Experiencing God's Curiosity and Compassion by Chuck DeGroatSample

Read through the Gospels, and you’ll notice that Jesus is incredibly curious about what we do with our hunger and thirst. Among the first words of his inaugural sermon we hear, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst” (Mathew. 5:6). And on almost every page of the Gospel accounts, some version of this question: What do you long for? What do you want? What are you hungry for? What are you thirsting after?

These are questions of immense curiosity, of profound compassion, reflective of a God who sees through your behavior to your biography. Paging through the Gospels, you’ll find story after story echoing this dazzling reality. Alongside a well named for Jacob, the patriarch who walked with a limp, Jesus meets a woman who is thirsty. He says to her, “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” (John 4:13-14). The woman, we’re told, is a Samaritan, which is to say she was an outcast, a member of a group known for “bad” blood, bad behavior, and bad theology.

But Jesus doesn’t slice the world into outsiders and insiders, bad guys and good guys, addicts and the abstinent. At the well of Jacob, Jesus compassionately greets a woman who is thirsty, a woman created in his image, longing for worth, belonging, and purpose at her core. He doesn’t mock her thirst. He doesn’t shame her actions or her identity. What Jesus does, time and again, is invite people just like you and me to hunger and thirst more deeply. Like Jacob many centuries earlier, she’d see God face-to-face and walk away with a blessing. She arrived an outcast and left at peace with God and herself. She then invited others to drink from his deep well.

God’s compassion creates the safety we need in order to long for more, to drink from God’s deep well. “The LORD longs to be gracious to you; therefore, he will rise up to show you compassion” (Isaiah 30:18). It began in Genesis, with God’s three curious and kind questions. Where are you? Who told you? Where have you taken your hunger and thirst? And Jesus brings into full clarity the compassionate heart of God. God’s kindness comes in the flesh -- Jesus living, suffering, even dying for the recovery of our hearts. God will go to no end to reconnect us to ourselves, to each other, to Him.

May you know the depths of God’s love for you. May you see his face shining upon you and sense his graciousness to you.

Content from this plan comes from the book Healing What's Within by Chuck DeGroat. Click here to learn more about Healing What's Within.