“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” 1 Corinthians 13:4-7
So many of us treat love as a transactional thing, don’t we? Essentially, this means we say, “If I give this, I should get that.” And so the love we feel that should save us ends up destroying us over a long time. Consider the woman at the well whom Jesus met at Sychar (John 4). Jesus asked her for water, then offered her living water. She evaded His questions, and so He told her all about herself: she had 5 husbands, and the man she was currently shacking up with was not her husband. Jesus, then, used that well as a backdrop for her life: she’d have to come back to that well time and again, but what He had to offer would quench every thirst she had. She would still need physical water while in the body…but her life was transformed!
We, like that woman at the well, want to seek love to complete and save us. Or substances. Or wealth. Or anything else but God. And when we gain those things, we find they are empty. Love only saves us when it comes from its source. You and I will spend all the love we have, and poorly, like the woman at the well. But when the Love of Christ, the author and finisher of our faith enters us, it overflows, and all the love we give away is HIS love, because it is that river of living water flowing from Him, overflowing then from us into everyone else. THAT is love. Love is something JESUS gives us, and no one else. Everything else is a feeling that will some day destroy us (I’ve seen it happen time and again). Stop expecting to receive what you put in. Seek Christ, whose love never runs out. Love with His love. Die to yourself, and then for others on a daily basis with His love, and watch how the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your heart and your mind in Christ Jesus.
John 4:1-29
Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John (although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples), he left Judea and departed again for Galilee. And he had to pass through Samaria. So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour.
A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”
Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.” The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”
Just then his disciples came back. They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you seek?” or, “Why are you talking with her?” So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” They went out of the town and were coming to him.
