Water is absolutely essential to the human body’s survival. A person can live for about a month without food, but only about a week without water. Water dissolves more substances than any other liquid. Wherever it travels, water carries chemicals, minerals, and nutrients with it.
1. Water helps to maintain a healthy body by increasing metabolism and regulating appetite.
2. Water leads to increased energy levels. The most common cause of daytime fatigue is actually mild dehydration.
3. Drinking adequate amounts of water can decrease the risk of certain types of cancers, including colon cancer, bladder cancer, and breast cancer.
4. For a majority of sufferers, drinking water can significantly reduce joint and/or back pain.
5. Water leads to overall greater health by flushing out wastes and bacteria that can cause disease.
6. Water can prevent and alleviate headaches.
7. Water naturally moisturizes skin and ensures proper cellular formation underneath layers of skin to give it a healthy, glowing appearance.
8. Water aids in the digestion process and prevents constipation.
9. Water is the primary mode of transportation for all nutrients in the body and is essential for proper circulation.
Nothing substitutes for water. No drink -- no coffee, no tea, no alcoholic beverages. Not even fruit juices.
Dehydration is the cause of pain and disease.
Most medications cover up symptoms and signs and complications of dehydration in the human body. Dr. Oz says its not always the aspirin you take that gets rid of a headache, but the water you drink to wash it down.
The Bible has over 300 references to water and another 80 on rain.
The Bible looks at water in many different ways, using it as a symbol of destruction (Genesis 6-9, The Flood),
cleansing (Exodus 30:18-Make a bronze basin, with its bronze stand, for washing. Place it between the Tent of Meeting and the altar, and put water in it.),
and spiritual need (Psalm 42- 1 As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, my God.
2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When can I go and meet with God? ).
God recognizes our need for water and makes provision for that need.
Deuteronomy 28:12 The LORD will open the heavens, the storehouse of his bounty, to send rain on your land in season and to bless all the work of your hands.
Isaiah 48:18 I will make rivers flow on barren heights,
and springs within the valleys.
I will turn the desert into pools of water,
and the parched ground into springs.
and Psalm 65:9 You care for the land and water it;
you enrich it abundantly.
The streams of God are filled with water
to provide the people with grain,
for so you have ordained it.[a
Isaiah 41: 17 “The poor and needy search for water,
but there is none;
their tongues are parched with thirst.
But I the LORD will answer them;
I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.
The most common symbol of water is as a symbol of blessing.
One of the many passages in the Bible which uses water to symbolise blessing is Isaiah 35. Much of the book of Isaiah concerns Isaiah’s prophecies of God’s judgement on the sins of the people. But this chapter looks ahead to God’s glorious promises to those who trust him.
Read Isaiah 35:1-7
1 The desert and the parched land will be glad;
the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.
Like the crocus, 2 it will burst into bloom;
it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy.
The glory of Lebanon will be given to it,
the splendor of Carmel and Sharon;
they will see the glory of the LORD,
the splendor of our God.
3 Strengthen the feeble hands,
steady the knees that give way;
4 say to those with fearful hearts,
“Be strong, do not fear;
your God will come,
he will come with vengeance;
with divine retribution
he will come to save you.”
5 Then will the eyes of the blind be opened
and the ears of the deaf unstopped.
6 Then will the lame leap like a deer,
and the mute tongue shout for joy.
Water will gush forth in the wilderness
and streams in the desert.
7 The burning sand will become a pool,
the thirsty ground bubbling springs.
In the haunts where jackals once lay,
grass and reeds and papyrus will grow.
Isaiah 35:8-10
8 And a highway will be there;
it will be called the Way of Holiness;
it will be for those who walk on that Way.
The unclean will not journey on it;
wicked fools will not go about on it.
9 No lion will be there,
nor any ravenous beast;
they will not be found there.
But only the redeemed will walk there,
10 and those the LORD has rescued will return.
They will enter Zion with singing;
everlasting joy will crown their heads.
Gladness and joy will overtake them,
and sorrow and sighing will flee away.
David writes in Psalm 51:7: "Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow."
Here, David refers to the spiritual washing required for his cleansing. He makes a deliberate request of God to wash Him, knowing that only the cleansing power of Almighty God can make a man clean and pure. Though his sins have covered him in filth and stained him to the very roots of his being, the washing power of God makes a man whiter than snow.
In our understanding of the symbolism of colors, "snow-white" is considered the ultimate in white, the whitest of white, as pure and unsullied a white as possible. David's expectation was that God's cleansing power would exceed even that ultimate white—"I shall be whiter than snow." We can only relate this to absolute spiritual, moral perfection, the very state in which Almighty God exists. The wording expresses that the scrubbing God could give him would permit him to exist in that absolute, ultimate state of perfection.
In Numbers 19, Moses gives instructions for one who is unclean due to touching a dead body. Remember my sermon 2 weeks ago where I mentioned Paul asking, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” These instructions include taking a bunch of hyssop, dipping it into clean, running water, and sprinkling the unclean individual, his tent, and possessions. This example clearly connects the use of hyssop and clean water for cleansing.
Over the years, some have suggested that hyssop contains valuable antiseptic or cleansing properties that would "disinfect" the contaminated person or his possessions. This cannot be the point because such an idea contradicts the fact that God is the only Source of true purification. The biblical use of hyssop in the Passover, the sacrifices, and the ceremonial cleansing rituals was a constant reminder, painting a detailed picture of the washing, cleansing, saving, purification, and salvation from death itself that come only from the eternal God.
This is the kind of cleansing that David requested of God when he asked to be purged with hyssop.
The Setting Apart of the Levites
5 The LORD said to Moses: 6 “Take the Levites from among all the Israelites and make them ceremonially clean. 7 To purify them, do this: Sprinkle the water of cleansing on them; then have them shave their whole bodies and wash their clothes. And so they will purify themselves. It signified, figuratively, that purifying of the heart which must characterize the servants of God.
Jeremiah 17: 7 “But blessed is the one who trusts in the LORD,
whose confidence is in him.
8 They will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
and never fails to bear fruit.”
9 The heart is deceitful above all things
and beyond cure.
Who can understand it?
10 “I the LORD search the heart
and examine the mind,
to reward each person according to their conduct,
according to what their deeds deserve.”
Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary
17:5-11 He who puts confidence in man, shall be like the heath in a desert, a naked tree, a sorry shrub, the product of barren ground, useless and worthless. Those who trust to their own righteousness and strength, and think they can do without Christ, make flesh their arm, and their souls cannot prosper in graces or comforts. Those who make God their Hope, shall flourish like a tree always green, whose leaf does not wither. They shall be fixed in peace and satisfaction of mind; they shall not be anxious in a year of drought. Those who make God their Hope, have enough in him to make up the want of all creature-comforts. They shall not cease from yielding fruit in holiness and good works. The heart, the conscience of man, in his corrupt and fallen state, is deceitful above all things. It calls evil good, and good evil; and cries peace to those to whom it does not belong. Herein the heart is desperately wicked; it is deadly, it is desperate. The case is bad indeed, if the conscience, which should set right the errors of other faculties, is a leader in the delusion. We cannot know our own hearts, nor what they will do in an hour of temptation. Who can understand his errors? Much less can we know the hearts of others, or depend upon them. He that believes God's testimony in this matter, and learns to watch his own heart, will find this is a correct, though a sad picture, and learns many lessons to direct his conduct. But much in our own hearts and in the hearts of others, will remain unknown. Yet whatever wickedness there is in the heart, God sees it. Men may be imposed upon, but God cannot be deceived.
Psalm 69:5 You know my folly, O God; my guilt is not hidden from you.
Psalm 139:1 O LORD, you have searched me and you know me.
Psalm 139:2 You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.
Proverbs 15:11 Death and Destruction lie open before the LORD--how much more the hearts of men!
In our Gospel this morning, Jesus points to the Samaritan woman's need for the water that he can give her.
Does Jesus tell the woman these things in judgement? No, that is what the devil does – he's the accuser of the brethren
His weapons are accusations to produce guilt and shame. God's conviction and Satan's conviction are not the same. When the Spirit of God convicts us, it tenders us. It draws us to God. But, there is satanic conviction. I am positive as I am standing here, many of God's people have confessed things under satanic conviction instead of God's conviction. Satanic conviction leads to despair. It leads to guilt. It turns you inward. You can confess your sins and confess your sins, and it gets darker and darker. Your despair becomes hopelessness leading to unbelief and rebellion against God because you do not find any relief in that sort of confession. That is satanic conviction. The Holy Spirit conviction brings relief and points to the remedy. The satanic conviction does not point to the remedy. It points to the action that you did or did not do and leaves you there. If it leaves us with our sin and there is no remedy and no pointing out and no sweet reminder, that is satanic conviction. It will drive you to despair. It has driven some people to suicide to get away from the thoughts of the accuser. He is a cunning foe. He is the accuser of the brethren.
God does not intend for you to live with guilt from day to day. When you take it to the Lord and ask for forgiveness, it is under the blood. It is gone forever... "their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more."
Satan accuses us and uses our sins to drive us to despair. The Lord Jesus in His tenderness drives us back to Him.
We must not listen to Satan or to ourselves because both are deceitful. We must listen to the truth God would say to us about ourselves.
1 John 1: 9If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
CONFESS - Greek – homologeo - to say the same thing as another, i.e. to agree with, assent
1. to concede
a. not to refuse,
b. not to deny
a. to confess
b. declare
c. to confess, i.e. to admit or declare one's self guilty of what one is accused of
It's a hot, dry day in Palestine. Jesus and the disciples have decided to walk north from Judea to Galilee. Think for a moment of Palestine as a big town, and if you're going to walk from the south end to the north end, you have to go through the middle, where the town is run down and the people are looked-down on. The part of town where some people advise you to make sure your car doors are locked and you keep your foot on the accelerator when you stop for a red light.
This place betwen Judea and Galilee is called Samaria, and there's bad blood, literally, between Samaria and the rest of Palestine. 750 years before there had been two kingdoms, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. In 722 BC the Assyrians under King Sargon II had conquered Israel and to make sure Israel never made trouble again, they deported more than half the people and brought in foreigners to fill the place that was left. The destruction of Israel must have been a terrible event, with conquering soldiers killing the men, raping the women, burning the cities, taking away into slavery many of those who were left, and bringing in foreigners to fill the empty space. And when the soldiers had gone and some semblance of normal life re-emerged, the people who filled the land were Samaritans. Samaritans still held on to their traditional Scriptures, the first 5 books of the Bible. Samaritans kept up the ancient traditions of Israel including the well that Jacob had first dug. And Samaritans were despised and hated by the people of Judah and Galilee -- because out of that experience 750 years before they were of mixed race, impure, and unclean.
In 30 AD, Jews hate Samaritans and the Samaritans hate them back. When Jews travel from Galilee in the north, to Judea in the South, on a pilgrimage to a festival, they keep close to their group. If you're Jewish, you don't want to be alone in Samaria. Stragglers have been attacked in this part of town.
Jesus sends the disciples off to the convenience store to find some lunch and sits down, alone, in the middle of Samaria. Does this man not value his life? Is he just too tired to join the others who have gone off to find food? Perhaps Jesus really does have the future all planned out and the script doesn't call for him to die until Calvary so he can be foolhardy in between. All we know is if he had asked us, we would have told him, "this is not a good place for someone of your kind to be sitting, alone."
It's noon time and the sun is terribly hot. This is not the time to be outside doing errands. But, before too long, a Samaritan woman shows up to get water. Perhaps she comes at this time because no one else will be here.
Jesus asks her for a drink.
Immediately we discover the first thing about this woman. She is not the shy, retiring, subservient woman much admired in traditional cultures.
"Can't you see this fountain says 'colored'? ", she asks. "You white folks slap your signs all over YOUR fountains and then you think you can just walk up to a fountain that says colored on it and get a drink? What's got into you? What are you doing in our part of town anyway? Haven't you got better places to be?"
Well, John didn't write it quite like that. What John wrote was "How is that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria." But have I changed the meaning that much?
Jesus is on the spot. It's not customary for a man to be challenged by a woman or for a Jew to be challenged by a Samaritan, and this woman has done both. And the bigotries of ages are normally observed in silence and not talked about, but this woman has put it right out on the table where it has to be dealt with.
A human impulse might be to say, "How dare you talk to me like that, you unclean, disgusting creature!" But Jesus doesn't choose that course. Another human impulse might be to get drawn in to the issues the woman presents, justifying or explaining or even apologizing for the bad feelings between Samaritans and Jews. Jesus doesn't choose that course either.
There's a humorous saying that when you're up to your neck in alligators, it's hard to remember that you came to drain the swamp. Jesus at this moment is up to his neck in alligators and he stays focused on what he came to do. He is on this earth to extend the reach of the Kingdom of Heaven, to make a difference in the lives of the human beings he encounters. He shifts the conversation to "living water", which literally means spring water which is constantly replenished, as opposed to well water.
The Samaritan woman continues to argue. Living water? How can you give me living water, you have no bucket and the well is deep. Besides, do you think your Jewish living water is superior to our well water that Jacob gave us so long ago?
Jesus continues to avoid talking race and continues talking about living water. If you drink of it, you will never be thirsty. It will become like a spring inside you. It will gush up to eternal life.
Finally, the Samaritan woman decides she wants this living water. She doesn't understand it, imagining it will exempt her from these hot, midday trips to the well. "Sir, give me this water," she tells Jesus.
At this moment, we have a transition. The woman is moving from being an argumentative stranger to making a serious inquiry. In a traditional culture, a serious discussion with a woman means that the woman's husband or father or son must become involved. So Jesus says, "Go, call your husband and come back." But the woman responds, "I have no husband."
Jesus then gives the well known answer: You are right in saying, "I have no husband'; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true."
The woman is astonished by Jesus' knowledge. She calls him a prophet and tries once more to shift the conversation to Samaritans vs. Jews, this time about how to worship. Jesus says neither the Samaritan Mt. Gerizim or the Jewish Jerusalem is the ultimate place of worship, for God is Spirit and those who worship God must worship God in spirit and in truth.
Then the disciples arrive and the woman leaves. She leaves with such excitement that the story tells us, having come to draw water, she leaves her water jar and goes back to the city to tell her fellow Samaritans, "come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done. He cannot be the Messiah, can he?
What made this angry, argumentative woman so ecstatic? Most of us would have mixed feelings about someone who "told us everything we had ever done."
I think the many husbands themselves are the clue. Think of traditional cultures. How many of them allow a woman the opportunity to seek a divorce? If there's a divorce, it's because the man got tired of the woman, or her dowry ran out, or she didn't bear him a child, or because the children she did bear him were the wrong sex.
We have seen that this is an intelligent, assertive woman. Where is there a place for such a person in Palestine in 30 AD? With her brightness and disposition, had she been born a different sex, a different race, a different place, she might have been anything from a rabbi to a warrior. But she was a woman, and a Samaritan at that. So she remained at Sychar in Samaria, at the mercy of men who made her their wife and then, for whatever reason, perhaps even because of her intelligence and assertiveness, cast her out. Does all this justify the sin of adultery, of which she was guilty according to the law? Her response to life just got her deeper into sin.
I think she ran back to the city to tell everyone about this man Jesus because his words, far from words of accusation, were words of understanding and forgiveness.
I think she ran back because she had finally met someone who knew the pain that she had carried all through her life, someone who understood what it was that made her angry and argumentative. Someone who forgave her.
I think she ran back to tell her town because in Jesus she had met the One who sent him, and therefore if Jesus understood, and forgave then God understood and forgave! She who had felt herself a prisoner in Sychar, bound by the chains of being a woman, bound by the chains of being a Samaritan, bound by the chains of her response, bound by the chains of judgement--but if God understood, and forgave, then she was free.
John 8:36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.
Are we like the Samaritan woman and the apostle, Paul, who, having experienced the freedom of forgiveness says, "I am under compulsion to preach the gospel, and have no choice. I am ruined if I do not preach it! I do all that I do for the sake of the gospel in the hope of having a share in its blessings."
or, are we like the servant in Matt 18:23-35 Therefore the Kingdom of Heaven is like a certain king, who wanted to reconcile accounts with his servants. When he had begun to reconcile, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents. But because he couldn’t pay, his lord commanded him to be sold, with his wife, his children, and all that he had, and payment to be made. The servant therefore fell down and kneeled before him, saying, ‘Lord, have patience with me, and I will repay you all!’ The lord of that servant, being moved with compassion, released him, and forgave him the debt. "But that servant went out, and found one of his fellow servants, who owed him one hundred denarii, and he grabbed him, and took him by the throat, saying, ‘Pay me what you owe!’ "So his fellow servant fell down at his feet and begged him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will repay you!’ He would not, but went and cast him into prison, until he should pay back that which was due. So when his fellow servants saw what was done, they were exceedingly sorry, and came and told to their lord all that was done. Then his lord called him in, and said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt, because you begged me. Shouldn’t you also have had mercy on your fellow servant, even as I had mercy on you?’ His lord was angry, and delivered him to the tormentors, until he should pay all that was due to him. So my heavenly Father will also do to you, if you don’t each forgive your brother from your hearts for his misdeeds." Our response signifies whether we have truly experienced forgiveness and cleansing.
My prayer for you is that you will have such an experience of the blessings that come from seeing things the way God sees them and the blessings of God's forgiveness that you can't help but share those blessings with others.
