The Rev. Dr. John Tamilio III, Pastor

 © 2022, Dr. Tamilio

Thirst, or being thirsty, is a metaphor often used to describe our longing for God.  We thirst for God.  Our arid spirits can only be quenched by drinking the water of life that only God provides.  You can try to slake your thirst other ways, but you will end up being just as parched, if not more so.  No public enterprise will satisfy you.  No secular scheme will satiate the emptiness that not knowing God will cause.  And the kicker is that when you are thirsty, nothing but an ice-cold drink will do.  It is all you can think about.

I may have shared this with you before, but I love what Max Lucado, the best-selling Christian devotionalist, writes at the start of his book, Come Thirsty.

You’re acquainted with physical thirst.  Your body, according to some estimates, is 80 percent fluid.  That means a man my size lugs around 160 pounds of water.  Apart from brains, bones, and a few organs, we’re walking water balloons.

[Lucado continues] We need to be.  Stop drinking and see what happens.  Coherent thoughts vanish, skin grows clammy, and vital organs wrinkle.  Your eyes need fluid to cry; your mouth needs moisture to swallow; your glands need sweat to keep your body cool; your cells need blood to carry them; your joints need fluid to lubricate them.  Your body needs water the same way a tire needs air.

[Lucado concludes] In fact, your Maker wired you with thirst — a “low-fluid indicator.”  Let your fluid level grow low, and watch the signals flair.  Dry mouth.  Thick tongue.  Achy head.  Weak knees.  Deprive your body of necessary fluid, and your body will tell you.[1]

Lucado then goes on to talk about spiritual thirst.  But Jesus told us about this long before Rev. Lucado did.  Remember the story of the Samaritan woman at the well?  Jesus comes to the city of Sychar, to Jacob’s well.  It is noon, and a woman comes to draw water from the well.  Jesus asks her for a drink.  She is taken aback by his request, saying, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman.  How can you ask me for a drink?”  This is because Jews and Samaritans were enemies.  Jesus’ response is interesting, and it seems to be different from her question.  “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”  She wants to know where he got this water.  Jesus says, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst.  Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

Living water.  Water of life.  This is what we all want to drink, no?  This is the water we want to saturate our being, filling us to the brim with God’s Spirit.  You may be well-aware of those who say, “I am spiritual, but not religious.”  These are the people who have given up on organized religion for numerous reasons.  Maybe they were abused by someone in the church.  Maybe they were turned off by religion, because of a TV evangelist.  Maybe they had an extremely religious parent — someone who went to church every Sunday, for example — but did not lead a Christian life.  The website The Spiritual Life says this:

“Spiritual but not religious” (SBNR) also known as “Spiritual but not affiliated” (SBNA) is a popular phrase and initialism used to self-identify a life stance of spirituality that takes issue with organized religion as the sole or most valuable means of furthering spiritual growth. Historically, the words religious and spiritual have been used synonymously to describe all the various aspects of the concept of religion, but in contemporary usage spirituality has often been associated with the interior life of the individual, placing an emphasis upon the well-being of the “mind-body-spirit,” while religion refers to organizational or communal dimensions.[2]

I get it.  I get all this.  The problem is that even though Christianity is comprised of many organized “religions” — if, by “religion,” we mean an organized system through which we worship God and live out our faith — even though Christianity is a religion, it is also a path to spirituality and spiritual fulfillment.  Some argue that religion is what we created to try to understand the God who has reached out to us spiritually.  We can try to parse these words all day, but we end up in the same place.

But I will bite.  I will answer the spiritual, but not religious claim.  Let me say two things about this.

First, if a religion does not connect to the spiritual you could argue that it isn’t really a religion.  We do not go to church (a manifestation of organized religion) we don’t go to church just to socialize, or to do good deeds with others, or to read the Bible, or to sing for the sake of singing, or to give a donation that we can deduct from our taxes, or to hear sermons delivered by a minister who looks like a young Robert Redford…  We come here because we have been called by God to be the body of Christ.  As I have said many times before, the lowest common denominator of the church is not the individual Christian, but the community of faith.  We are called to be in community with one another.

Second, by being this community, and doing many of the things I just mentioned (such as praying, singing, and reading the Bible) we are to nurture our spiritual nature.  By connecting with the God made known to us in Jesus Christ, by focusing on the ways Jesus is alive with us now, not just some character in a book, we grow spiritually.

For me, it happens right here: in the gut.  It is hard to express it any other way.  It is something I feel and know it is real.  The feeling waxes and wanes depending on what is happening in my life, but it is always there in some way.  I wish I could reach inside myself and show you the feeling.  Those who experience the same feeling know what I mean.  It is not unlike the butterfly feeling people have when they are in love.  Words cannot explain it.  No painting can capture it.  It must be felt.  I know that love is real, and I know that Christ is real for the same reason.  His presence resonates deep within my soul.

And once you sense it, you want more of it — sort of like the mountaintop experience that you never want to end.  I think it is safe to assume that we all have this desire: to know that we are not alone facing a Godless, silent universe.  We are made whole and holy by the Living Christ.  Isaiah says, “Come, all who are thirsty, come to the waters.”  He tells us that “no money” is needed.  It is a free gift.  Come, and drink deep.  It is the water that quenches our deepest spiritual thirst, as Jesus tells the Samaritan woman at the well.

He tells us the same thing.  We are almost halfway through Lent.  As we continue to trek the stony road, keep slaking your thirst by staying connected to Jesus through prayer, song, worship, and immersing yourself in his Word.  Come, drink the water of life.  If you do, you will never truly thirst.  Amen.

[1] Max Lucado, Come Thirsty (Nashville: W Publishing Group, 2004), 11.

[2] Taken from slife.org.