“Man cannot live by bread alone.”   That is Scripture and that is life.  You have to have water.  (I have to have ice cream.)

The truth of the matter is the human body needs food and water to survive. 

One can go for more than three weeks without food (Mahatma Gandhi survived 21 days of complete starvation), but water is quite a different story.   The body is mostly water, and every living cell needs water to keep it functioning.  Water acts as a lubricant for our joints, regulates our body temperature through sweating and respiration and helps to flush toxins and waste.  The maximum time it seems that an individual can go without water is a week, less under certain conditions like extreme heat.

Some of us do not drink enough water – don’t like the taste, prefer soft drinks, get too busy, forget, – we have a lot of excuses).  We can go along for a while until our body cries out for nothing but water.

With a water loss of just 1% you begin to feel thirsty and show signs of dehydration such as fatigue, dry mouth, dry eyes and darkened urine.  If not hydrated, skin begins to lose elasticity and blood pressure drops.  Because water is key to the delivery of oxygen, with dehydration comes diminished blood flow to tissues.  Severe dehydration results in weakness, shock, coma and, eventually, death.

But the water from our taps and from all those bottles we buy (Americans spend more than $4 billion annually for bottled water) only temporarily quenches our thirst.

We need “living water.”

In John 4, Jesus said to the Samaritan woman, “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…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?”  (ESV)

The eye-opener comes in the simplicity of verse 28 – “So the woman left her water jar…”  In a dry land one doesn’t leave behind her water jar.

Unless her thirst has been quenched.