Living water.

I have known where the water is and still chosen to walk back into the desert.

That is the most honest place I can begin.

Because there have been moments in my life when I have experienced the presence of God so deeply that, for once, I did not feel like I needed anything else.

And somehow, after experiencing that, I still went looking elsewhere.

There is a conversation in John 4 that I keep coming back to.

Jesus is sitting beside Jacob’s well when a Samaritan woman comes to draw water. He asks her for a drink, then tells her about something he calls living water.

The water she has come to collect will leave her thirsty again. But the water he gives becomes a spring within her, flowing into eternal life.

She has come to the well with a need she knows how to explain.

Jesus offers to meet a need that reaches much deeper.

And I wonder how often we recognise that something is missing without understanding what we are actually missing.

We feel empty, so we look for something.

Something to buy. Something to achieve. Something to experience. Something to take the edge off being ourselves for a while.

Alcohol. Drugs. Sex. Money. Designer clothes. A faster car. A bigger house.

Different things, carrying the same promise.

“Maybe THIS will finally be enough.”

And sometimes, for a moment, it feels like it is.

Then the feeling passes.

And we are thirsty again.

How many times can that happen before we stop asking where to find more and start questioning what we are drinking?

When I was around seventeen, when I first started seeking God, I had a dream.

I was in a desert, and I was incredibly thirsty.

Then I saw a glass bottle of water. It was as though it had come from heaven. Light was shining down on it from above.

I remember drinking it and feeling this overwhelming sense of satisfaction.

I do not really know how to explain it beyond that.

There was no immediate thought about what I needed next. No reaching for something more. No feeling that something was still missing.

I was satisfied.

I believe God was using that dream to show me something about himself.

That beneath everything I thought I wanted, there was a thirst only he could answer.

And I would love to tell you that I understood the message and never needed to learn it again.

But that would be a lie.

There have been times since then when I have wandered from my walk with God. Times when I have tried to find satisfaction in practically every other area of life you could imagine.

And I am not writing this from the position of somebody who has never enjoyed those things.

Sometimes I enjoyed them.

That is part of what made me keep returning.

But enjoying something for a moment and being satisfied by it are two very different things.

The night ends. The excitement fades. The thing you were desperate to buy becomes something you barely notice.

And eventually, you are alone with yourself again.

Whatever you were trying not to feel is still there.

Sometimes it feels even louder.

I have had moments like that. Moments when I have realised that all I had really done was postpone the emptiness.

I had given myself something to feel without finding anything that could sustain me.

And the hardest part was knowing I had experienced something different with God.

I was searching for water while remembering what it felt like to drink.

In Jeremiah 2:13, God describes his people leaving him, the fountain of living waters, and making broken cisterns that cannot hold water.

Think about that.

They leave the source and start building substitutes.

They work. They dig. They collect.

But what they have built cannot hold what they need.

That image makes so much sense to me.

Because how much effort do we put into getting things we believe will finally make us feel full?

And then, when the feeling disappears, we assume we simply need more.

More money. More pleasure. More success. More of whatever briefly made us forget that we were empty.

We rarely question the container.

We just keep trying to fill it.

I think about a toy I had when I was a baby.

It was one of those boxes with different shaped holes. A wooden square goes through the square hole. A triangle goes through the triangle hole. A circle goes through the circle hole.

You get the picture.

There is a video of me repeatedly trying to push the square into the circle.

It would not fit.

So I tried again.

Still would not fit.

And watching it back, part of me thinks, “Wow. I was a stupid kid.”

But how much of my adult life have I spent doing the EXACT same thing?

Trying to fill something spiritual with something material.

Getting frustrated when it does not work.

Then trying again, harder.

A more expensive version. A more exciting experience. Something stronger. Something bigger.

As though the square will eventually fit if I push it with enough determination.

But the problem was never that I needed a bigger square.

It was that I was trying to fill a space it had never been made to fit.

That is what I mean when I talk about a spiritual void.

We have a need for God, and we keep offering it everything except God.

Then we wonder why nothing seems to reach it.

A nice car can be enjoyable. Money can make life easier. There is nothing wrong with appreciating something beautiful or working towards something meaningful.

But how could a possession give me the life of the one who created me?

How could having more of the world become the same thing as knowing God?

And yet, without necessarily saying it like that, that is often what we are asking for.

“When I earn this much, I will be happy.”

Then we earn it.

“When I finally have that, I will be satisfied.”

Then we have it.

And somehow, the finish line moves again.

What once looked like everything becomes ordinary. What once felt out of reach becomes the place we are standing while wishing we were somewhere else.

At what point do we question the promise?

Because if having more were enough to satisfy us, surely there would come a point when more became enough.

So what is the living water Jesus offers?

In John 7, Jesus invites the thirsty to come to him and drink. John explains that he is speaking about the Holy Spirit.

That matters.

Because Jesus is offering something much deeper than a better feeling or a more positive outlook.

He is offering the presence of God within us.

Through Christ, we are forgiven, brought into communion with God and given his Spirit.

The one we were made to know comes to dwell within us.

Think about that for a moment.

We spend our lives going out into the world, collecting things we hope will give us life.

And Jesus speaks about a spring WITHIN us.

The source comes to live in the thirsty person.

That is what moves me about this.

God knows how far we have wandered. He knows what we have reached for. He knows the difference between the person we present to everybody else and the person we are when there is nobody around.

And still, he invites us to come.

The living water is a gift.

You do not arrive at the well with a life impressive enough to purchase it.

You arrive thirsty.

I find that deeply humbling.

Because there is something in us that wants to bring God an explanation. Something that makes our wandering sound more understandable. Something that makes us feel less exposed.

But I do not need to convince him that I was less thirsty than I was.

I need to drink.

Sometimes the most honest prayer I can offer is simply, “God, I have been looking everywhere again. And I am tired.”

Tired of wanting things that cannot give me what I am asking them for.

Tired of briefly feeling full and somehow ending up empty.

Tired of knowing where life is found while persuading myself to look somewhere else.

And when I return to God, something in me settles.

I do not mean that every difficulty disappears.

I still feel pain. I still have questions. There are still days when prayer feels difficult and my emotions do not immediately follow what I believe.

But underneath that, I have somewhere to belong.

I can come before God without needing to impress him. I can be honest about the things I am ashamed of. I can sit with him without having anything particularly impressive to say.

There is a kind of rest in being fully known and still invited closer.

And the more I live close to him, the less urgently I need the things I once thought I could not live without.

I can enjoy something without asking it to give me an identity.

I can want something without believing my whole life is incomplete until I have it.

I can feel something painful without immediately needing to escape it.

That is the satisfaction I am talking about.

A life rooted deeply enough in God that every passing desire does not have to become a direction.

But this also means learning to trust him with how I live.

Sometimes we want the peace of God while resisting the things he tells us.

“Why should I give that up?”

“Why does the Bible say I should live this way?”

“Surely I know what will make me happy.”

I recently took my car to a mechanic.

I know a bit about cars, but I am not a mechanic. When he explained what needed fixing, I trusted his understanding because he knew the car better than I did.

And God knows us more deeply than any mechanic knows a car.

He MADE us.

He knows what gives us life. He knows what damages us. He understands the needs beneath desires we barely understand ourselves.

So why am I so convinced that I know how to satisfy myself better than the one who created me?

Especially when my own ideas have so often left me thirsty.

I am learning to see obedience through that question.

God’s instructions come from the one who knows what we were made for.

Sometimes following him means letting go of something I still want. Sometimes it means trusting him before I understand why.

But desire alone cannot tell me whether something will give me life.

I have wanted too many things that left me empty to keep pretending it can.

And there is something else in John’s Gospel that I find difficult to read without stopping.

On the cross, Jesus says, “I thirst.”

The one who offers living water knows thirst in his own body.

I think about that.

God has entered the world of the people he is inviting home.

He knows exhaustion. He knows suffering. In Christ, he bears our sin and goes through death to bring us into life with him.

His invitation reaches us through a love that has cost him something.

And I do not want to become so familiar with hearing that God loves me that I stop feeling the weight of it.

The water is freely offered.

That does not mean it was cheap.

After everything I have reached for, everything I have mistaken for satisfaction and every time I have wandered, I find that his invitation is still there.

Come.

Drink.

There is something about that which undoes me.

Because I know how easily I can grow tired of learning the same lesson.

Yet God has not grown tired of calling me back to himself.

At the end of the conversation in John 4, the woman leaves her water jar and goes into the town to tell people about Jesus.

She came to collect something.

She leaves having encountered someone.

And that is where I want this thought to bring us.

To the God we can spend our whole lives hearing about while still looking everywhere else for life.

I do not want to spend the rest of mine describing living water while dying of thirst beside the well.

I want to drink.

- Adam