Episode Transcript
CONSECRATION
Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.
Jesus, I belong to you.
I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice.
Jesus, we belong to you.
Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.
THE WORD OF THE LORD
John 4:7–15 NIV
When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)
The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)
Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
“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.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”
CONSIDER THIS
This woman comes to the well carrying more than a water jar.
She carries history. Shame. Longing. Weariness. She comes at noon, the hottest part of the day, likely to avoid the glances and whispers of others. She comes alone. And there, at the well, she meets Jesus.
Jesus begins with a simple request. “Will you give me a drink?”
It is a small question, but it opens a holy conversation. Jesus crosses boundaries of gender, ethnicity, and religious hostility. He meets her exactly where she is, and then he gently redirects her thirst.
“If you knew the gift of God . . . ”
That sentence hangs in the air. If you knew. If you could see what is being offered to you.
Jesus does not shame her thirst. He names it. He honors it. And then he invites her to imagine a deeper satisfaction. “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again.” Jesus knows how many wells we return to again and again, hoping this time will be enough.
Approval. Achievement. Control. Comfort. Even religion, when it becomes another well we draw from without truly encountering God.
But Jesus offers something different. Living water. Not a temporary fix, but a spring within. A life sourced not from striving, but from communion.
Notice how the woman responds. “Sir, give me this water.” She does not fully understand yet, but desire has awakened. Something in her recognizes truth when it hears it. Awakening often begins before clarity arrives.
And here is the good news for us today. Jesus meets us at the wells we keep returning to. He does not scold us for being thirsty. He offers himself as the one who satisfies.
To wake up to living water is to let Jesus redefine what we are really longing for.
PRAYER
Jesus, you see the wells we return to again and again. You know our thirst, even when we struggle to name it. Meet us in the ordinary places of our lives. Interrupt our routines with your grace. Give us living water that wells up within us to eternal life. We pray in your holy name, amen.
