Lesson 7 Leaving Our Thirst Behind
Question 1
Greetings again, and welcome back! It’s great to study with you in this way and I’m glad to see you have returned.
We’ve been studying through the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. We have seen how she interacted with Jesus and how Jesus skillfully and graciously uncovered her problem. The problem she had was that she was “thirsting”, yearning and craving, desiring to find love and satisfaction. She tried quenching her thirst in relationships with men, but each relationship failed. By the time she met Jesus, the woman had been married five times. She didn’t even bother to marry the sixth man, but she was living with him at the time of her encounter with Christ.
Clearly she was using relationships with men in a way that they were not designed; in other words, she was “thirsting” and turning to men to quench her thirst. Jesus taught her that as long as she kept turning to men she would “thirst again”, but He offered her “living water” as a gift that would quench her thirst forever.
We’ve been comparing this “thirst” of the woman at the well to what we experience in media addiction when we keep returning to social media, gaming, online dating sites, YouTube or any of the myriad of other forms of media, in an attempt to satisfy something that is missing within us. But media is not designed to do this, and as long as we continue turning to it we will continue to thirst.
In the last lesson, we saw that Jesus offers us “living water” as a gift, which will quench our thirst forever. We saw from John chapter 7 that we get this “water” by believing in Him. We receive the “water” of the Holy Spirit by believing in Jesus; that is, believing that He lived for us, died for us and rose again for us.
Hse writes, "Yes, I believe in Jesus because he has proved his love for me on the cross, as well as his Grace in daily life."