Turn to the Inner Life

You have an inner life. Everyone does. Your inner life is the world of thoughts and ideas and feelings and intentions and dreams that you live with every day.

Jesus said you are to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and will all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). The word “heart” in Hebrew is the key word that describes human personality, the true you. In Greek and English as well the word is used to describe the inner life of humans.

The word “soul” is the Hebrew nephesh and describes the world of feelings and choices that we live in every day. And the word mind, added by Jesus to the Hebrew heart, soul, and strength, describes our mental life. The mind is more than the brain. It creates a world of its own through the vast amount of information it receives. It interprets that world for us, integrating the things we know from our senses—sight, smell, hearing, touch—and the things we think we know from our reasoning and feelings.

So loving God—loving anyone—is really about your inner life. You love God with all that is within you. “Bless the Lord, oh my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name” (Psalm 103:1).

Someone told me last week that he wrestles with demons every day. That wrestling match with the demons takes place in the heart, soul, and mind. This is where we confront our greatest anxieties, confusion, frustration, and fears.

When you tell your story, you inevitably and intentionally describe your inner life before you received Christ as Savior. You tell how you were troubled within, and how that very trouble turned your heart toward God. You describe the moment that you flung open the door of your inner being to the God who was pursuing you, wooing you. And you describe what’s been going on inside of you since you first trusted in Christ.

We Think We Must Do This Ourselves:

“A Samaritan woman came to draw water” (v8).

This Samaritan woman has a very active inner life full of dreams and fears, I am sure. In this conversation with Jesus she is picking up some unusual vibes. But she cannot break out of the rut she has lived in for so long. She thinks that her familiarity with the well provides her with information that the stranger to the well does not possess. She knows about this well and has drawn water from it many times. She has never seen him before. He is just traveling through. She is the expert on this well.

• “Well, I am trained as a psychologist,” someone will say when they hear that God loves them. “And I don’t think this preacher has the credentials to pedal his spirit talk with me.”

• “Well, I am an engineer,” another says. “I study the migration of water in the aquifers of the earth. And I can tell you, there is no living water here.”

• “Oh, I am a doctor. All I have done all my life is study the human body. We are just a sack of water, really, with some bones thrown in. That’s all. No soul.”

“You have nothing to draw with.” You cannot help me. You do not have the proper credentials. You’ve got to have a bucket to get water out of any well. You need to know your logarithms. If you studied anatomy, you would understand the impossibility of your claim about living water.

The well is deep. You don’t realize how hard it is to get water here. This is no shallow water well. This hand-dug well is 100 feet deep. The water may rise up in it half-way or more, but it requires a long rope to lower a bucket that far. The Philosopher and poet may protest in the same way. This well is too deep for you, Jesus. You can’t get to the bottom of it.  

This mindset is not only typical of our time and place. It is typical of people all over the world in every age. We assume that we must do it ourselves. We assume that we are experts on our environments and needs. 

If we are pressed about it, we acknowledge the existence of our spiritual lives—that we are more than bone and flesh. And yet we are reluctant to turn to solutions that are beyond our own power and comprehension.

We Keep Making the Same Mistake:

“Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again” (v13)

All the ropes and buckets and wells in the world cannot provide a true solution for the inner life of fear and doubt. Our science and technology, no matter how advanced, leaves us thirsting for more.

The true thirst within us is not a craving for water from the well but for purpose and meaning and forgiveness. Most all humans acknowledge that we long for meaning in our lives.

• The Samaritan woman could say, “I have found my purpose in life by coming to this well every day. It is the reason that I live. I enjoy my journey over here in the heat of the day. This is the reason for which I was born and am walking on the earth.

• Some people suggest that this created meaning is all we can hope for. Create your own purpose. Maybe it is collecting comic books or old Lionel Trains or shards of ancient pottery. Maybe your purpose is music or poetry.

• Others, like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus suggest that we embrace the meaninglessness of it all. Life is absurd, they say, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Friedrich Nietzsche said that you charge into life with all the courage you can muster even though you know it doesn’t mean a thing.

This is life in the alpha privative—a-theism; a-gnostic. The alpha means “no”—no god, no knowledge of god. Maybe this is where all humans are stuck. Maybe we are trapped in the negative--the accidental byproduct of an evolutionary process controlled by no one. Maybe a universe can come into existence by itself and something really can come from nothing. 

Believing such a thing is the biggest mental stretch of all. And it leaves you thirsty every time. People of faith have doubts. We acknowledge this. But atheists and agnostic are plagued with doubt. What if they are wrong? What if the notion of the spontaneous creation of the universe is the true absurdity and God is the only answer to our existence? What then?

We Receive the Living Water:

“whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst” (v14)

God became a man in Jesus of Nazareth. He walked among us, and met this woman at the well. Here we have a narrative that captures the interaction between a human being and her true God.

“You have nothing” (v11). He is a tired and weary man without a penny to his name. He is sitting alone by this well. He has no luggage, no donkey or camel or goat. He has no rope or can or bucket. Everything he owns in this world barely covers his skin. 

“The well is deep,” she says (v11). You have to have the right tools, the right technology. Jesus seems ill-equipped to help.

I have in my open documents the prayer I offered for Mayor Landrieu before he gave his address on Violence in New Orleans Wednesday. I have a request for a meeting with members of the U.S. Congress. When I look at these documents I feel important.

But Jesus has no such documents. He has not been invited to pray at Herod’s next speech. He is not about to have a sit-down with Governor Pilate. To the powers of that day he was invisible.

“Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again” (v13). This is a universal truth. No matter who you are, if you drink only regular water you will be thirsty again.

• Thus, the entire human race is thirsty for something they cannot seem to find. Everyone is thirsty. They lack the capacity to satisfy the soul, their inner life. We are lonely. We are afraid. We are anxious. We are self-condemning. We are need to be loved.

• It doesn’t matter how smart you are or rich you are or tech-savvy you are. It doesn’t matter how many toys or tools you have. You can have the longest rope on the planet and the biggest bucket. But if you drink this water you will be thirsty again.

“Whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst” (14).

• The solution Jesus has is for “whoever.” It doesn’t matter who you are—Samaritan or Jew, rich or poor, man or woman. It doesn’t matter what you have done—your history and status.

• You, my friend, are one of those whose longing of heart could be forever satisfied by this living water. Your inner life is just like mine. It is more important to you than anything else. Your deepest longings and greatest needs are internal, emotional, and spiritual, not physical. 

• You’ve got to drink: “Whoever drinks the water…”

“Neither do I condemn you,” he said to the woman caught in adultery (John 8:11). I think this woman at the well hears and feels this same forgiveness and grace from Jesus. She does not feel condemned in his presence. She feels respected, valued, and loved. This is the living water she needs.