God-centered resources from the ministry of John Piper

This week's sermon: "The Father Is Seeking True Worship—Now"

Title changed to: "The Tragic Cost of Her Cavernous Thirst"

Her inner life was too painful and too dirty, so the woman at the well kept her heart locked and couldn't recognize her thirst for living water, even with the answer for her thirst standing right there in front of her.

So Jesus, ever loving and ever wise, reached for the nerve. "Go, call your husband." And he wasn't fooled by her use of truth to distort the truth. "You are right in saying, 'I have no husband'; for you have five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband."

From this encounter at Jacob's well, we learn not just about the woman, but about ourselves. We learn how we desperately move from one substitute to the next to try to satisfy our cavernous thirst for real water. But we also learn about Jesus—that he is hot on the trail of sinners, ready to savingly expose the ugliness of their sin, and willing to die to save them.