One Drink That Satisfies

John 4:10-14 Jesus answered and said to her, “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.” The woman said to Him, “Sir, You have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Where then do You get that living water? Are You greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, as well as his sons and his livestock?”  Jesus answered and said to her, “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.”

Here's an uplifting and thought-provoking lesson on this passage. Water is necessary for life, and no one can live for long without it. Jesus, when talking to the Samaritan woman at the well, used this simple and well-known fact to teach timeless truth, both to her and to us. The two occurrences of the word “drinks” (pinō) in this passage of Scripture are actually in two different forms. The construction used in Greek implies a continual, habitual drinking in the first case but a one-time action in the second.

Likewise, while the woman referred to a “well” (phrear - literally “a hole in the ground”), Christ referred to a “flowing well,” or “spring,” using a different word (pēgē). Furthermore, when He said one who drinks from His spring shall “never thirst,” He said so in a very emphatic way. One who drinks from the wells of the world will thirst again, for sinful pleasures never satisfy. But just a single drink from the springs of “living water” of which Christ spoke eliminates spiritual thirst forever.

That one drink is a drink of eternal life, and it becomes in the believer a veritable spring, inexhaustible in its quantity and unsurpassed in its quality. The water is a reference to the work of the indwelling Holy Spirit, sent by Jesus to minister to His followers in His absence. One day we’ll be with Him, and then, as well as now, He completely satisfies.