Praying with Scripture

Continuing through the Gospel of John as the basis for prayer, we find Jesus speaking with the Samaritan woman in Chapter 4:  Whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

Of course, if we are that woman, we ask with her, "Sir, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water."  What satisfies our continuing thirst? Recognition? Scholarship? Television? Power? Wealth?  Anything we can think of eventually runs out and we have to return to the source once again, often finding that it has grown stale and fails to satisfy us.  Jeremiah lamented in God's name the condition of mankind: 

My people have committed two sins:

They have forsaken me,

the spring of living water, 

and have dug their own cisterns,

broken cisterns that cannot hold water (2:13).

Now why go to Egypt 

to drink water from the Shihor?

And why go to Assyria

to drink water from the River? (2:18)

....I provide water in the desert

and streams in the wasteland,

to give drink to my people, my chosen,

the people I formed for myself

that they may proclaim my praise (Isiah 43:20-21).

I will pour water on the thirsty land,

and streams on the dry ground;

I will pour out my Spirit on your offspring,

and my blessing on your descendants (Is. 44:3).

From the first page of the Old Testament to the last page of Revelation, we find water associated with blessing and blessing with water.  In fact, in Hebrew, the two words are separated by one vowel.  Berakah means "blessing," and berekah means "pool/spring of water where camels drink." So if we could hear the last verse above spoken in Hebrew, we would hear berekah on the thirsty land, and berakah on your descendants, the sound of the words reinforcing the meaning.

Probably one of the best visual representations of this Biblical theology was the movie The Lion King; under an unjust ruler, the land dries up and fails to produce.  Under a just king, the land bursts forth in plenty for everyone. When Jesus cries, "I thirst!" from the cross, all the moisture in His body has dried up from loss of blood and evaporation -- He has become our sin and taken on our thirst:

I am poured out like water, 

and all my bones are out of joint.

My heart has turned to wax;

it has melted away within me.

My strength is dried up like a potshard,

and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;

I am laid in the dust of death (Ps. 22).

Returning to the Gospel of John, Jesus not only offers a "spring" of living water to the Samaritan woman, but "on the last and greatest day of the feast" (commemorating God's gift of water to the Israelites in the desert), Jesus stands up in the Temple and says, If a man is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.  Whoever believes in me...streams of living water will flow from within him."

Now he says not a "spring" of living water (for personal use) but now "streams" of living water (flowing out from the believer to others).  By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive (Jn. 7:38).

Lord, give us this living water!