You Have Nothing to Draw With

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John 4:11-14 "'Sir,' the woman said, 'you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?' Jesus answered, 'Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.'"

Think

Jesus offers her living water and she points out that he does not have a bucket.

It is a completely fair objection. The well was deep, well over a hundred feet by most estimates, and he is sitting there with nothing. She is not mocking him. She is being practical, and she is thinking about actual water, because that is what people come to wells for.

Then she asks a second question with an edge on it. "Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well?"

That is a real challenge. She is saying, “This well has been here for generations, our ancestor dug it, everybody in this region depends on it, and you are sitting on the edge of it suggesting you have something better. Who exactly do you think you are?”

Notice what Jesus does with the pushback. He does not get defensive and he does not answer the Jacob question at all.

He goes underneath it. "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again."

That is not a claim about theology. That is a claim about her Tuesday. She is standing at a well she has walked to a thousand times, in the heat, alone, and he says the thing you keep coming back for does not stay filled.

She would have known that better than anybody in the story. That was her entire life, described in one sentence about water.

And this is where it stops being ancient and starts being about you, because everybody has a well they keep walking back to.

For some students it is attention. You get some and it feels good and by the next afternoon you need more. For some it is a phone that gets picked up two hundred times a day looking for something it has never once delivered. For some it is being the best at something, or being needed, or a relationship you have made responsible for telling you that you are okay.

None of those are evil. A well is not evil. It is just that you have to keep going back, and you have probably noticed by now that it never stays full.

Then look at what Jesus offers instead, and pay attention to the picture he uses. He does not say he will give her a bigger bucket or a closer well. He says the water he gives "will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life."

A spring is completely different from a well. A well is a hole you go to and take from. A spring comes up from underneath on its own.

He is not offering a better version of what she already has. He is offering something inside her instead of something she travels to.

That is the difference between a faith you have to keep going and get refilled at, and something God does in you that has its own source. Plenty of students only feel close to God at events, which means they are treating God like a well. There is nothing wrong with the event. It is just that a well runs on your walking to it.

And notice that Jesus answered her objection by making her thirstier. He did not resolve the confusion about the bucket. He just described her life accurately and let her want something.

So what is the well you keep walking back to, and how is that working out?

Apply

Name your well – Write down the one thing you keep going back to for a sense of being okay. Be specific. Then ask God for one honest thing today: that he would become the source instead of the thing you visit when you run dry.

Pray

God, I keep going back to the same things and they never stay full. I am tired of the walk. I do not just want to feel close to you at big moments. Put something in me that does not run out when nobody is watching. In Jesus' name. Amen.