THIRST: Take a long pull on the Living Water!

SPIRITUAL THIRST: [John 4:1-26 or Revelation 21:6]

My wife and I were involved in foster care; we’ve had a foster child with us for over six years. From time to time we were required to take certification classes. In one session, the instructor was explaining how some children are abused by depravation.

She told us of three siblings who had been deprived of water. When they arrived at her home they were fascinated by the availability of water … they ran around turning on every faucet, inside and outside. But what fascinated them most were the toilets, they flushed them again and again.

A negative side to these discoveries was a sense of desperation when leaving home; their new mom solved the problem by getting each of them a mini-water bottle.

When people are deprived of a thing they “want,” they generally get along pretty well without it; however, when it’s something they “need,” or require, they suffer horribly in its absence.

These little boys didn’t consciously know they were suffering from a lack of water, but they were … so too is man as he is deprived of God’s living water! Just as he thirsts for physical water, so too he thirst for spiritual water. Only One can satisfy that thirst: The Living Water of Life!

LIVING WATER - Drink and never thirst again!

DEHYDRATED SOULS AND SPIRITS! [Jeremiah 17:13; Other topics - Lost, Salvation, Sanctification, Satan, Thirst]

In a message on Ananias and Sapphira, Rev. Jim Henry, Pastor of First Baptist Church in Orlando, Florida, tells of how natives in Africa locate water during their all too frequent droughts.

The natives capture a baboon and feed him salt for a few days … when they release him he races to the nearest water hole in the forest. By following the baboon they are led to a source of water they didn’t know existed.

Satan has been feeding man lies (salt) instead of God’s word (bread) for centuries; because of this condition man has become desert parched.

The non-believer, once free of Satan’s grip, immediately races to whatever the world calls moisture (self-help, gurus, meditation, occultism, mysticism, false religions, whatever). In short order, the lost soul finds his thirst unsatisfied and so races on to the next stop on the devil’s treadmill … discovering again his parched throat is unappeased. [cf. John 14:13]

But the true believer (if ever trapped by a snare of the evil one), when freed from his bonds, races to the source of living water [John 7:38] for he is like a tree firmly planted by streams of water [Psalm 1:3]; the parched condition of his experience is never far from Satisfaction.