It was the Feast of the Tabernacles in Jerusalem. Every day a priest with a golden pitcher went down to the Pool of Siloam followed by a huge crowd of people. The priest would fill the pitcher at the pool, then carry it up the street amid while the people shouted and sang and played trumpets and cymbals.

When the priest reached the temple he would pour the water out by the alter… while the people sang a line from Isaiah 12:3.

With joy we will draw water from the wells of salvation. (NIV)

Everyone looked so happy…. They weren't

Like people at just about every party in the world…You would have thought those people didn't have a care in the world….. They did

With all the exuberance and excitement…. Surely none of these laughing people had huge voids in their lives, minds filled with unanswered questions, aching inner needs with no one to meet them.

Yes, Yes they did

There was a man standing in the crowd that day who knew the hearts of these people better than they knew themselves…He must have been so struck with the futility of it all…at the weeklong party they sang and danced, and shouted…after it was all over they went home to their same heartaches and fears.

1) Dissatisfaction with family, community, and government

2) Sacrifices to a seemingly unhearing God

3) A long-awaited Messiah who didn't seem to ever be coming.

The One looking on must have had Jeremiahs prophesy ringing in his ears:

Standing right there in the middle of the crowd was one who could satisfy every thirst of every person and have a lot left over.

He did a very unusual thing. A normally quiet public person heard all he could take:

He stood up and yelled!

All the dancing stopped!

All the shouting stopped!

All the singing stopped!

One lone voice rang out across the temple court…

John 7:37 On the last and greatest day of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. 38 Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him." (NIV)

Some came…some drank…some were satisfied

Many watched, pondered, turned aside and went away thirsty….

We followed a biblical trail here at the fasting and prayer service on Wednesday evening of people in the Old Testament who declared themselves to be "Thirsty for God". More prominently was God saying to the Children of Israel- You're not thirsty for me!!!

You are producing successive generations who are thirsting for lots of things… but not for me. Isaiah 55:1 "Come…all who are thirsty, come to the waters…. If you know your bible history you know that from Isaiah's time Israel ran away from God…so much so that the Assyrians (modern day Iran) wiped out 10 of the 12 tribes disappeared... never to be reformed again.

It really struck me this week… this idea of the Creator of the universe…creating us to fellowship with him… desiring nothing more than a closeness of relationship…a communion between our spirit and God's Spirit…

There is something so, eternally, sad about the God of the universe crying out to his children… Come to Me…let Me satisfy your every need… doesn't anybody have a thirsting to be drawn closer to Me???

And God's creation…en mass says "Not really!" Were getting our thirst satisfied elsewhere.. but thank you for asking!"

There is a reason why Jesus plays this theme over and over again… I think, in this/these statement/s, out of the mouth of Jesus, you are hearing into the very heart of God!

John 7:37 On the last and greatest day of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. 38 Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him." (NIV)

To the Samaritan woman… watch her response…

That intrigues me…

What makes you physically thirsty? Rather than guess at it…I actually looked it up.

Two things, at least on a basic level make you thirsty. 1) If the water volume in your body, particularly your cells, falls below a certain threshold…your brain is signaled and that brain then causes an uncomfortable dryness in your mouth and throat signally you to bring in more water. 2) A second thing is happening… the osmolite concentration.. particularly the level of sodium/salt goes up as the water concentration goes down. If you eat a lot of salty foods… you instantly upset the balance and immediately get thirsty. Your body is actually saying to you…too much salt…I need a quick balance.

(Isn't it amazing what a finely tuned machine billions of years of random evolution has produced?)

If the cells get to empty of water they begin to shrink in an effort to survive, causing dehydration… enough of which could lead to death.

It gets more complicated…

When you body begins alerting you to its need for moisture… it is asking specifically for

H20

If I give it something else… (illustrate coffee and soda cups) … while there is H2O in here… the caffeine in these drinks will actually act as a dehydrator….so even though I'm taking in water, I'm actually still further depleting my body of needed moisture.

Alcoholic beverages have the same effect… You can drink large amounts and be even more dehydrated than when you started.

Or how about this (Frosty). I'm so thirsty…so I satisfy my shrinking cells by putting in a frozen chocolate milk confection ????

My point: It is possible to be virtually dying of thirst… and yet continually try to satisfy one's inner raging thirst with "counterfeit" thirst quenchers!

That is exactly what was happening spiritually at the Feast of the Tabernacles when Jesus finally erupted: If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink! Jesus could see the horrific inner thirst in those people. They were taking part in a prescribed religious feast… a supposed personal connection between them and their God… but Jesus looking on saw that their inner spiritual, cells were shrunken and dry. They were going through the motions on the outside but what they were trying to slake their thirst with was not the right prescription. Even though they were busy "running" through their lives…frantically filling themselves with anything/everything they thought would satisfy…. They were getting more and more thirsty on the inside.

Just like there is only one true, physical, thirst quencher…

If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink!

Whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."

(talk about renewable natural resources)

The alcoholic man can drink all day long and become more and more dry on the inside… the Dunkin Donuts addict can almost order one of every drink on the menu and still be dehydrated at the end of the day…. because they are trying to hydrate with the wrong thing. The biker can have a fine water bottle strapped to his bike…but if he doesn't take repeated swigs he will eventually fall off the bike.

We only talked about this a short time on Wednesday evening but what grabbed many of us was how un-thirsty many of us are for the very God we are going to spend all of eternity with.

Let's face it: for many of us…God is the spiritually hydrating bottle that stays strapped to the bicycle while we stop along the way for every counterfeit we can find…

It's not that we are not thirsty… we are!! The whole world is virtually dying of spiritual thirst…. But the world is also frantically involved in trying to find counterfeit ways to satisfy their raging thirst.

Here's a problem. It's possible to be a Christian, having repented of your sins and accepting the eternal life Jesus has offered… It's possible to have done that and still be all caught up in counterfeit hydrating.

The people Jesus was talking to at the Feast were actually people who believed in God and were celebrating a religious feast. They're the ones he was crying out to…Is anybody out there thirsty? You are all racing through your religious activity with little shrunken cells.

Isn't anybody thirsty for the water of life?

Your spiritual enemy….. Satan, the evil one…. Doesn't have to convince you to turn aside from your Savior and reject his salvation in order to defeat you. All he has to do is convince you to satisfy your thirst with other things… substitutes for God's presence and power in your lives.

When I start looking at what kind of things and how many things I can substitute for god's presence in my life…it's not hard to imagine why God comes to this earth and cries out repeatedly:

Is anybody thirsty? Does anybody want the eternally hydrating water of life?