Last week we asked the question: What will satisfy you the most and for the longest period of time? We ask God for many things: health, money, reconciliation in relationships. Sometimes our motives aren’t as “pure” and the things we desire in life become demands for respect, success, money, or whatever else will finally make us happy. We carry around with us the “if only” attitude that causes us to think that if God isn’t giving us the one thing we’ve been waiting for to make us happy, He doesn’t love us. It is a subtle trap and a lie. Rarely do we actually hear ourselves talking this way. Instead we come up with a number of justifiable reasons why we “only want this one thing and then everything would be good”. The secret to eternal satisfaction is actually not much of a secret at all, and the truth is that there really is just one thing -or shall I say person- that can finally and ultimately satisfy us.
In John 4:7-15 Jesus helps the Samaritan woman, and us, understand our souls in a life-giving way.
Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well as she is drawing water and asks for a drink. She is surprised because back then Jewish people didn’t really like Samaritans much. They felt that Samaritans were “half-breeds” who weren’t God’s chosen people. Not cool. – So she’s a little taken aback that a Jewish dude would ask a Samaritan for water. She totally doesn’t understand the whole fully God, fully man, Savior of the World thing. Basically, she’s like “What?” and he’s all “Check this out!”. He says to her “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” This still goes over her head and he continues with,
“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” John 4:13
Jesus drops the answer to the question no one knew they were asking!? “What will satisfy me forever?” The back story is that this woman has been hooking up with a bunch of men. Jesus tells her that the lifestyle she is living isn’t going to provide her with the fulfillment she thinks it is. The truth is that we do the same thing. Our lives are defined by “the pursuit of happiness”; we chase after happiness in friends, belongings, technology, pornography, sex, television, music, volunteering to serve in church ministries and more. All of those things will not last and all are selfishly trying to satisfy our soul’s eternal hunger for God. Some things, like friends, serving or volunteering, and even technology, aren’t bad things until they take God’s place on the throne.
What will satisfy you the most and for the longest period of time? If God doesn’t give it to you, he doesn’t love you. God desires the best for our souls. Our eternal souls were made to be happy only in what is eternal, our Creator! It can’t be ourselves because we wouldn’t seek to be made happy by any other thing while on earth if we could simply be happy with ourselves. Besides, that’s a pretty selfish way to live. Even doing something like helping in a soup kitchen so that we can be satisfied that we did something good is selfish because we’re still just focused on ourselves. The answer to the question must be GOD HIMSELF! Only He will make us eternally happy. If God were to fill our lives with everything that we think would make us happy and never allow us to see how gloriously sufficient He is, He would be withholding from us the greatest gift we would ever know. Fortunately He has given himself to us in Jesus so that we can stop chasing after the seductive and sometimes virtuous pleasures of life and find that our souls are only eternally happy when we behold our great God who is above all things and worthy to be praised! So we must come to Christ and ask God for forgiveness that we have gone to serve many other kings in our pursuit of happiness. We must admit that it is a sin which is offensive to our Creator-King, but then take up the forgiveness that is provided by Jesus, vow to fight and kill the idols in our lives and hearts, and revel in the glories of our God!
