Peter Barnes: Living Water, Jeremiah 2:1-13; John 4:1-26 (Sunday 2 August 2020 Evening Service, 6.00 p.m.)
Martyn Lloyd-Jones preached over thirty sermons on John 4:13-14, so we will have to be content to skate over six verses in one sermon!
1. Christ draws a sinner to Himself.
– 4:10. This is a cryptic offer of living water. J. C. Ryle: ‘There is a handle to every mind, and our chief aim must be to get hold of it.’ Don Carson: ‘the water is the satisfying eternal life mediated by the Spirit that only Jesus, the Messiah and Saviour of the world, can provide.’
– God is the fountain of life, of living waters – Psalm 36:9; Jer.2:13. She probably saw something significant was being claimed here, but had no idea what it was – 4:11-12. For misunderstand Jesus’ words, see John 2:19-22; 3:3-4; 6:51-52.
– Don Carson says the well is still over 100 feet deep. Ryle says she speaks ‘perhaps with a slight sneer’. Her view is: ‘You are a man, and you can hardly be greater than the patriarch Jacob.’ She is at least interested – 4:15.
2. Everything else will fail.
– 4:13. Jesus is obviously saying more than ‘The water in this well will only keep you alive for a day.’ See Jer.2:12-13. Juan Ponce de Leon searched for the Fountain of Youth. Richard Baxter: ‘The more the world is known, the less it satisfieth.’ Benjamin Shaw on the book of Ecclesiastes: ‘Most vaporous, most vaporous, everything is vapour.’
– It is not just the failures of life that fail to satisfy. The successes of life have a ‘so what?’ aspect to them.
3. Christ alone gives the Holy Spirit and eternal life. – 4:14; John 6:63; 7:37-39. The Holy Spirit is perpetually refreshing.