What is the “living water” Jesus offers?

In John 4:1-26, Jesus crosses deep social barriers to meet a Samaritan woman at a well — and offers her “living water.” In this study, Dr. Toby Holt shows how Jesus seeks and satisfies thirsty souls.

Jews and Samaritans despised one another, and this woman came alone at midday, an outcast even among her own people. Yet Jesus speaks with her, asks her for a drink, and offers her water that ends all thirst — “a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.” He gently exposes her broken past, then reveals Himself as the promised Messiah. Dr. Holt notes that, like Solomon who had everything yet found it all empty, this woman’s soul was dry until she met the One who could truly fill it.

Questions this study answers:

1. Who were the Samaritans? A despised, mixed people whom the Jews avoided. That Jesus would speak with a Samaritan — and a woman — was shocking.

2. What is the “living water”? It is the eternal life and satisfaction Jesus gives, which truly quenches the thirst of the soul that no earthly thing can.

3. Why is this story so encouraging? Because Jesus sought out an outcast and offered her everything. No one is beyond the reach of His grace.

“but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.” — John 4:14 (NKJV)

Speaker: Dr. Toby Holt is the President of New Geneva Theological Seminary, a Reformed seminary in Colorado Springs. He is known for clear, down-to-earth Bible teaching, and his sermons have been downloaded more than 1.9 million times on SermonAudio.

Listen and go deeper: This sermon is part of the John Explained study from New Geneva Theological Seminary. Find more verse-by-verse teaching across the Bible at newgeneva.org. To support this teaching ministry, visit newgeneva.org/give.

In the Book of John, our Lord had a number of one-on-one encounters with people in need, but none of those encounters was more surprising than the one he had with the Samaritan woman in John 4. As we'll see in today's text, this woman had been ostracized by her own people and was despised because of her many sins. But in talking with Jesus, she experienced just the opposite. For the first time, she experienced forgiveness and hope.

In the first century, the Jews were oppressed by this evil, tyrannical empire, the Roman Empire. Rome was oppressing Israel at this time. Now, Rome was bad. If you were an Israelite and you lived in Jerusalem and you saw the centurions marching around in your hometown, when you saw all this, it undoubtedly filled you with rage. And yet, in the first century, do you know who the Jews hated even more than the Romans?

The Samaritans. Now, with that said, who are the Samaritans? Given that Rome literally had its boot down on Israel, and given what Rome was and who Rome was, who were the Samaritans that they would hate the Samaritans even more than Rome? Well, for our purposes this morning, let's consider this question for a moment. Let's ask ourselves, who are these people? Who are the Samaritans? Well, the Samaritans at one point had been Israelites, or at the very least, the area in which they lived was part of what you'd call northern Israel. Samaria is a region of northern Israel. However, it was a region that was taken over in 722 by the Assyrians off to the north. They came in, they conquered the northern kingdom, they conquered northern Israel, and at that time, the Assyrians brought in resettled pagans from other nations into this land. See, the Assyrian king was particularly wicked, and he says, "How are we going to mess them up? I know what we'll do. We'll go and find some other wicked people, some pagans, and we'll settle them in there, and that'll help disturb the locals who remain, the ones who weren't exiled." What was the result of that action? What was the result of paganism being brought in intentionally, deliberately into northern Israel on top of the exiles who married pagans in Assyria and then later returned? What happened to this region? Well, what happened is what you would expect. The region became polluted, corrupted, so to speak, spiritually. Whereas at one point, the practices had shown great fidelity to God, to Yahweh, to Jehovah, and his ways and his rules. Whereas at one point, this had been an area that had been faithful, afterwards, it was no longer that way. Once paganism had come in, the people began to act like pagans. Now, were they still Israelites? Well, in an extreme sense, yes, and I'll explain what I mean. The Samaritans had an Israelite background and history. Things like Jacob's Well resonated with them as part of their own history, just as it resonated as part of the Jewish history to the south. They both would've championed Jacob and Joseph and the like. But here's the interesting thing. If you were to look at the Samaritan Bible, so to speak, you would find that it had only five books in it, the first five books of the Bible, what's called the Torah. They had the books up through Moses' writings, but all of the other writings, particularly the writings of the prophets and the kings and the chronicles, they did not have. Now, why don't you think they had it? Well, in part because all those books champion Jerusalem, right? You can't read the story of David without reading about Jerusalem, and they hated Jerusalem. They had their own holy place, their own mountain, Mount Gerizim. They had no business, no desire, no love for Jerusalem and for the temple therein. And that was proven years later. The Jewish Talmud records this. But years and years and years later, after the Babylonians had sacked Jerusalem, destroyed its temple, when the rebuilding occurred in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Samaritans, because they had developed this disdain for the Jews, just as the Jews had a disdain for them, the Samaritans took a pig, and they brought it to the construction site of the temple, and when the pig was then folded into the construction materials of the temple, it caused the entire temple construction to come to a complete halt. Because as kosher, as holy individuals, the Jews of that era would have nothing to do with pigs, and so the Samaritans did this as a way of messing up the Jewish progress with the temple. There were moments like this scattered across their history, scattered across their interaction, that caused the Jews to hate the Samaritans, and the Samaritans to hate the Jews. So by the time you get to the first century, at this point, there's been centuries of animosity amongst people that are not that far apart in terms of where they live geographically. Centuries and centuries of animosity. And that animosity had grown to the point that in the first century, in Christ's time, if you wanted to give someone the greatest insult you could, if you were an Orthodox Jew there in Jerusalem, and you wanted to absolutely slam someone else, you would call them what? A Samaritan. When you call someone a Samaritan, it's like talking about someone's mother. It's somewhere you don't go. Which is why, interestingly, what did the Pharisees say to Jesus when they really wanted to slam him? They not only called him a Samaritan, they called him a demon-possessed Samaritan. So with that said, in this context here in which Jesus is going to go into Samaria, he is going to the last place that anyone would ever possibly have wanted to go at this time, and even his own disciples are going to be aghast at what he is doing. Let's look at this now. Let's return to the text. Let's look at verses one through nine, and then just work our way through the balance. Okay, verse one. "Therefore, when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus had made and baptized more disciples than John, although he himself did not baptize, but his disciples did, he left Judea to the south, and he departed to Galilee to the north." He went from a dry and dusty climate up to a green and lush climate. But verse four, "But he needed to go through Samaria. And so it came to a city of Samaria, which is called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Now, Jacob's well was there, and Jesus therefore, being wearied from his journey, sat thus by the well, and it was about the sixth hour," which would've been noon. "Now a woman of Samaria came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, 'Give me a drink.' For his disciples had gone away from the city to buy food."Then the woman of Samaria said to him, "How is it that you, being a Jew, would ask from me a drink, a Samaritan woman?" For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. All right, verses one through three. Verses one through three, we read that Jesus had left Jerusalem to go back home again to Galilee, off to the north. However, the problem was geographically, that to go from one place to other, to go from the south to the north in a straight direct line would take you right through the heart of Samaria, and that was something that they didn't do. If you were a Jew in Jerusalem and you needed to go up to Galilee, you did not take a direct route for that very reason. The Jews would not go through Samaria any more than you would feel comfortable walking down Bourbon Street at 2:00 in the morning, right? This was a red light district, not an area to be seen, not an area to go. So what did they do? Well, they went around. They went way around. In many cases, they crossed the Jordan, went up the Transjordan Highway, and then looped back in to get to Galilee. But we see here that that's not what Jesus did, because Jesus didn't share the priorities of his Jewish contemporaries. Jesus had not come to Earth with the idea that I want to avoid sinful people. Jesus had not come to Earth with this idea that I want to avoid those who might otherwise affect or contaminate me, those that I really shouldn't be seen around, those I shouldn't hang with. If that had been the case, he wouldn't have visited anybody. If Jesus' mentality was, I'm not going to go to where the sinful people are, there's nowhere he could have gone where there are not sinful people. So Jesus had no intention or desire ever of saying, "Yeah, I think I'm going to avoid Samaria and the Samaritans." Rather, he goes right through the heart of it. And in this time, he goes to a location that's referred to here as Jacob's Well. Now, Jacob's Well was understood and appreciated by both the Jews and the Samaritans. It was on a plot of land that had originally been given to Joseph and his children. Jacob's Well had been around for how long at the time of Christ? Roughly 2,000 years. Well, guess what? It's still there. Right now, today, if the world events weren't as they are, you could travel and you could go to Jacob's Well, and you could see the water and the whole lot. There's a big Greek Orthodox building there. It's kind of interesting is, I guess, the best way I can put it, but the well is still there. The well is still there. There's been thousands of years that there's been a well there, and it's still there. So here in verse six, we see he goes to this well, this landmark for both the Jews and the Samaritans, and says that he's tired, which speaks to his humanity. He did get tired. Jesus sneezed. He did things that are normal for you and I. So he gets tired and he sits there by the well, and as a good rabbi, his disciples at that time, culturally, his disciples were the ones who would go and take care of the rabbi and get the food and so forth. So they went into town. He sat by the well and waited. But he did not wait without some expectation of what was about to happen. He was waiting with a divine appointment in view. He was waiting for one to come who he knew was going to come, a woman from Samaria.

Now, what do we know about this woman? Well, we know a couple things right off the bat. The first is this. No good, revered, devout woman of Samaria went and got water at the sixth hour of the day at noon. At that time, no one went in the Middle East to go do the hard labor in the middle of the day. Rather, they would go in the morning or they'd go in the evening. And the idea was that you got enough water to last you 24 hours to do your washing, to cleanse your utensils for drinking and the like. They did it either in the morning or they did it evening, but they did not go in the middle of the Middle East at noon at the sixth hour to go and get the water. And we know that no one did this at the sixth hour because no one else is here. This is the primary source of water. This is the primary source of refreshment and cleansing and purification, all these different things, and no one else is there but this woman. What does that tell us about her? It tells us, as we're going to find out later in the text, that she bore a giant scarlet letter upon her. In this sense, she was known to be a sinner. She was ostracized from the community. She couldn't go when the other people went to get the water. She had to go by herself. And so here, this Samaritan sinful woman

comes to get water in the middle of the day, and she encounters Jesus. Now, at this point, we see there in verse seven that Jesus does what's almost unthinkable. He asks her for something. He asks her for a drink. "Give me a drink," for his disciples had gone away in the city to buy food. And the woman says, "How is it that you, a Jew, are asking me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?" For the Jews had no dealings with the Samaritans. That's actually, depending on the translation, that's a poor phraseology. They did have dealings with the Samaritans. Where had the disciples just gone? They'd gone to get food [chuckles] in a Samaritan town. So they had dealings, but you know what they would never have done, never in a billion years would they have done, is share a meal or a drink or utensil with a Samaritan. That's different. And so when he, in effect, a guy sitting there with no scoop, no spoon, no cup, no bowl, nothing, says, "Give me a drink," he was saying, "I will utilize what you have to nourish myself." And that astonishes her because she's never heard of such a thing, let alone experienced such a thing. And so she asks him, "What is going on here? Why would you do this? Do you know who I am?" All right, let's see his response in verses 10 through 15. Verse 10, "So Jesus answered and said to her, 'If you knew the gift of God, and if you knew who it says to you, "Give me a drink," then you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.' And the woman said to him, 'Sir, you have nothing to draw with. The well is deep. Where do you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, as well as his sons and his livestock?'" Verse 13, "Jesus answered and said to her, 'Whoever drinks of this water,'" as if he's probably pointing to the well, whoever drinks that water, "'whoever drinks of this water will thirst again.'" You come here every day. "'Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I give him will never thirst. But the water I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up, gushing up, bubbling up into everlasting life.' And the woman said to him, 'Sir'""Give me this water." Evidently, it sounded pretty good. "Sir, give me this water, that I might not thirst nor come here to draw." So she's still confused about exactly what he's talking about, but she knows this much, it sounds pretty good. All right, so let's stop and ask ourselves a little bit more about this woman. In the earlier verses, Jesus had been the one to ask for water, but it was the woman who's actually thirsty. As we said before, this woman was undoubtedly socially isolated. There's a reason why the text says it was the sixth hour of the day, the one part of the day when no one goes and does labor like this. We know that she was socially isolated. She did not go to the well the same time as others. No one accompanied her to the well at this time, so she was alone in her walk through life. And in a moment, we're going to find out that she's actually had five husbands, and the person she's with now isn't even her husband. This is a woman who was alone in her walk through life and who had made many, even countless, bad choices. She probably was the scourge of her town. A pariah would be the term that we would use. With that said, who's really thirsty here? Is it Jesus? Is it this lady? Well, if you're talking about spirituality, if you're talking about emotions, if you're talking about the heart, this woman was the thirsty one. You could argue that her soul was parched. Her soul was not just parched, her soul was bone dry. She came up bearing all the baggage and all the hurts and all the loss and all the accusations and all the slander and all the gossip and everything that everyone ever said upon her probably hung about her shoulders as she came up to that well to get water just to nourish her body. And even as she nourished her body, she'd have to do it again a day later. With that said, the one thing she could not nourish, the one thing that well could not serve in any capacity, was the hurts that she bore. Her soul was bone dry. Well, Jesus knew that. Again, this is a divine appointment. Jesus knew her condition. He knew the Samaritan woman's greatest needs, just like he knows yours and mine. How many of us, as a side note, have lived in a spiritual desert, chasing the world's nourishment, chasing things that we think will feed us, at least for a season? We chase things that feed our body. We chase fame, success, and money and relationships and all of these different things. And then one day we wake up from chasing all that and we say, "You know what? This didn't turn out like I had thought it would." How many of us can relate to this? We spent a big portion of our life chasing after things that would feed our pocketbook or feed our pride or what have you, or our lusts or what not. How many of us have spent a whole lot of time feeding our carnal selves only to wake up one day and go, "This is no good. I'm as empty as I used to be. I've acquired these different things. I've had these different experiences, and yet I'm just hollowed out. I'm just dead inside." How many of us have had that experience or have observed others in our walk who are presently undergoing those circumstances, those situations? Who was the richest man to ever live? What was his name?

Solomon.

King Solomon. Who was, I don't know, the wisest man in the Bible? You can say Solomon again. He was the richest, wealthiest, most famous guy of his age. Solomon, Solomon, Solomon. Who had more wives than anybody in the Bible? Solomon. Every possible thing that mankind typically lusts after in our culture, whether it's money or fame or power or relationships, sexuality, what have you, Solomon had all of it to the hilt. Every part of that, everything that you have ever desired, Solomon saw it in the most extreme form you can see it. Solomon experienced it in the most extreme way that it can be experienced. Solomon had all of that to the utmost, and at the end of days, in Ecclesiastes, he says, "It was worth nothing, a chasing after the wind, vanity." It was all vanity.

Whatever you're chasing, if it's not Christ, whatever you're chasing, if it's not the God who made you, whatever you're chasing, if you're a created being and you're not chasing the Creator, other things in the created realm are not going to be sufficient. And even if you got them, even if you got all of it to the utmost that you could get it, you would wake up one day and feel empty,

thirsty. Well, this woman didn't even have the physical stuff to distract her. She didn't even have the benefit of those things to at least pretend that she was being well-nourished. She was hollowed out, she was dry, and she was thirsty. And then along comes this one,

and he says, "I know your condition,

and I know that what you're seeking is not enough.

I've come to offer you something more."

Let's see how that conversation plays out as we look at the balance of our verses. Let's look at verses 16 through 26. So Jesus said to her, "Go, call your husband and come here." And the woman answered and said, "I have no husband." She had to say that with shame. She had to say that with shame. "Call your husband and come here." "Sir, I have no husband." But she was honest. She was honest. So Jesus said to her, verse 17, "You well said, 'I have no husband,' for you've had five. You have had five husbands, and the one who you now have is not your husband. In this you have spoken truly." And the woman said to him, "Sir, I perceive you must be a prophet." See, he had just told her something that was her greatest embarrassment. They'd never met before. How would he know it? So she says, "Sir, I perceive that you're a prophet." And then she brings up this theological question that was probably on her heart and the heart of a lot of other Samaritans. They probably wondered about this all the time, but she asks it. This man seems to be a prophet. She asks him a question, verse 20. She says, "Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews say that Jerusalem, that that's the place where one ought to worship." She thought that was the only distinction that mattered. Well, Jesus is going to correct her and say, "That's not the distinction that matters." Verse 21, Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will neither worship on this mountain or in Jerusalem."

Neither place is going to be the litmus test for what good worship is and where good worship is done. "Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither will you worship on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know. We worship what we do know, for salvation is of the Jews." Remember, they had neutered the Old Testament text. They took the first five books and lopped off everything else, which meant they missed a whole lot of stuff. And so he looks at her and says, "You worship what you don't know. You've deliberately been ignorant. You and your people have taken about this much of the text, and that's what you've held onto. You don't understand what you're worshiping or who you're worshiping, and you don't understand how salvation works. Salvation is of the Jews, but the hour is comingThis is a transition. He says, "Therefore, but an hour is coming, and it's now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. For the Father is seeking such to worship Him. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth."

The woman said to him, "Sir, I know that the Messiah is coming, the one called the Christ. And when he comes, he will tell us all things."

Can you imagine the gleam in Christ's eye right about then?

Verse 26, Jesus said to her, "I who speak to you

am he." I who speak to you am he. All right. In verses 16 through 18, Jesus has identified the woman's source of sin and shame, all her husbands. In the same way that he knows everything about you and all that you've done and the thoughts that you've had and the deeds that you've done and the like, he knew everything about her, and so he identifies it. He identifies the source of her sin and her shame. With that said, what he doesn't do is run from her at that time. I think I've said it before, even in this austere, Presbyterian, loving church body, the truth is, if you knew every thought, every deed that everyone had done to your left and to your right this morning, there aren't enough doors for how far we would want to move away from one another, and that's the reality. We put on our finer and our clothes and like, but we know the rot that has existed inside, and we know what we've done in times past. And we know that if those things were named and listed out, that there's a lot of people in our world that just wouldn't want anything to do with us. Well, here Jesus says, "I know everything about you," and not just the Samaritan woman, but you and I this morning as well. Jesus says, "I know everything. I know it all. I know what you've done. I know what you've said. I know things you've thought.

Now, in spite of what I know about you,

I still love you." Here in this text, he does not run, he does not turn, he does not recoil in spite of knowing these things about her. The very same things that other people ostracized her for. Remember when I said people would move away from you? That's what happened to her, right? That's exactly what happened to her. In her society, the people knew what she'd done, [mimicking crowd] and so they avoided her, they ostracized her. But here he sits with her, and he talks with her. And when his other disciples show up, they're going to basically think, "What are you doing?" Remember, that always happened to Jesus. Remember when Jesus would sit down with sinners and tax collectors for a meal, and the other people would walk around and go, "What is he doing? Doesn't he know who he's sitting with?" Yes, he does because he did not come to save the righteous. He came to seek out sinners. With that said, he found one here. Now the woman, despite the fact that he's still there talking to her, which she can't believe, she says, "Well, here's a chance to ask a question, a burning question of this Jewish rabbi who's sitting in front of me." And so she asks the question. She says, "Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews say that Jerusalem is the place to worship." This was the demarcation line between these two people who shared the same ancestry, who both would have appreciated the very well in front of them. This was the line of demarcation. You guys worship there. We want to worship over here. And it was a divide that had been along for a long time, to the point that some people didn't even know why they did it this way. Sometimes you can do things for generations and wake up one day and go, "Why do we do it this way?" Well, so she asks. She says, "Why do we worship here and you worship there?" Well, rather than give her the history lesson, Jesus wants to seize on the word worship. And he says, "Worship is not a function of where you do it." It's not to say that where doesn't matter. This morning, you are better off worshiping God in the context of corporate worship in the church than you would be worshiping him on the golf course. So it's not to say that location never is relevant. But in this context, the idea that you could only worship in one place wasn't true. And so he redefines it. He says, "Worship is not a function of where it's done, nor is it a function of the ancestry of the people doing it." One of the wonderful things about God's promise and the new covenant that had originally been prophesied through Jeremiah and others was that a day would come when it wouldn't just be the Jews in Judea and northern Israel, Samaritans included, or anyone else that would worship God, but there'd be people in Ephesus and Corinth and Greece and even in Rome, which was, again, the greatest threat to all cultures on the globe at this time. Even in Rome, there'd be people who would pray and who would worship God there, despite where they're at, despite what they've done, and despite the ancestry that isn't even the remote part Jewish. It had nothing to do with Jacob's well. Even there, God would raise up people to worship him. So this is what he's saying, and this would've blown her mind just as it blew the Pharisees' minds. Everyone he told this sort of stuff to, immediately their reaction was to get their back up against the wall because all they had at that time was their love and affection for those who were in their group, their clique, and their hatred for everyone on the outside. Jesus says, "That's not the way this works." With that said, the Jews had a history, even in Jerusalem, of worshiping in the right place and worshiping the true God, but worshiping in a way that rose as a stench to his nostrils. In the Book of Jeremiah that I just mentioned a few moments ago, in Jeremiah chapter 7, you would have a group of holy, devout Jews. Not holy so much. They appeared holy. They appeared devout. You would have this group of Jews in Jeremiah 7 who would go into the temple there in Jerusalem, and they would repeat, "This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, temple of the Lord." They would repeat it as if it mattered to them. They would look at their religiosity, the things they were doing, the place they were worshiping in, and they would put all their emphasis there. And at the same time, God looked at their hearts and said, "You guys are full of it. You're saying the temple of the Lord while you're here in Jerusalem, but your hearts are far from me." There's a verse that says that the people honored God with their lips, but their hearts weren't there. That said, what kind of worship does God want? If it's not a function of exactly where you do it and what time of day you do it and the amount of prayers you say in life, if that's not a function, then what is the function of true worship? Well, he's going to tell her. He told her in these verses. He says, "Look, this is the sort of worship God wants. Whether you're a Jew, a Samaritan, whether you're in Jerusalem, whether you're in Rome, whether you're in Gulfport, the sort of worship that God wants is worship that's done in spirit and in truth." In spirit and in truth. The truth part's easy. It's got to be founded on thisThere's a lot of ways you can worship the God who has made you, but this is the way, or this book describes the way that he desires to be worshipped. It describes the precepts by which we approach him, the diligence with which we come to him. It describes who he is, what he expects of us. We come to God not on our terms, inventing the way we think he might want to be worshipped or the way we want to worship him. Rather, we worship and truth come on the basis of what this book says. Secondly, we do so in spirit. There's a whole sermon there, but in short, we worship him with a spirit that has been changed, regenerated, with hearts that are true, with hearts that hate our sins, that have turned away from that which we're doing wrong, are inclined towards him. There's humility. There's all these different sort of things, and this is an appropriate way by which we come to God. And there was people, even Pharisees, at this exact hour, this exact time, there in Jerusalem, who worshiped God all the time, and yet they didn't repent, and they didn't worship him in spirit at all. We talked about this on Wednesday night. There's a famous parable in which you have this Pharisee standing next to this tax collector, and the Pharisee is praying, "Oh, God, oh, God, thank you." Thank you what? Thank you that I'm not like him. Thank you I'm not like this tax collector. Now, meanwhile, what was the tax collector doing? He couldn't even look up. He was beating his breast, saying, "Lord God, forgive me. I am a sinner." That's what God desires of us, that we'd have a right understanding of who we are and therefore greater appreciation for who he is. We worship him in spirit and in truth. With that said, as we look to wrap up this morning, notice that when Jesus did this, when he talks about worship in this context, he refers multiple times to something called a coming hour, a coming hour. And the woman brings this up in one of her last questions there in verse 25. The woman says, "I know that the Messiah is coming." She thinks to maybe that's what he's talking about, this coming hour. "I know that the Messiah is coming, the Christ. When he comes, he will tell us all things."

At that point, Jesus told her with clarity that he didn't always tell the Pharisees with. He says, "You know what? The one who's speaking to you,

I am he. I who speak to you, the one who speaks to you now, the one who's talked to you about the living water, the one who didn't run away from you,

I am he."

In John 3, we saw there last week, the Messiah had come, but he hadn't done what anyone expected, and he came to people that you would never expect. Last week, he had this encounter with Nicodemus, the high and mighty. Here comes the Samaritan sinful woman who was on the low end. Jesus did not do the things people expected him to do. He did not go to the people that other people expect the Messiah would go to. There was nothing about his ministry, nothing about his ministry that made sense to those observing it, oftentimes including the disciples. How often did the disciples look at what Jesus did and just go, "Oh, my goodness, I can't believe he's doing that." It happened all the time. And yet, the irony is, even though he wasn't fulfilling the expectations of the people, he was fulfilling this. This book told everyone who he would be and what he would come to do. This book anticipated the nature of his ministry. This book says that when he came, he would be lowly and meek, that when he came, he would seek out the hurting. That when he would come, Isaiah 53 says that he would be despised, a man of grief and acquainted with sorrows. He would be the last thing people would look for, but the very thing that people need. This morning, are you thirsty?

The answer is yes, whether you own it or not.

You and I are thirsty. If God has regenerated our hearts and we've already experienced the sensation of this everlasting life, and it's given us a hope that we didn't previously have, but there may be some present today or within the hearing of my voice that are not there yet. They're on the outside looking in. They're looking for something. Maybe you're looking for something, something that will fill that giant vacuum inside. This morning, Jesus has the same message for you and I who are seeking or searching or desiring or wanting fulfillment, the same message as he did for the Samaritan woman. "I who speak to you am he." If you hear his voice this morning, whether you're already a believer and have kept him at arm's length, or whether you're outside looking in at matters of the faith, you have a problem. Jesus has the answers. You are thirsty. Jesus has everlasting water. Run to him. Let's pray.

To search through an archive of Dr. Holt's previous sermons, please visit us at fpcgolfport.org, or you can look us up at sermonaudio.com. [outro music]