For Those Who Are Thirsty Sýnishorn

Thirsty for God

The human body has three stages of dehydration: mild, moderate, and severe. The first is ordinary thirst. Your mouth is dry and your brain tells you to drink some water. If you don’t drink, your thirst intensifies. In this stage you experience headaches, dizziness, fatigue, confusion, and more. In the third stage, drinking water is no longer enough; medical intervention is necessary.  

Two guys were driving through the desert, and their truck broke down. You can imagine what they thought! They were stranded and had no way to reach someone to help them. They were alone, in the heat, in the sun. After a while, they drank all the water they had. They decided to lie underneath the truck to get some shade from the sun and maybe bring the temperature down a few degrees. They got thirstier and thirstier. 

The thirst of these men was like the thirst of the rich man in hell. He longed for relief, so he asked Lazarus for just one drop of water on his tongue. The stranded men were so thirsty they decided to drink the liquid from the radiator of the truck. It was lethal. The liquid they drank was poison. 

We can get so thirsty in this world that we will take our legitimate need—this thirst for God—and try to satisfy it in ways that won’t work, that are even deadly to us. This world is full of broken cisterns where we try to slake our thirst but can’t. Some of these are success, fame, money, pleasure, and fulfillment. But Malcom Muggeridge, a British author, said: 

I may, I suppose, regard myself, or pass for being, a relatively successful man. People occasionally stare at me in the streets – that’s fame. I can fairly easily earn enough to qualify for admission to the higher slopes of the Inland Revenue – that’s success. Furnished with money and a little fame, even the elderly, if they care to, may partake of trendy diversions – that’s pleasure. It might happen once in a while that something I said or wrote was sufficiently heeded for me to persuade myself that it represented a serious impact on our time – that’s fulfillment. Yet I say to you, and I beg you to believe me, multiply these tiny triumphs by a million, add them all together, and they are nothing – less than nothing, a positive impediment – measured against one draught of that living water Christ offers to the spiritually thirsty, irrespective of who or what they are.

Jesus is the Living Water. He is the only way to satisfy our spiritual thirst.