October 8: Streams of living water

On the last and most important day of the festival, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone is thirsty, he should come to Me and drink! The one who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, will have streams of living water flow from deep within him.” He said this about the Spirit. Those who believed in Jesus were going to receive the Spirit, for the Spirit had not yet been received because Jesus had not yet been glorified.  (John 7:37-39 — Holman Christian Standard Bible)

Jesus spoke these words on the last day of a 7-day festival called the Feast of Tabernacles — one of the three most important Jewish religious festivals of each year. People would live in makeshift shelters for those seven days to remind them of how God took care of their ancestors as they travelled in the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land. On that last day, the people would march around the temple altar seven times in memory of the victory at Jericho, as the priest would pour water that had been taken from the Pool of Siloam from a golden pitcher onto the altar, in memory of when water flowed out of the rock in the wilderness. 

Jesus might have cried out at the very moment that the priest was pouring the water on the altar, and if so, it must have been a very dramatic moment. But even if it wasn’t at that exact instant, what Jesus declared could not be misinterpreted. He made it clear that He was the answer to people’s needs, and that the Holy Spirit would not only quench people’s thirst, but would become a stream of living water flowing from within them. The Jews had already been planning to kill Jesus in the days leading up to this festival, and these words must have made them even more furious. But for those who had open hearts, those words must have been like a bolt of lightning; those words must have given them the hope that God cared and had huge blessings reserved for them. They did not need to look to the past to see the greatness of God’s power, He was ready to work in their day.

What Jesus implies in this passage is that anyone without the baptism in the Holy Spirit is thirsty, whether they realize it or not. Nutritionists say that we need to drink at least 8 cups of water a day, and that most people will unknowingly turn to food when their body is really crying out for water. In exactly the same way, people try to satisfy their spiritual thirst with all sorts of things from this world — alcohol, drugs, sex, video games, family, marriage after marriage, money, possessions, etc. — when the only thing that will truly quench our thirst is the Holy Spirit. But even that is not enough for God, He wants to create a stream of living water inside of us so that we will never be thirsty ever again. What an amazing reality that is! If we’re not pushing everything to the side and concentrating all our efforts on getting His Spirit, we don’t really know what a good thing is.