Thirsting for acceptance. – March 15, 2023

The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “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.”
John 4:9,10

Thirsting for acceptance.

He simply asked her for a drink of water, and suddenly the true thirst spilled out. “How can you ask me for a drink?” She was shocked that Jesus would talk to her before she even knew who Jesus really was. She recognized that Jesus was a Jewish man. Jews looked down on Samaritans because they were not full-blooded Jews. On top of that, Jesus revealed that this woman had been married five times, and the man she was currently with was not her husband.

Jesus exposed her real spiritual thirst by simply asking for a drink of water. She thirsted for love and acceptance, but she was looking in all the wrong places to quench that thirst. We might seek approval from peers or acceptance through a relationship that becomes more important than a relationship with God. Our world has a twisted view of love and acceptance and looks for it in all the wrong places.

But Jesus cared about this woman enough to have a deep and tough conversation. And his end goal wasn’t to crush and reject her; it was to reveal himself as the solution to her sin, the living water to wash away her sin and quench her thirsty soul. She knew rejection and what it was like to be looked down on. But she had never been loved like that, like only God can love, until she met her Savior, Jesus.

Jesus cares about you enough to come to you in his Word and to meet a deeper thirst that nothing in all the world could ever quench. Jesus quenches our thirst for love and acceptance, not by downplaying sin, but by forgiving it completely. By washing it away in an unending flood of his love and acceptance.

Prayer:
Jesus, meet me beside the waters of your Word so that I may find the kind of love and acceptance that only comes from you. Amen.