and bluster make a man dear to God. Jesus knows that's a lie. There's an interesting note just two chapters earlier in John chapter two that actually shows this. I think John is bringing this out. In the middle of Jerusalem, Jesus is performing all these miracles. He's healing people. He's being celebrated by many. He's being condemned by others. And John says this at the end of chapter two. He says, Jesus on his part would not entrust himself to them for he himself knew what was in everyone. In other words, Jesus did not entrust his identity to anyone. He did not entrust his identity or measure his success or his mission by the praise of people who loved him. Nor did he measure the success by the comments of those who criticized him. He measured his success by his fidelity to the mission of the kingdom of God. That mission which was given to him through his spirit and his baptism. Fidelity to that mission is the only thing that Jesus has in mind. And look what fidelity to that mission looks like here in chapter four. It looks like him leaving Judea and starting back towards Galilee. But the text says he had to go through Samaria. So again, some geography for you. Judea in the south, Galilee in the north. Samaria is in between the two. So it would make natural sense that you would walk through Samaria. He had to go through Samaria, the text says. But did he though? See, we know from history that any observant righteous Jew in Jesus' day never actually went through Samaria because they didn't want to be contaminated by those heretical half -breed religious people. There was a great divide in the first century. We'll talk about this divide in a little bit more. Because he meets a Samaritan woman here. But whenever a Jew needed to get to Galilee from Judea, they would intentionally avoid Samaria at all costs. They'd take a massive detour. Instead of going straight north, they'd go east, cross the Jordan River, pass Samaria on the other side of the Jordan River, cross back, and then get to Galilee. Nerd out with me for a sec. I've got a couple maps that show this that I think just is really helpful to get a visual for what this looked like. So if, right now, Jesus, in this story, this is a modern map. These are cities that line up with where Jesus was in the ancient world. Nablus, right there in the middle, that's in Samaria. That's likely where Sychar is. That's actually where Jacob's Well is to this day. You can go there and drink from Jacob's Well. Kaffir Kana is Cana in Galilee. And then you've got Jerusalem in Judea, right? So if Jesus wanted to go straight south to north, he could walk through Samaria and take about 34 hours on foot. Right about 34 hours. So a couple days trip, he could walk straight up. What people would do in the ancient world if they were Jewish to avoid the Samaritans is they would take this detour. They would immediately go right, crossing the Jordan River, which is right about here, where Jericho is, cross the Jordan River, keep going up to Umkais, what is now called Umkais, then cross back across the Jordan to get into Galilee. This would nearly double their trip. All to avoid these people.

Just a modern way of expressing this. Imagine that we in Phoenix want to travel to Flagstaff. It's about a two -hour drive from here to Flagstaff, right? If you want to go straight up. But we all know we need to avoid those terrible and vile Camp Verdeans, right? We cannot get anywhere near the Camp Verdeans. So if we want to avoid the Camp Verdeans, we've got to take a detour. We've got to go to Globe, and then Show Low, and then Snowflake, and Holbrook, and Winslow, all the way up to Flagstaff. We would have to double our time just to avoid the people in Camp Verde. That's how extreme this divide was. Imagine a trip to Flagstaff that takes you five and a half hours.

That's right, that's right. And imagine what the disciples must be feeling when Jesus takes them into and through Samaria here. Jesus is ripping them from their nice and successful ministry in their hometown. And he's taking them to a place where no righteous Jew would ever spend time. They've gotten this remarkable experience with Jesus, this amazing picture of his life -giving power. And they've seen it work in their lives. And Jesus is like, great, welcome to the kingdom. Now leave your comfort behind. Get ready to be challenged. Get ready to be pushed beyond your biases, to have your expectations and categories broken wide open.

Friends, if you stay with Jesus, you won't be able to stay in your convenience or comfort for very long. He's going to take you places. You may not be comfortable going. He's going to challenge you to love those you're not used to loving or those who are challenging love. He's going to shake up your habits and your thoughts and your choices and your bank account. He'll take you to the students who are the hardest to teach, to the patients who are the most frustrating, to the neighbors who are the most disrespectful. Because here's the truth, y 'all. The mission of the kingdom of God is about getting living water to thirsty people. It's not about self -help for us, though we do benefit. It's not about, it's not about fulfilling our dreams, though we find our deepest satisfaction in it. It's about getting living water to thirsty people. That's why Jesus had to go through Samaria. The kingdom has to be for all people, or it's not a real lasting kingdom. It has to be for longing hearts, for thirsty hearts, for all those, for all of us who have searched in vain and cry out for life. That's why Jesus arrives at Sychar, a town in Samaria, and he's getting tired at this point. It's a long walk. So he sits down at a well. His disciples, go ahead of him to get food, the text says, and so he's alone, and a Samaritan woman comes to draw water from the well. And it's there, in a completely unexpected way, in the middle of her everyday errands, that Jesus perceives something in her. He perceives a truth that is just as true for every one of us in this room. She is thirsty for much more than water. She's longing deep within her soul for something lasting and living and eternal. And Jesus says he's got it. Living water. Which completely confuses her when she hears it. She has no idea what he's talking about. She doesn't grasp it all. Jesus actually points it out. He says, if you knew the gift that is in front of you, if you knew the gift that God wanted to give you, if you grasped what was on offer, you would ask and you would receive it. What Jesus is saying there is if us thirsty people ever want to experience living water, if we ever want to experience deep, lasting satisfaction, we need to understand what exactly is on offer. We'll never ask if we don't really know what Jesus has to offer. We'll never long for it if we don't really believe that Jesus can offer it. And so this text, I think, shows us the nature of this living water, shows us and reminds us why this is something we desperately need in our lives. This living water, we see, is three different things in this text. We see it's surprising, satisfying, and saving. Surprising, satisfying, and saving. First, surprising. Jesus, he's thirsty. He's been walking for a long time. He asks this woman for a drink. And look at how surprised she is in verse nine. How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria? Now, why would she be so surprised? That should strike us. Why is she responding the way she is? Well, because Jesus here is deliberately breaking every social, cultural, moral, and religious barrier that existed in his time. In his day, a man like Jesus would have nothing to do with a woman like her. And that's first because she's a Samaritan. And Israel's history, the reason they avoided, the reason they'd go so far out of their way to avoid the Samaritans is because their shared history together was complicated. They were both originally part of the nation of Israel, but after the enemy nation of Assyria came in and took over the nation, the Samaritans ended up intermarrying with them and adopting many of their heretical beliefs and corrupt worship practices. And so to the Jews, they were deserters. They were people who had deserted God, who had betrayed God, who had undermined the story of God, and who were living with a false view of reality, God, and the world. And because of that, centuries of violence between these two groups had erupted leading up to Jesus' day. It continued into Jesus' day. It was baked into the culture. There's a common first century rabbinical prayer that Jewish rabbis would pray. The prayer was this, Lord, do not remember the Samaritans in the resurrection. That's how deeply baked this was. And so a Jew like Jesus would never have gotten near a Samaritan like this woman, let alone taken a sip of water from her. But it's not just that it's a Jew and Samaritan divide. It's also a male and female divide. Remember, this is a highly patriarchal time in history. In Roman culture and Greek culture and Jewish culture, women had low statuses. And for a man to be caught talking in public with a woman, especially alone like this, would be utterly shameful for them both. But there's a third note here that shows us how surprising this living water is that Jesus offers. She's alone. That's a detail we can't skip over. She shows up to the well alone. That's weird because no one in that day collected water from a well like this alone. First, because drawing water was an arduous task. You'd travel to the well to get all the water you need for the entire day. Cooking, cleaning, all the water that you'd need. Which meant you'd have to bring this massive and heavy bucket. And that meant that you'd often have people come with you to draw that water. In the way labor was divided back then, drawing water was actually the woman's job. And this was one of the few places that women could gather together and speak in public. And so many women would go together. They'd travel to the well, not alone, but to support one another, to speak with one another, to listen to one another, to love one another. But not this woman. She goes alone. And not only that, she goes at the hottest point of the day. Most of the time, you'd go to get water early in the morning because it's so hot out. She goes at the sixth hour. That's noon, the hottest point of the day. Why? Why is she alone here? Because she is a moral and social outcast. We find out in this passage, soon enough, she had multiple husbands and was living with a man who was not her husband. In her town and culture, that would have meant she was a complete outcast in her community. The reason she was alone is because no one wanted to go draw water with her. They were ashamed of her. And the reason she's alone is because no one wanted to go draw water with her. The reason she's alone is because she probably doesn't want to draw water with anyone else. She feels ostracized, shamed, alone. So he's a man, she's a woman. He's a Jew, she's a Samaritan. He's a righteous religious teacher, and she's a moral outcast. And Jesus moves past every single one of those barriers to listen to her, to love her. And that's a classic Jesus move. If you read the Gospels, you see Jesus constantly breaking down these sorts of barriers. This was the primary critique leveled against him by the religious people of his day. He was a friend to tax collectors and sinners. He constantly drew near to those who were sick and deemed unclean in that culture, and he healed them. After his resurrection in John, the very first person that he shows himself to is a woman who was a reformed mental patient and had a bad reputation, Mary. Why does Jesus constantly do this? Here's why. Because living water, the life he has to give, is a gift. It is grace. Grace. It's never made available to us based on merit or class or morality or pedigree or race or gender. It breaks down every one of those walls says if you are thirsty, no matter where you come from, no matter what you've done, no matter what you've failed to do, you can have life in Christ. Simply bring your thirst to him. And that breaks every one of our religious and social categories even today, friends. It breaks our religious categories. In every world religion, the one who is favored by God, the one who is closest to God and who knows God is never a surprise. It's always pretty formulaic in world religions. The one who's closest to God is the one who's the upstanding moral type who follows God well. They're the one praying or meditating. They're the one who folds their hands the right way or breathes the right way. There are no surprises in religion. Everyone knows who's close to God and who's far from God in religion. But look at this woman. She's living a completely irreligious life. She's not seeking. She's not seeking. She's not morally striving. She's not even praying. She wasn't reading the scriptures and wrestling with spiritual questions and that's when Jesus showed up. She arrives here utterly indifferent to God. She's just running her errands, trying to get her water and get out. She doesn't earn anything. And in a complete surprise, she encounters an offer for exactly what she didn't even realize she was looking for. True life and peace and joy is available to her, not because she earned his love or was searching for his love or was earnestly praying for him. Not because she was praying for his love but because simply he was searching for her.

You guys, anyone, anywhere can meet Jesus. Anyone, anywhere can have him. It doesn't matter what you've done or what you've been. And this doesn't just break our religious categories. It breaks our social categories. We live in a culture that sociologists refer to as a meritocracy. That means that you can receive life and peace and joy and satisfaction through merit. You get all those things through your education or your appearance or your pedigree or your accomplishments. You get all those things through your education Those things validate you. Those are the things that bring you life. And so we're constantly people who strive.

We're forced to do this in school with our grade -keeping systems. We have to strive in order to earn favor. We're forced to do this in our promotional processes at work. We have to earn promotion. We're forced to do this in our sports and athletics. We're constantly taught that winning is the only result that validates you. In our culture, we are seen as valuable or useful or worthwhile or worthy of life only if we merit the right thing. And the easiest example, friends, look at, in our culture, how people treat older folks who no longer can contribute through consumption or production. Look at how we treat them. We marginalize them. We push them to the fringes because they're no longer earning any merit. Suicide rates for people among 75 and older are more than triple what you see in younger ages because they have been told that they do not have value. They have been told that in a meritocracy they have nothing to bring. That is our culture. And Jesus' living water shows up and heals those problems. It surprises us merit -based people by saying that love and acceptance and value are available in Christ. And so if we want to continue to live with a merit -based view of self and others, man, we're going to undermine the kingdom. We're going to deny the gospel. So friends, when you find yourself thirsty, when you find yourself longing, the first thing you need to do is be willing to be surprised by God. Be willing to let God shake up your expectations. Be willing to let God send you to the people that you'd least expect. Be willing to have eyes wide open with wonder in the most mundane moments because it might be there that God shows up. It might be in the middle of your errands that God radically shakes you awake. You need to get rid of the belief that God can't work in my small life or that God won't show up in my little life. Get rid of the belief that you need to look or act or sound a certain way for God to work. Let God surprise you again because living water is surprising. It's grace. But it doesn't stop there. We also see in this passage that living water is ultimately satisfying. We can't overlook the significance of the metaphor that Jesus uses here. He found the most basic necessity of human existence, the building blocks of how we can survive, and he said he offers something that we desperately need at a deeper level than even that. In the same way that you need physical water to survive, you need a spiritual living well in order to live. And if you don't, you will be dehydrated in your soul. You will lose deep satisfaction.

He exposes this explicitly in the example he raises with the woman. In verse 15, she seems to still be confused about what this living water is. And when he actually describes it to her, she says, oh, great, that sounds great. Give me this living water. And then she says something curious. So that I don't have to keep coming back. So that I don't have to keep coming back to the well. That is, she wants Jesus to just help her in her kind of worldly convenience. What's the thing that will just make this easier for me? She wants an easier life from Jesus. And she seems to think that actually he might be just offering in -home plumbing. He might just be offering her water that would prevent her from having to walk to the well and she could just have it at home. So she's like, that sounds great. That would save me so much time. Thank you, Jesus. Give me that worldly convenience.

Friends, sometimes our lives work the same way. We're people who settle for less than living water. We just want indoor plumbing. We settle for the belief that some small, finite thing can really save us. We satisfy our deep inner longing. We ask Jesus for convenience instead of completeness. And we keep bringing our buckets to those wells. We try to satisfy our souls with little conveniences, hoping they'll quench our thirst. And Jesus sees she's doing this and so he says something pretty piercing. Go call your husband and come back. Which seems like a pivot, like kind of out of left field. We're talking about water and now we're talking about husbands. But it's not. Remember, she is searching in all the wrong places for satisfaction. Jesus sees it. And he calls out the specific area that she's pursuing. For years, she has assumed that if she could just find the right person, she'd find peace. For years, she has gone through relationship through relationship. This could be that she's a victim of an old culture. It could be that she is just constantly finding her identity in men. Either way, she's looking in all the wrong places. And Jesus gently replies, it's not working. The water you're drinking is dehydrating your soul. It's tepid. It's soiled. It's not living.

Friends, if you drop the bucket of your soul into any other well than Jesus, any other cause, any other relationship, any other work or goal, you'll die of thirst. Because they aren't able to sustain the deep longing in your soul. You have infinite desire made to be satisfied by the infinite. You need more than the finite. And friends, our lives are always evidence of this. If you pursue a relationship in your deep spiritual longing, you might even find someone that you love and that loves you. But tragically, they're mortal. And tragically, they're broken themselves. They'll let you down. They'll at times even make you feel the opposite of loved. Our world is full of people who have dropped their buckets into well after well of relationships like this woman only to come out dehydrated in the end. If you pursue a job to satisfy that deep spiritual longing for purpose or meaning, you may find a great job, but that job won't stay the same forever. The company will change. Management. Co -workers will change. Or you'll lose the job or you'll get sick of the job. It will never be enough.

There's a great story from one of the most modern and most creative modern storytellers in our culture. His name is Pete Docter. He's an animator who's worked for Pixar and he's made a bunch of movies that you all grew up on and love. But he was always driven to become the best at what he did. Throughout his whole life, he said, I want to reach the peak of animation. And animation historically in film history has not been really well respected. By film critics. And so he said, I'm going to make really good animation that people have to recognize. And I'm going to win an Oscar. I want to win an Oscar for animation. And so he created a movie that became a cultural sensation, Inside Out. Oh yeah. People love Inside Out. And he won the Oscar for it. He was praised and celebrated. He went up on stage. He was tearful. He was so amazed that he had actually gotten his goal. And then he, in an interview with a guy named Mark Labberton who worked at Fuller Seminary, he said he got home. He held the Oscar and looked at it and said, I'm empty. I got the very thing I was looking for. I got the very thing that I was striving and built my whole life on. And I'm empty. It is quite literally just an idol. And so the next movie he wrote and made, it's a movie called Soul. It's all about the emptiness of worldly pursuits to find deep satisfaction. It drove him to go and win another Oscar for Soul, which is amazing. He was freed by having to hold this thing and say, it's not going to work. It's not going to quench my deep thirst. I need something greater. Soul is all about how there is a connection with the divine that we need to make if we want to be satisfied.

Friends, what Jesus is saying is that that eternal, aching longing in your soul for true love, for true meaning, for true peace, for true rest, it's there because there's an eternal source to satisfy it. And until you seek that eternal source, you're going to be dehydrated. You're going to thirst. C .S. Lewis describes this really well in his book, Mere Christianity. He said, creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. 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. There is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself, though, a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. And so if that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise or be unthankful for these earthly blessings, but on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are a kind of copy or echo or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, my living water.

Augustine put it really simply back in the day. He said, you have made us for yourself, oh God. And our hearts are restless until they find rest in you.

So friends, where are you taking your bucket? What's the husband that Jesus is calling you to bring to the well? What's the poison in the water? Because there is water that can satisfy, but the only way to get it is to name the idol, to name the Oscar, the faulty water we're drinking. And finally, friends, we see in this passage that living water is ultimately saving. This story certainly shows us how the woman is thirsty, but did you notice that there's another character who's thirsty here? Jesus. Jesus is thirsty. When he gets to the well, he's experiencing thirst, same as her, and he asks her for a drink. She would not have found Jesus and had this interaction if he wasn't first thirsty. And that comment should spark in our minds, if we know the gospel well, another moment where Jesus thirsts. John 19 .28. John makes a connection here. He says this, when Jesus knew that all was finished on the cross, he said, in order to fulfill the scripture, I am thirsty.

John knows what he's doing, friends. He gives us this woman at the well to reveal to us our own failure, to quench our thirst on our own. That's what Christians have always meant by sin. It's this condition or this habit to seek our life and our satisfaction and our peace in things other than God. And the separation from God that that creates, the dehydration it produces in us. It's leading all of us in our own ways to death. We're dying of thirst because we've gone to the wrong wells. But when Jesus says, I thirst from the cross, he's talking about all of our collective thirst in the deepest spiritual sense. On the cross, Jesus takes the poisoned water, the death, the result of all of our faulty wells onto himself. And he dies the death that they lead us to so that we might not have to experience that death. And he rises again with a remarkable claim. You don't have to lead a dehydrated life on the way to a dehydrated death. There is perpetual, eternal, real satisfaction springing forth in him. All you've got to do is believe and entrust yourself to Turn away from all the faulty sources and go to the spring. And when you do, you'll find a power and a strength to navigate your desert life in a remarkably different way. You'll find inexplicable joy welling up inside you because Jesus was thirsty. You don't have to be any longer. So friends, enough of our poisoned wells. Enough of the tepid, dirty water. Bring your bucket to the spring. Bring your soul to Christ. All those things your soul deeply longs for, the purpose and the love and the joy and the peace, he's got them. And when you drink from him, you'll spring forth from this room a different person, a transformed person who transforms the world around you. Come forward, friends. Drink with me. The water's fine. Let's pray.