by There’s a deadness around us and within us. It’s a hunger and thirsting for something – though we can’t always pin our finger to it. You sense it every time you speak to young people, and you can feel them either grasping for straws or removed from reality, zombified. They may act nonchalant, but often you feel the growing urgency as they reach out for something, but they do no know what.
You’ll also notice it when you meet people struggling to fill their life with addictions, amoral sex, drunkenness and lasciviousness, money and more power. You want to ask them, what are you looking for? Why are you chasing that?
But aren’t we all looking for something out there, trying to fill something inside here? Aren’t we all playing in a field where our enemy is out to steal from us, kill us and destroy us, our dreams, futures, self esteem, sense of self and our families? Isn’t there a malignancy of sin and evil in all of us, mutating into various expressions of evil and wickedness despite our best intentions?
What’s this hole we are trying to plug with entertainment, alcohol, drugs, sex, ambition, success, money?
One of the my favourite Bible stories has to be of the Samaritan woman at the well… and the way Jesus offers her a drink of eternal life and she gobbles it up, like a thirsty person. She didn’t even know what she was looking for. But you can see the thirst in her list (and choice) of men. Then she meets Jesus and turns into an evangelist.
We are all thirsty and hungry. We are all dead inside. Just that some are more aware of it than others.
The indictment from scripture is that we are all walking dead. From the moment Adam and Eve sinned, we were all declared dead. But thank God for the gift of life in Jesus. Our path to the tree of life has been opened afresh by the Son of God. We can live. We can stop feeling dead and empty, chasing after the wind, seeking for something to stir us up. There is life in the Son of God. Abundant life. “If you only knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you’d have asked him and he would give you living water.”
“Living water.”
“Bread of life.”
“Resurrection and life.”
“I have come that you may have life.”
“Those who believe in me will live.”
“Tree of life”
“River of life”..
There’s an amazing promise of life now, and eternally, in Christ. And God does not lie. Every promise, every claim he makes, is true. For those who have believed in Jesus have crossed over from death to life. It’s cliché but it’s true, that there is life, abundant life, thriving life, prolific life, in Christ. Ask any one who has truly had a life-altering encounter with Christ and they will tell you life is different, purposeful, meaningful, peaceful. For Christ himself is our peace, with God and within all. Truly one can say, “I was blind now I see.”
Are you thirsty? Come to the well and drink at no charge. “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?” Isaiah 55:1
