Living Water

As the deer pants for streams of water,
    so my soul pants for you, my God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
    When can I go and meet with God?
My tears have been my food
    day and night,
while people say to me all day long,
    “Where is your God?”
These things I remember
    as I pour out my soul:
how I used to go to the house of God
    under the protection of the Mighty One
with shouts of joy and praise
    among the festive throng.

I wonder what it must have felt like to live in the Old Testament times…Clinging to the faith of your fathers, not having the fulfillment of Scriptures through Jesus to glean from.

David was called a man after God’s own heart, yet as I read this psalm, my own heart is pained for him. He had hope, he followed God’s commands and knew God’s power and might…

But his soul was still thirsting for God. For living water.

Jesus, when talking to the Samaritan woman at the well, told her that anyone who drinks of His water will never thirst again. Indeed, the water He gives will spring up into a fountain within them, overflowing to eternal life.

What a thought! A complex one, too…

But keeping digging along with me…

Jesus continues conversing with the woman and says that now is the time when true worshipers will worship God in spirit and truth.

Immediately after reading this, my mind was drawn back one chapter to when Jesus is talking with Nicodemus, the Pharisee.

Jesus tells Nicodemus that to enter the Kingdom of God one must be born again, born of water and spirit.

I think, growing up, I’d always read and understood that to mean a person needed to be baptized. But now I see it with fresh eyes: we need that Living Water within us, so that we thirst no more!

To have access to the Kingdom of God, we need to be born of the Spirit. That comes through faith in Jesus Christ, who gives us His Spirit: Our Comforter, Counselor, and Teacher.

We also have to be born, fresh and new, with Living Water. I wonder if this is ultimately our faith being rooted down deep…where we can access the wells of Jesus’s abundance.

And now, just as you accepted Christ Jesus as your Lord, you must continue to follow him. Let your roots grow down into him, and let your lives be built on him. Then your faith will grow strong in the truth you were taught, and you will overflow with thankfulness. – Colossians 2:6-7 NLT

Strong, in truth, and thankful…That is a life without thirsting. A life free from longing and searching for satisfaction and fulfillment in things of the world. An abundant life!

Are you thirsty today, Friends? Is your Spirit crying out for relief? Do you question, “Where are you God? All I see is pain and strife!”

Come, drink of Living Water, and be satisfied by grace.