Don't Drink Alone

"...but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life,"--John 4:14

For Christmas my husband gave me a gift that I can't seem to shut up about. He took a day off work (without my knowledge) to stay home and completely clean the place. In case the unloaded dishwasher and neatly folded clean laundry didn't shock me enough, he even tackled the foreboding second bedroom which had pretty much been a catch-all from the time we moved in two months ago. What a treat to rediscover that the room does in fact have carpet!

Most of you probably received a wonderful gift at some point in life that you couldn't help but tell people about. Maybe your parents sponsored a trip to Hawaii as a college graduation present, or maybe your best friends all pitched in to give you a memorable surprise party. If you're a Christian, you know that you have been given the greatest gift of all--God's grace, and the promise of eternal life.

In the Gospel of John, Chapter 4, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at the well of Jacob and offers her water that will keep her from ever being thirsty again. The woman understandably but mistakenly assumes that Jesus is referring to actual physical water. She initially fails to understand that Jesus is drawing a spiritual comparison between being filled with the Holy Spirit to being quenched of thirst. The woman believed Jesus when he went on to tell her that he was the Messiah, the Christ. She then knew that she had been given a precious gift and subsequently went to tell anyone she could find about her experience at the well. Later in the chapter we learn that many Samaritans became believers as a result of hearing the woman's account of her conversation with Jesus.

Those of us who believe in Jesus as our Lord and Savior know that he does indeed offer us living water. That's the kind of gift we cannot and must not keep to ourselves. Like the Samaritan woman, we need to share the news of that gift with anyone who will listen, and then allow God to work in their hearts so that they too can be filled with the living water of the Holy Spirit. Living water is definitely something that we shouldn't be drinking alone.