Satisfaction I: Worship for Water

If life came with a label it might say "Satisfaction NOT Guaranteed." We often feel empty, unfulfilled and dissatisfied. For most of our hungers and thirsts there is some earthly solution. If I am physically hungry, there is food to satisfy me. But, to varying degrees of awareness, there is an often undefined, underlying dissatisfaction deep within every human heart that nothing on earth can fill. We sing about it. Write novels, plays and movies about it. We look here, there and everywhere for the solution to it, but no amount of substances, sex, success, or stuff can satisfy our hungry hearts. In our text, we meet a spiritually parched woman who has been desperately seeking satisfaction in the wrong wells just as she meets the physically thirsty Savior seeking sincere worship for His Father. Let's look at JOHN 4:1-26 and focus on the relationship between God's desire for worship and our need for satisfaction. The two definitely go together.

In our text, we see Jesus intentionally making His way across social barriers to a divine appointment with an important person. Of course, no one would have guessed the Samaritan woman who was making her way to Jacob's well in the noon sun was a VIP. It is very likely that she was a social outcast. It is a tragic irony that this woman's efforts to find love, acceptance, and relationship were the very actions that resulted in her social isolation. The wells we turn to in our efforts to satisfy our thirsty souls seem to work that way. We go somewhere to cope and try to fill the void, and the places we go often take matters from bad to worse. The first key to finding satisfaction for your thirsty soul is to look in the right place and that place is in a right relationship with God. You and I were created to enjoy a living relationship with God and without that relationship, we are spiritually dead inside. Romances, reruns, and religions about God all eventually run dry, but a real living relationship with the real living God never does. No wonder God pleads with us in places like Isaiah 55:1-2 to seek and find our satisfaction in Him.

We not only need to look in the right place - a real relationship with God - we also need to look in the right way. Sadly, many people who have experienced genuine reconciliation with God, by turning from sin to Him and trusting their lives to the care and control of Christ, still fail to enjoy the abundant satisfaction that is available to them. Why? I think much of the answer is found in Jesus' and the woman's discussion about worship. God's glorification and our satisfaction are mutually complimentary. John Piper has done a great job broadcasting his phrase, "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him." That is true. When we are so abundantly satisfied in God that the world's wells no longer hold any appeal to us, people can see that we have found something superior in God. Filthy food scraps by a dumpster don't look appetizing unless you are starving to death, and in the same way, sin's pleasures don't look nearly as appealing when you are spiritually feasting on the richest fare in the universe by delighting yourself in God. God tells us over and over again in Scripture...Rejoice! Delight! Celebrate! These are not burdensome commands. God works to wean us off of the world's dumpster scrap pleasures not to starve us of pleasure. He knows we need to enjoy beauty. He knows we need to express appreciation for excellence. He weans us off the world's pleasures so that we can enjoy the vastly superior pleasures of delighting in all that God is and in all that God does. God is infinitely splendid and His excellencies (Psalm 103) are an inexhaustible source of celebration!

To genuinely honor God and enjoy soul satisfaction, we must worship Him in spirit and truth. Both must stay together for genuine worship. Truth without spirit is just dead orthodoxy. We have the information correct, but we are unmoved by it. How honored would you feel if I knew a great deal about you but could not care less? On the other hand, spirit without truth is just ecstatic inaccuracy. In that case, we dishonor God by celebrating something He is not. Imagine meeting a famous singer-songwriter and going on and on about how much you love one of their songs only to discover another artist actually wrote and performed that song. The artist you were meeting might be amused, but they would not be honored. We must really delight in God as He really is. When we do, He will be worshipped, and we will be satisfied.