The Samaritan woman said to him, "You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?" (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)
Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water."
"Sir," the woman said, "You have nothing to draw and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?"
Jesus answered, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 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 4:9-14
Jesus offered the woman "living water."
What did that mean? In Jewish speech the phrase "living water" meant water that was flowing, not water that was stagnant, as in a cistern or a well.
Fresh, flowing water would always be preferred over
well water.
So the woman He was speaking to naturally thought of a stream.
She seems skeptical. Here was a man who thought he could produce better, finer water than did her ancestor Jacob.
After all, had Jacob known of a stream he certainly would not have taken the trouble to dig a well, probably a hundred feet deep.
He goes on to talk about living water that cures thirst forever. Not only that, it becomes a spring inside us that wells up continually.
No one as ever seen a well of water spring up. Only the water in a spring springs up.
The water in a well just lies there.
So Jesus is not talking about a well at all.
The woman had come to a well. Jesus has invited her to a spring.
Now He adds that if she allows Him to place this spring in her, the spring will never cease but will continue to bubble and bubble on forever.
Perhaps you want to build a house on a piece of property on which there is a well. But you don't want the well -- you will have city water.
You will just ask the bulldozers to push some dirt into the well and the well will be gone forever.
This won't work with a spring on your property. (Of course, you probably wouldn't want to stop up a lovely spring of fresh water, but if you did you would find it a much more difficult task.)
You could push a large pile of dirt over the spring and it might appear to have stopped the flow. But by morning, the stream will be there again, simply by pushing its way through the ground.
A well can be covered. A spring seeps through anything you may place over it.
That's what Jesus is talking about. He is promising to place a spring within the life of anyone who will come to Him.
His spring will be eternal, free, joyous, and self-dependent.
But He is also warning us that we will never be able to stop it - we can't bulldoze anything over it to stop its flow!
We might try -- I know I have.
Sometimes His Presence in my life has seemed inconvenient and maybe intrusive - certainly He seemed to interfere with my plans.
So I tried to "put a plug on it" and go my own way.
But, like the stream the builder tried to cover up with dirt, my life became muddy water.
Obviously, muddy water did not come from the stream itself -- the stream water was clean and pure -- it was because I pushed dirt into the water source that it produced filthy, not fresh and clean, water!
So I came back to the Source of the Living Water, to Jesus, and asked Him to clean me up again - to remove the dirt and grime and let His lovely sparkling water flow freely again!
It took some work, but He did it!
And if I mess up again, He'll certainly clean me up again. I'm confident of that.
Being confident of this, that He who began
a good work in you will carry it on to completion
until the day of Christ Jesus.
Philippians 1:6
