Sun, 24 March 2019
“Stay thirsty, my friends.” So ended every commercial in a well-known marketing campaign. The ads featured an older, debonair fellow dubbed, “The World’s Most Interesting Man.”
In each commercial he would do something exotic and daring—cliff diving in Acapulco, riding a monster wave on some exotic coastline, freeing an angry bear caught in a trap, sowing up his own injury while chatting with medical staff. You get the idea.
His signature sign-off was “Stay thirsty, my friends.” The idea is akin to YOLO—"you only live once.” Go for the gusto. Get all of the pleasure you can from life. Stay thirsty.
But if there’s one thing that we humans need no encouragement to do, it’s to “stay thirsty.” We are driven by thirst—a thirst for wealth, for adventure, for pleasure, for relationships. We are a people parched with thirst!
The truth is, they miscast the world’s most interesting man. The mantra of history’s real “most interesting man” is not “Stay thirsty, my friends.” We have no trouble doing that. Instead, his polar-opposite offer is, “Quench your thirst, my friends.” Jesus satisfies the thirsty with living water so that we never need thirst again.
Turns out, he is not only the world’s most interesting man, he is also the world’s most powerful, most compassionate, and most redemptive man! He is worthy of our admiration and allegiance.
By the way, in 2016 the company ditched “The World’s Most Interesting Man.” I guess the company was implementing its own slogan. They ditched their pitch man in their thirst for a younger, hipper guy. But I digress.
This coming Sunday morning we’re going to sit down at a well with the world’s true “most interesting man.” A very thirsty woman is going to come to the well and her encounter with Jesus is going to quench her thirst. For the first time in her life she will be satisfied. What she experienced that day so long ago can be our experience as well as we drink the water that he alone gives.
Who’s Your One? “Quench Your Thirst, My Friends” John 4:1-30
A woman from Samaria came to draw water(4:7a).
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 (4:14).
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(4:23).
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?”(4:28-29)
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