Have you ever been thirsty? I mean really thirsty? Some of you may remember a cowboy song by a group called the Sons of the Pioneers that went like this:
“All day I faced/ The barren waste/ Without the taste of water/ Cool water/ Poor Dan and I/ With throats burned dry/ And so I cry for water/ Cool, clear water/” (1)
Now that’s thirst. O.K., let’s see how old you really are. The Sons of the Pioneers sang in motion pictures with which famous cowboy star and his equally famous wife? Somebody tell me. That’s right. Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. Some of you who are younger are shaking your heads asking, “Who?”
The theme of “Cool Water” is very close to that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of The Ancient Mariner.” Remember that golden oldie from your school days? After he slew the albatross, the mariner was stuck aboard a ship lost in a cruel ocean with no hint of a breeze “a painted ship on a painted ocean.” Little food, no drink. And then the plaintive plea, “Water, water, everywhere, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.” Have you ever been thirsty like that?
Pastor John Jewell tells the incredible true story of a young marine corporal named Joey Mora. In 1996, Joey Mora was standing on an aircraft carrier patrolling the Iranian Sea when he fell overboard. His absence was unnoticed for 36 hours. A search and rescue mission began, but was given up after another 24 hours. After all, no one could survive in the sea without a lifejacket for 60 hours. His parents were notified that he was “missing and presumed dead.”
About 72 hours after he had fallen into the water, four Pakistani fishermen found Joey Mora. He was treading water in his sleep, clinging to a makeshift floatation device made from his trousers. He was delirious. His tongue was dry and cracked and his throat parched. About two years later, Mora spoke with Stone Philips on NBC Dateline and told his incredible story. He said it was God who kept him struggling to survive. The most excruciating thing of all? The one thought that took over his body and pounded in his brain was “Water!” (2) In the middle of a sea and dying of thirst.
Have you ever been thirsty? Probably not like that, but perhaps you have had times when you knew it was important to hydrate your body.
One of the problems most athletes have at some time is dehydration. The body requires about 3 quarts of water a day to operate efficiently. Blood, which carries nutrients to the cells, is 90 percent water. Muscles are also mostly water. They must be replenished in order to do their work. Water regulates our body’s temperature through perspiration. Athletes know they must stay hydrated.
Dehydration, so we’re told, sneaks up on you. You grow faint, your muscles ache, but it doesn’t occur to you that your real need is water. People have survived without food for weeks or even months, but go without water for even just one day and you will be in desperate straits. We all need cool, clear water.
The Bible was written by people who knew about the need for water. There are parts of the Holy Land where water is an absolute luxury. So, naturally, the need for water would find its way into the sacred word.
The Psalmist wrote, “As the deer longs for streams of water, so I long for you, O God. I thirst for God, the living God. When can I go and stand before him?” (Psalm 42:1-2) Someone has noted that in warm weather a fully grown deer must drink more than two quarts of water every day. Deer don’t sweat. They pant instead. So, what’s a poor deer to do in a part of the world where there are stretches of desert? The Psalmist compares his own plight in a desolate world with that of a deer and he writes, “As the deer longs for streams of water, so I long for you, O God. I thirst for God, the living God . . .”
Jesus knew what it is to thirst. It was his fifth word on the cross. Hanging there with the life ebbing out of him, Jesus cried, “I am thirsty.” However, in spite of his pain, in spite of his thirst, he saw his mission through to the end.
Jesus once spoke of water to a Samaritan woman. The story’s found in John 4. We know her as “the woman at the well.” She had come to the community well to draw water. Jesus approaches her and asks, “Will you give me a drink?”
The Samaritan woman replies, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” You see, Jesus had stepped over the line on two fronts in the culture wars of the first century: she was a despised Samaritan and she was a woman. She didn’t realize that none of this mattered to Jesus.
Jesus says, “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 evidently has no idea what Jesus is talking about, for she says, “Sir, you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?”
Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but 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.” Quite a story. “The water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
Now we come today to our text from Revelation 22 and we encounter this promise again: “Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life” (v. 17).
God’s grace is available to all. That’s the first thing we need to see. Jesus said to the woman at the well, “WHOEVER drinks the water I give him will never thirst . . .” And we should put our emphasis on “whoever.” We run across it twice more in this verse from Revelation: “WHOEVER is thirsty, let him come; and WHOEVER wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life.” “Whoever” is you and me and the bum on the street and the AIDS victim in Africa, and the young woman covered head to toe in a burqa in Afghanistan. “Whoever” means anyone who seeks a better way regardless of what their life has been before. I wish we could convince people of that. You don’t have to reach a level of spiritual excellence before you are acceptable to God.
But you say, pastor, “whoever” doesn’t mean me. You don’t know what I’ve done. If you knew the real me, you would know there’s no way God could accept me.
Well, let’s go to the Bible. John 3:16 notice what it says, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Notice it does not say only those who are worthy; notice it doesn’t say only those who are perfect. “Whosoever believeth in him . . .” Do you believe in Christ? Christ believes in you regardless of who you are or what you’ve done.
Paul adds his testimony to the Gospel of John when he writes in Romans 5:8, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” If you and I were perfect, Christ would not need to have died. But he did die. For whom did he die? “Whoever.”
Pastor Tyler Grant of Willmar, Minnesota tells a delightful story with which many of us can relate. One day Pastor Grant was in the mall with his three-year-old son Jacob. They walked by a clothing store, and Grant saw a suit that he had wanted for a long time. It was on sale so Grant decided to go in and try it on.
Three-year-old Jacob remained sitting quietly in his cart until he saw that his father had his shoes off and a pair of suit pants on that were two sizes too big. Seizing the moment, Jacob took off running through the mall. Regardless of how he was dressed Grant knew he had to get his son. So with one hand holding up his pants and with no shoes on, he went chasing after Jacob. When Jacob saw his father coming, you know what he did. He started running faster and laughing. Grant says that Jacob wasn’t the only one laughing at him. By this time they had attracted the attention of people in the mall. And then when Pastor Grant thought things couldn’t get more embarrassing, Jacob ran into a women’s lingerie store. As he pulled Jacob away from the silk pajamas, Grant took his young son into his arms, and they both began to laugh. Pastor Grant concludes his story like this: “As we were walking back toward the suit store, I felt the Lord impress upon me that just as I was chasing my son, he also had been chasing me.” (3)
And that’s true of us all. God chases us. We’re part of Christ’s grand, “whoever.”
There is a story about John Duncan, who long ago taught Hebrew at New College in Edinburgh, Scotland. One Sunday, as he sat at the Lord’s Supper in church, Duncan felt so depressed that when the elements came to him, he couldn’t take them. He allowed the bread and wine to pass. As he was sitting there feeling absolutely miserable, he noticed a girl in the congregation whom, when the bread and wine came to her, she too allowed them to pass; and she began to cry. That sight shook the old saint. And in a whisper that could be heard across the church, he said, “Take it, lassie, take it. It’s meant for people like you and me.” Then, Duncan himself took the sacrament. (4)
Duncan had nearly forgotten the Gospel. God’s grace is available to all.
Here’s the second thing we need to see. God’s grace is found in Jesus Christ. “In him [is] life, and that life [is] the light of [of the world] (John 1:4). He is “the way, the truth, the life . . .” according to John 14:6. Jesus is the one who offers us living water. He alone quenches our thirst for God.
In the rolling hills of central Ohio there is a farmhouse built around an ever-flowing spring of pure water. The original owners, welcoming the discovery of the spring as a good omen, first enclosed it in a little spring room and then literally built the house around it. For nearly half a century now, day and night, that steady stream of clear water has been flowing out of the earth into the spring room, bringing strength and refreshment to all who live in the house around it. (5) That is who Christ is in our lives. God’s grace is available to all. That grace is found in Jesus Christ alone.
Here’s the final thing to be said: Our task is to take the grace of Jesus Christ to our neighbors whoever they may be. Don’t forget that everyone is part of God’s grand “whoever.” That’s sometimes more difficult to remember than it may seem.
Author Philip Yancey has told many great stories in his many books, but none more powerful than one he tells about what took place in South Africa after Nelson Mandela became president of that strife-torn country. Mandela changed all the rules about how one is to deal with his enemies. Let me rephrase that. Mandela didn’t change the rules. He simply started enforcing rules established by our Savior 2,000 years ago.
When Mandela emerged from prison after twenty‑seven years of incarceration to become president of his country, he shocked the world by asking his jailer to join him on the inauguration platform. Can you imagine what a shock that was to the jailer? Mandela then appointed Archbishop Desmond Tutu to head the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This amazing commission was designed to defuse the pattern of revenge that so often emerges when one oppressed race or tribe takes control from another.
For two‑and‑one‑half years, South Africans listened to reports of atrocities coming out of the commission’s hearings. The rules were as simple as they were mind-boggling: if a white policeman or army officer voluntarily faced his accusers, confessed his crime, and fully acknowledged his guilt, he could not be tried and punished for that crime. Can you imagine us in this the allegedly most Christian nation in the world establishing that kind of justice? Confess your sin in front of those you have wronged and be set free? Obviously, there were people in South Africa who grumbled that this wasn’t just, but Mandela insisted that the country needed healing even more than it needed justice.
At one hearing, a policeman named van de Broek confessed to a horrendous crime. He and some other officers shot an eighteen‑year‑old boy, then burned the boy’s body to destroy the evidence. Incredibly, eight years later van de Broek returned to the same house and seized the boy’s father. His wife was forced to watch as policemen bound her husband on a woodpile, poured gasoline over his body, and ignited it.
The courtroom grew hushed as the elderly woman who had lost first her son and then her husband was given a chance to respond. “What do you want from Mr. van de Broek?” the judge asked. She said she wanted van the Broek to go to the place where they burned her husband’s body and gather up the dust so she could give him a decent burial. His head down, the policeman nodded agreement.
Then she added a further request, “Mr. van de Broek took all my family away from me, and I still have a lot of love to give. Twice a month, I would like for him to come to the ghetto and spend a day with me so I can be a mother to him. And I would like Mr. van de Broek to know that he is forgiven by God, and that I forgive him too. I would like to embrace him so he can know my forgiveness is real.” (6)
And we think we’re Christians! That elderly African woman had more Christian faith in her little finger than most of us do in our whole body. That’s grace the grace of Jesus Christ. That’s the grace that caused Christ to die in our behalf. That’s the grace that we are to show to our neighbor. That’s the grace we are to show to the world. Have you yet discovered that grace? “Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life.” That’s you. Whoever.
1. http://www.cowboylyrics.com/tabs/sons-of-the-pioneers/cool-water-1908.html.
2. NBC Dateline: Nov. 1998. http://www.lectionarysermons.com/mar993-07.html.
3. Parables, etc.
4. James Stewart, The Rending of the Veil. Cited by Dr. Gary Dennis, http://www.lacanadapc.org/transcripts/031608st.htm.
5. Edward W. Bauman, Beyond Belief (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1964).
6. Rumours of Another World (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003), pp. 223-224.