Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it
is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he
would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have
nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living
water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank
from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” (John 4:10-12)
As I continue
through John 4 (Jesus’ visit with the Samaritan woman), I am sharing how Jesus led
her to look at something Higher than she had ever had to think about, followed
by something Deeper inside her that she had to admit before the next Higher. I
can’t recall when I first noticed this pattern (my first writing about it
appears to be January of 2008), but I have not been able to unsee it!
The first
Higher-Deeper for “the woman at the well” was that Jesus blew her mind by
giving her a first-time experience of a Jewish man treating her with respect,
followed by her deep feelings of how the animosity from the Jews had shaped her
understanding of herself in their eyes. From Jesus’ first words, “Give me a
drink,” something was radically different. You can read more about this in my
previous post.
The next Higher is
expressed in Jesus’ words, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is
saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have
given you living water.” This lifts the woman’s thoughts into something that
could only be revealed from heaven, that there was a gift of God, and there was
something distinct about Jesus. These realities together were of such a
profound goodness and grace that, if she had only known these things when she
saw Jesus at the well, Jesus wouldn’t have even had time to ask her for water,
because she would have been pleading with him for the living water that only he
can give.
This sense of, “If
you knew…” hit me very personally. It took me back through the spiritual
markers of my life where I came to know God better than ever. Each time that
happened, it was Jesus giving me something I hadn’t known. And it led me
through Highers and Deepers I did not even recognize as a pattern for many
years.
I believe there is
a universal sense in which we can come to God’s word every day and expect a Higher
of the heavenly variety. God’s ways are higher than our ways, and his thoughts
are higher than our thoughts, so every time with God, every sermon in church,
every teaching video online, will have something in it that lifts our thoughts
higher than we have ever considered. And as we expect this to happen for us, we
will get a sense of what it felt like for the Samaritan woman the first time it
happened for her.
The Deeper part of
this is the way it led the woman into her heart where she had to verbalize a
simple reality: all she knew about a gift from God was “our father Jacob” who “gave
us the well…” That may have been a unique Deeper for her, but it is also a
universal Deeper for us as we realize that, at the same time as God opens our
minds to some new truth from heaven (as revealed in Scripture), it will
confront the limitations of our earthly experience. Perhaps the limits of our
church’s denominational distinctives, or the limits of our parent’s experience
(or non-experience) of God, or even just the fact that every day we are only so
far along on our journey and today’s lesson from heaven will show us the limit
of where we left off the day before.
While there is so
much more to say about this (including how this continues to rhyme with what Jesus
taught Nicodemus, and how it shows the Beatitudinal Valley Jesus was leading
the woman on at the same time), the focus for today is to consider how the Holy
Spirit will reveal Highers to us in the word that feel like we are being told
kingdom-of-heaven things we hadn’t known before, and this will expose the Deepers
of whatever earthly limitations we have put on our walk with God up to this
time.
My encouragement is
to meet God in both. If his word says something Higher we simply haven’t seen
before, welcome it right away and feel the childlike wonder of a heart, soul, mind,
and brain, being graced with the gift of knowing something that is on our
Father’s mind.
At the same time, if
the “if you knew…” truth exposes a Deeper awareness of how earthly our thinking
is about ourselves, and God, and the kingdom of heaven, and the “good news of
great joy”, and walking in the Spirit, praise God for the “blessed are the poor
in spirit” gift of grace and tell him what you’re thinking. Whatever thoughts
come to mind, tell “our Father in heaven” in prayer, and continue meditating on
his word as he works these things out in our lives in the most real and
personal of ways.
© 2025
Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8
Email: in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the
English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text
Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of
Good News Publishers.)
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