Living Water

“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” (John 4:10 NKJV).

Ever wonder what Jesus was talking about when he offered “living water” to the Samaritan woman? If we read it in Hebrew, the phrase would be “running water.”

What’s so important about water in motion? Think of how it comes to us. Rain comes from the sky and collects on the earth. What falls into cisterns or ponds without outlets, soon becomes stagnant or stale. But rain that flows down a slope gathers into streams and merges into rivers. Its constant motion helps keep the water fresh, aerated, and clean.

Still water can easily be measured in cubic centimeters or gallons. If we scoop out a bucketful, we’ve reduced its volume by that much. Remove too much, and the cistern goes dry.

Living Water: An Endless Supply

Running water, living water, is harder to measure. How much water is in a river? The amount flowing past us will soon empty into the sea. What’s spilling down the mountain will soon be part of the river, but we can’t count it yet. We drink from it, yet its volume is not reduced.

And where does a river start? Its exact source is less certain. It began somewhere “up there,” at the top of a hill, or summit of a mountain. We can find its first trickle, but if we come back during a rainstorm, we’ll find it burbling from somewhere higher on the slope.

Ecclesiastes explains it this way, “All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; to the place from which the rivers come, there they return again.”^[1] Water—coming down from heaven, gathering into rivers, rushing on to the sea, then evaporating to heaven and starting all over again. No beginning. No end.

This was the living water Jesus offered the Samaritan woman in John 4. Life-giving water that can’t be measured, that can’t be used up, that has neither beginning nor end. He offered her, and offers us, an everlasting stream of life from which to drink. We can drink all we like, of this living water, this running, moving water. Because heaven will keep pouring out more and more—an endless stream of grace, mercy, and love.

^[1] The New King James Version (Ec 1:7). (1982). Thomas Nelson.