While Jesus was traveling from Judea to Galilee, he took the route that led through Samaria. He stopped to rest at Jacob’s well, and it was there that he met the Samaritan woman.
She came to draw water at the time that respectable women avoided the well. While Jesus’s disciples went into the city to buy food, Jesus initiated a conversation with the woman. He began by asking her for a drink of water.
This confused her. Why was a Jewish man even talking to a Samaritan woman, much less asking her for water?
Jesus responded by saying, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” (John 4:10)
He wasn’t making any sense to her. She asked if he was greater than Jacob who dug the well.
Instead of directly answering her question, he said, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (vs. 13-14)
The Samaritan woman assumed he was talking about physical water. She wanted some of that water so she’d never again have to go to the well to draw water. She didn’t yet get it.
Sometimes God speaks to us, but we don’t understand what he’s telling us. If we continue to engage with him, however, he makes it clear.
Read about the Samaritan woman: John 4
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