Come And Drink

Come and Drink

With joy you will drink deeply from the fountain of salvation!

Isaiah 12:3

On the last day, the climax of the festival, Jesus stood and shouted to the crowds, “Anyone who is thirsty may come to me! Anyone who believes in me may come and drink! For the Scriptures declare, ‘Rivers of living water will flow from his heart.’”

John 7:37-38

They drank from the spiritual rock that traveled with them, and that rock was Christ.

1 Corinthians 10:4

Humans can live for several weeks without food, but we can live for only three days without water. So drinking water is truly a matter of life and death. But water has not always been as easy to come by as it is for us today.

As part of the annual Festival of Shelters, the Jewish people celebrated God’s provision of water. The priests would go down to the pool of Siloam and fill up their pitchers with water and take them back to the Temple. They would pour the water into silver containers while people shouted, “With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation!”

It was on this day, as crowds of people were watching the priests pour the water into the containers in the Temple, that Jesus made a big announcement. He stood up and shouted for everyone to hear, “Anyone who is thirsty may come to me! Anyone who believes in me may come and drink!” He chose the most dramatic moment of the festival to make an important statement about himself. He was saying that just as God had sustained and satisfied his people with water from a rock in the wilderness in the days of Moses, he would satisfy the spiritual thirst of anyone who comes to him. In other words, he was the living fulfillment of everything this feast celebrated. Just as no one can live without drinking water, it is only by taking in the living water of Jesus that a person can live forever.

DISCUSSION STARTERS

During Bible times, people had to get all their water from a city well or a river and carry it back to their homes in pots. How would your attitude toward water change if this were something you had to do every day?

Try to imagine the scene from the festival when Jesus shouted out that he was the living water. Why do you think he chose that time to say this? How do you think people responded?

What do you think it means to be spiritually thirsty?