If Anyone Thirsts
If Anyone Thirsts
John 7 – Jesus rejected their advice and offered Himself instead.
Everyone Who’s Anyone
John 7 — Jesus rejected their advice and offered himself instead.
What is going to be the most elaborate party or celebration you throw this next year?
Maybe it’s one of the holidays. The Christmas decorations are already out this week at my local Costco — in the first week of September. So you could start prepping now. Or maybe this year it isn’t a holiday at all, but a milestone birthday or an anniversary coming up where you are going to pull out every stop.
Think about the planning and preparation we put into these celebrations. The travel. The decorations. That one dish you only make once per year.
Hold that in your mind, because today we are in John chapter 7, and the whole chapter takes place inside a party.
The Feast
John 7 is set at Sukkot — the Festival of Booths, or Tabernacles. It lands every year in September or October, which makes this a fitting month to be reading about it.
Honestly, nothing in our calendar quite compares. Take a big family reunion, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, wrap them all into one, and then stretch it across a full week. That gets you in the ballpark.
Three main events help set the stage:
The booths. Israel was commanded to take leafy branches from the riverside, build makeshift shelters, and live in them (Leviticus 23:39–43). A whole week of camping in your own front yard — which, if you are eight years old, is the greatest week of the year. The point was memory: God rescued Israel out of Egypt, walked them through forty years of wilderness, fed, sheltered, and provided water every day of their journey. Once a year, you sleep under the stars to remember God’s provision.
The water. By Jesus’ day, the festival had incorporated a new ceremony concerning living water. Each morning, a priest carried a golden pitcher down to the pool of Siloam, filled it, and processed back up to the temple, where the water was poured out at the altar. The Mishnah says the water was poured for all seven days of the feast (Sukkah 4:1). It looked backward — Moses struck the rock, water came out, Israel drank in a desert. And it looked forward, because Sukkot is a harvest festival: as the water hit the altar, the nation was thanking God for the rain that had come and praying for God to send the rain next year. You gave us water. Give us water again.
The light. In the Court of the Women, they raised enormous golden lampstands and lit them every night — the Talmud puts them at fifty cubits, call it seventy-five feet, tended by young priests on ladders. The Mishnah remembers it this way: there was not a courtyard in Jerusalem that was not illuminated from the light of the place of the water-drawing (Sukkah 5:2). Memory again. God led his people through that wilderness with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.
Seven days of booths, plus an eighth day of assembly. No work. Nothing on the schedule but celebrating God and recalling his generosity.
Josephus, writing in the first century, calls Tabernacles “a most holy and most eminent feast” among the Hebrews. It got so big you could drop the name entirely, and simply call it “the feast.” Are you going to the feast this year? — and everyone knew which one you meant.
Which is interesting, because theologically it probably isn’t the most important of Israel’s festivals. I would probably rank Passover first — that’s when God broke Pharaoh’s grip — or the Day of Atonement, when God carries away the sin of the nation.
But it’s like the difference between Easter and Christmas for us. Easter is the most important Christian holiday by a long shot. The death and resurrection of Jesus is our absolute foundation. But culturally, Christmas has the decorations, the music, the month-long runway, and the Costco aisle in September. Sukkot was Israel’s Christmas. Everyone who’s anyone was going to be there.
And Jesus is about to make the whole thing about him.
How to Become Somebody
This chapter, at a run, offers us four misunderstandings about who Jesus is and what we should expect from him. Four groups, four objections, all of them measuring Jesus with the world’s yardstick.
And here is the uncomfortable part. That yardstick is still the one we use. This is the roadmap for influencers, for politicians, for anybody trying to build a platform. If you want to be somebody in our world, you need a following, the right credentials, the right background, and the right endorsements. And that’s precisely what the people are demanding from Jesus in John 7.
1. You need a following. This one comes from his own brothers.
“Leave Galilee. Go to Judea so that your disciples can see the amazing works that you do. Those who want to be known publicly don’t do things secretly. Since you can do these things, show yourself to the world.” His brothers said this because even they didn’t believe in him. (verses 3–5)
In many ways, it is not bad advice. They’re telling their brother, “Stop doing this in backwater Galilee. Go where the people are. Announce yourself!” In other words: Get more likes and subscribers. Build your following.
The irony is that Chapter 6 just showed us Jesus’ own metric for success. It was not the five thousand families he fed on the hillside, but the twelve who stayed after everyone else deserted. His following had cratered, and Jesus does not appear bothered by it.
He tells his brothers no. This is not my time; you go. And then, two verses later, he goes anyway — not with the fanfare, not on their schedule, but quietly, sent by his Father. He’ll come. He just won’t be launched.
2. You need the right credentials. Halfway through the week, he starts teaching in the temple courts, and the leaders are floored.
Astonished, the Jewish leaders asked, “He’s never been taught! How has he mastered the Law?” Jesus responded, “My teaching isn’t mine but comes from the one who sent me.” (verses 15–16)
Notice what they are not saying. They are not disputing his theology or finding holes in his exegesis. They are astonished — the man has a mastery of the Scriptures nobody in the room can match — and they object that he doesn’t have the paperwork. He didn’t go to our seminary. Who gave him the right to stand up here?
Jesus’ answer is not the one they wanted, but it is the only honest one available to him. My teaching comes from the one who sent me. His credential is that God sent him. It just doesn’t come printed on anything.
3. You need the right background. Then the crowd chimes in with the opposite complaint.
“We know where he is from, but when the Christ comes, no one will know where he is from.” While Jesus was teaching in the temple, he exclaimed, “You know me and where I am from. I haven’t come on my own. The one who sent me is true, and you don’t know him.” (verses 27–28)
It is the same over-familiarity as chapter 6 — isn’t this Joseph’s boy, we know his brothers — now hardened into a rule. The Messiah is supposed to be mysterious, but this man has a hometown.
John is winking at us, because he opened his gospel by telling us exactly where Jesus is from. He was the Word, in the beginning, with God, and he took on flesh and moved into the neighborhood. The crowd has his origin catastrophically wrong.
4. You need the right endorsements. The last misunderstanding closes the chapter. The temple guards were sent to arrest Jesus and came back empty-handed.
The guards answered, “No one has ever spoken the way he does.” The Pharisees replied, “Have you too been deceived? Have any of the leaders believed in him? Has any Pharisee?” (verses 46–48)
Pure gatekeeping. If he were the one, we would have said so. We didn’t. Therefore, ignore him.
And then John does something wonderful. The very next line is Nicodemus (a Pharisee!) speaking up to ask, Our Law doesn’t judge someone without first hearing him, does it?
They asked, has any Pharisee believed in him? and one of their own answered out loud, and they would not hear it. They turn on him instead: You’re not from Galilee, too, are you? The group that just demanded a Pharisee’s endorsement moves the goalpost to cut him out.
So stack it up. No following — he’s down to twelve. No credentials — wrong school. No background — wrong town. No endorsements — wrong friends.
By every metric anyone in that day or ours would recognize, Jesus is a nobody.
The Murmuring
There’s another great irony in the way John tells this scene. As the crowds argue back and forth about Jesus, John says they are murmuring. Grumbling. Muttering to each other.
It is the same word the Greek Old Testament uses for Israel in the desert.
Sit with that for a second. The entire nation has gathered to remember God’s provision in the wilderness. They are sleeping in booths to tell that story to their kids. Every night this week, a child has asked, why are we sleeping outside? And a parent has answered, because God led us through the wilderness.
They are behaving exactly like their ancestors, just not in the way they had imagined.
Because that first generation did not receive God’s provision like saints. They complained the entire way. They murmured about food, they murmured about water, and God put up with them the whole way. Forty years of provision, forty years of muttering.
So John sets the scene: the God who provided then is standing in the temple courts now, at the festival held in his honor, and the crowd is still muttering. They have no idea, but they are just like the people God rescued thousands of years earlier. So am I. So are we.
Did Jesus Ever Say, “I Am God”?
This chapter helps answer a question I’ve received many times from skeptics of the faith: If Jesus is really who you say he is, why didn’t he just come out and say, “I am God”? Why be so mysterious about it?
My tongue-in-cheek answer is that Jesus never said “I am God,” because, well, he wasn’t speaking English, so we should probably not expect to find that exact sentence.
But the real answer is better. Every page of the Gospels is shouting it — if you know how to read it. Read it like a Hebrew, and Jesus does not show up as some vague, abstract deity. He shows up as the specific God of Israel, over and over. When Mark tells us Jesus walked across the sea, that is not a party trick — Israel’s Scriptures say treading on the waves is something the LORD does. Anyone with an open Bible knows what that scene is claiming.
And here in John 7, I couldn’t stop hearing an echo from Malachi:
“And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple.”
— Malachi 3:1
The Lord whom you seek. That is precisely what this week is. Hundreds of thousands have traveled to Jerusalem to seek the Lord who provided for them. They have built the booths, poured the water, lit the lamps. They are seeking him with everything they’ve got.
And he is shouting in the courtyard, and they don’t know it.
If Anyone Thirsts
Then, on the last and greatest day of the feast, Jesus stands up and shouts.
“All who are thirsty should come to me! All who believe in me should drink! As the scriptures said concerning me, Rivers of living water will flow out from within him.” (verses 37–38)
Consider where he is standing. Water has been carried up from Siloam and poured out at that altar every morning this week, while a nation prayed for rain. And into that, Jesus says: if you’re thirsty, come to me.
This is one of the clearest moments in the Gospels. He is not saying he is a good teacher with useful ideas about life. He is not offering himself as a moral example. He is saying, I am the one who fed you and watered you in the wilderness. This entire festival has been about me. If you are thirsty, I am the source.
That should have stopped the courtyard cold. If anyone had actually been listening, the murmuring would have died in their throats.
And here is what I keep coming back to. Two things Jesus does not do.
He never takes the bait. He could have answered all four objections on their own terms, and won every one. He does have the credentials — he was taught by God himself. He does have the background — you have no idea where I’m from. He does have the endorsement — the Father sent me. He could have laid out the résumé item by item. Like and subscribe for more.
He doesn’t. He won’t even wade into it. That is not what he came for.
Jesus changes the question. The whole chapter has been asking, is this man qualified? Jesus stands up and asks something else entirely: are you thirsty?
Not: do you have your life together. Not: have you gotten all your questions answered. Not: are you the kind of person who belongs at a festival like this.
Are you thirsty? Then come and drink.
He isn’t looking for somebodies. He’s looking for thirsty people.
And he is not talking about your water bottle. He means every place in your life that has run dry.
So let’s actually stop and ask it. Where are you thirsty right now? Relationally — is there a relationship that just is not working, no matter what you try? Emotionally. Physically. Spiritually. Maybe it’s the project you have poured your whole heart into and it is coming apart in your hands. Maybe you are thirsty for worthiness. For significance. For some sense that any of this counts.
Jesus says: if you’re thirsty, come to me.
The Proof Is in the Eating
One more verse stuck to me all week. It sits earlier in the chapter, buried in the answer about credentials, and I think it belongs right beside the invitation to drink.
“Whoever wants to do God’s will can tell whether my teaching is from God or whether I speak on my own.” (verse 17)
He flips the logic. We want to settle the question first and then decide whether to obey. Jesus says it runs the other way: if you want to know whether this is true, you have to try it.
There is a kind of knowing that only comes after tasting.
I like to cook. And there have been a few incidents in my kitchen — a few — where I slaved over a meal, got it looking perfect, right sheen on it, smelled immaculate, everybody at the table ready to dig in. And I had accidentally tripled the salt.
Inedible. We went another direction that night.
You can pour your whole heart into the presentation of the dish. The proof is still in the eating.
That is not a shrug at hard questions. Keep the questions. Wrestle with God — he can take it. But there is a tendency in my own faith, and maybe in the church generally, to spend so much time talking about Jesus that we never get around to receiving anything from him. We can unpack and analyze for years and never once come and drink.
Jesus is cutting through all of that. Yes, and — are you thirsty? Are you hungry? Come and receive.
It is in trying the way of Jesus that you begin to discover that the way of Jesus is the best possible way to live.
What We’re Actually Thirsty For
John doesn’t leave the living water abstract. He tells us exactly what Jesus meant.
Jesus said this concerning the Spirit. Those who believed in him would soon receive the Spirit, but they hadn’t experienced the Spirit yet since Jesus hadn’t yet been glorified. (verse 39)
That verse keeps this from becoming something it isn’t. Without it you could walk away thinking Jesus grants whatever you happen to be thirsty for — name the ache and he’ll fill it. In a way that is true. But the deeper truth is that all of those thirsts — physical, emotional, the hunger for meaning and significance and purpose — are underneath one thirst. A thirst to be connected to the God who made you.
And what he offers is his Spirit. A helper. A constant companion. God himself taking up residence, becoming a river of living water that overflows out of you and spills onto the people around you. The deepest thirst of the human heart is to be reconnected to our Creator through our Savior — and that is what is being handed out in this courtyard.
Taste and See
Let me put a capstone on it with a prayer from the Psalms.
Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!
— Psalm 34:8
Maybe you are in a season of talking a lot about Jesus and learning a lot of things about God, and you have not come and said, I just want to taste. I want to receive the actual presence of God in my life.
And it is fitting that we came to the Lord’s Table this Sunday. At Sukkot, Jesus took the greatest festival Israel had and said, it was always about me. Then at Passover — the feast behind communion — he picked up the bread and the cup his people had lifted every year for centuries and said, this is about me too. This is my body. This is my blood.
He keeps doing this. Jesus will continue to take every marker, symbol, and celebration in the Hebrew Scriptures and declare: I’m the one you’ve been remembering.
When you’re hungry, come and eat. When you’re thirsty, come and drink.
A Prayer to Close
Underneath all the noise — the credentialing, the gatekeeping, the muttering — the invitation has not changed at all.
Where in your life do you need God’s presence, God’s life, God’s transformation to come and fill you up? Sit with it, and say it plainly: God, here’s where I feel depleted.
Preparing this sermon, the practice I kept coming back to all week is almost embarrassingly simple: tell Jesus how thirsty you are. What if we did that every day?
Jesus, I’m so thirsty. I look at the news, I look at the devastation around the world —
God, our world is so thirsty.
My family is so thirsty.
I’m so thirsty.
Because that is the great promise of John 7. If you’re thirsty, come to me.
Go this week with the love of God, the grace of his Son, and the fellowship of his Spirit.
This week:
- Name the thirst. Once a day, out loud, finish the sentence: Jesus, I’m thirsty for… Don’t tidy it up first.
- Read the chapter slowly. We surveyed John 7 at speed. Go back and walk it, and watch for who is murmuring and why.
- Do the next thing. Verse 17 says the knowing comes after the tasting. Is there a call from Jesus you’ve been ignoring? How can you find your answers by doing his will?
