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Weekly Devotion
John 4:13-16
13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” 15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”
16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.”
In John 4, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at a well in Sychar. Their conversation, as recorded for us in John's Gospel, seems disjointed. Jesus offers her "living water." She accepts. He, then, tells her to go get her husband. How does this comport?
Most readers will focus on the fact that she had many husbands. Even by modern standards, five failed marriages is a lot. But to me, the more informative word is the number five. It represents repeated failure and continued dissatisfaction. It conveys a heart that is still wanting, searching but unable to fill the void. That's why Jesus told her to go get her husband. He wasn't trying to shame her. Rather, he was trying to show that she was still thirsty. He was trying to show her that her main problem wasn't meeting and marrying the wrong guy. but that she did not know the true and living God.
J.I. Packer, in his book Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, warns of this distinction. He wrote: Everyone’s life includes things which cause dissatisfaction and shame. Everyone has a bad conscience about some things in his past, matters in which he has fallen short of the standard which he set for himself, or which was expected of him by others. The danger is that in our evangelism we should content ourselves with evoking thoughts of these things and making people feel uncomfortable with them and then depicting Christ as the one who saves us from these elements.
Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman shows us that our deepest need is not physical water or love or whatever else we can find in this world. Rather, our deepest need is for him. Only Jesus can provide living water that satisfies our soul, and those who receive it cannot help but tell others about him.