📖 The Gospel of John — Unit 3: Living Water

Introduction — A Divine Partnership

Imagine a garden full of vibrant flowers, lush plants, and towering trees. God creates the life in the plants; He sends the sunshine and the rain. But the gardener must still nurture and trim and fertilize and weed, or the true beauty is never unveiled. Our lives are like that garden. Jesus offered the Samaritan woman living water — He offered her Himself — but the real beauty of her story was unveiled when she ran and shared the Christ she had only just met. Again and again Scripture shows this lovely symmetry: God provides salvation and the power of His Spirit, and then God works through us to finish His purpose. "It is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure" (Philippians 2:13). That is the Divine Partnership, and this chapter is its picture.

I. The Woman at the Well

Jesus, wearied from His journey, sat down by Jacob's well about the sixth hour while His disciples went into the town to buy food. A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Everything about that meeting was a wall a respectable rabbi would not climb. She was a Samaritan, a half-Jew — and the Jews and the Samaritans despised one another. She was a woman, and the teachers did not speak with women in public. And she was, by the town's reckoning, a great sinner; she would prove to have had five husbands, and the man she lived with then was not her husband. She was, as we would say, a hopeless case. Yet Jesus opened the conversation Himself: "Give Me a drink." The Maker of the spring asked a sinner for a cup of water, so that He might give her a fountain.

II. The Living Water

"If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, 'Give Me a drink,' you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water" (John 4:10). She heard only the well at her feet — You have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. But Jesus was speaking of another water altogether. "Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. The water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life" (John 4:13–14). The world's water always runs out; you drink, and within hours you are thirsty again. The water Christ gives does not sit in a cistern to be rationed — it springs up, it overflows, it becomes a fountain inside the one who drinks.

Some years ago I traveled in the Canadian province of Ontario and made sure to drive and see Niagara Falls, on the border of Canada and the United States — the grandest waterfall in all of North America, where millions of gallons pour over the edge every single minute and never, ever stop. That is a faint picture of the fullness Jesus offered that woman. He offered her Himself. Salvation, and a purpose for living, are found in Him alone, and they never run dry.

Every one of us was made with a thirst that no well of this world can fill. We carry our buckets to the cisterns of money, of pleasure, of approval, of one more relationship, and we drink, and for an hour we are satisfied — and then the old dryness creeps back, because those wells were never deep enough for a soul. The woman at Jacob's well had been to that kind of cistern five times over, and the man she lived with then was a sixth bucket let down into an empty well. Jesus did not scold her thirst; He offered to end it. And He offers the same to us. The ache you cannot quite name, the restlessness that no achievement finally quiets, is the soul's cry for the only water that satisfies. His invitation has not changed in two thousand years: drink of Me, and you will never thirst again.

III. In Spirit and in Truth

Then He touched the wound. "Go, call your husband, and come here." "I have no husband." "You have well said... for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband." He did not shame her; He simply showed her that He already knew everything, and still was offering her the fountain. Seeing a prophet before her, she raised the old quarrel of worship: our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews say Jerusalem is the place. Jesus lifted the whole question to higher ground: "God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth" (John 4:24). True worship is not finally a matter of the right mountain or the right building, but of the heart and the Spirit and the truth of God. And then, to this woman — a Samaritan, an outsider, a sinner — He said what He had said plainly to no one else: "I who speak to you am He." The first soul to hear Jesus openly name Himself the Messiah was a woman at a well at noon.

IV. The First Evangelist: Come and See

What she did next preaches its own sermon. "The woman then left her waterpot, went her way into the city, and said to the men, 'Come, see a Man who told me all things that I ever did. Could this be the Christ?'" (John 4:28–29). She left the very waterpot she had come for — the old thirst forgotten in the new fountain — and ran to the same townspeople who knew her reputation. She could not have walked anyone through a set of spiritual laws. But she could say two words: come, see. And they came. "Many of the Samaritans of that city believed in Him because of the word of the woman" (John 4:39), and then many more believed because they heard Him for themselves, and said, "Now we believe... and we know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world" (John 4:42).

Mark the contrast John quietly draws. The disciples had gone into that same town — men in training under the Lord Himself, the most qualified evangelists on earth — and they came back with bread and no converts; there is no sign they spoke to a soul. The first evangelist in Samaria was one grateful, excited sinner. The living water must have been sparkling water, for it came bubbling up out of her life.

V. The Fields Are White

When the disciples urged Him to eat, Jesus said, "My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work" (John 4:34). Then He pointed to the Samaritans even then streaming out of the town toward Him: "Lift up your eyes and look at the fields, for they are already white for harvest" (John 4:35). One sows, another reaps, and "he who reaps receives wages... that both he who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together" (John 4:36). There is the Divine Partnership again: Jesus had sown in one woman by a well, and already a whole village was ripening. God gives the increase, but He is pleased to let us carry the seed and swing the sickle, and to share the joy of the harvest.

VI. Every Believer on the Team

People sometimes imagine there is only one kind of evangelist. There are many, and every believer belongs to the team. There is the mass evangelist — I once sat in a Billy Graham crusade and watched thousands stream forward. There is the defender of the faith, the apologist — men like Lee Strobel and Josh McDowell, or Nabeel Qureshi, who reasoned his way out of Islam into Christ and then spent his short life defending the faith. There is the serving evangelist, like Barnabas the son of encouragement, whose compassion gave weight to his words. There is the tract evangelist: I was told of a paralyzed man named J. D. Fore who could move almost nothing, yet stamped gospel tracts by gripping a rubber stamp in his teeth and, with his mother's help, mailed them to soldiers across the world — and his wall filled with letters from men saved through those tracts. There is the timid or "come and see" evangelist, like the little white-haired man on George Street in Sydney who asked passersby one quiet question — "If you died today, where would you be?" — and never knew, until late in life, how many he had sent to Christ. And there is the invitational evangelist, the Samaritan woman herself, who only said, "Come and see." You may never preach to thousands or argue a skeptic to his knees. But you can say, "Come and see." Have you drunk of the living water? Then leave the waterpot, and go.

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