A Desire for Truth
One summer, a friend of mine and I went to Colorado to climb mountains. To get there, we drove all night from the very southeastern tip of Texas (near Beaumont) beginning Sunday night around 8:00 P.M, and arrived in Trinidad on Monday afternoon around 4:00 P.M. The first mountain that we climbed was outside of Trinidad. This was the first time that I had climbed to such heights and did not know what to expect.
What do you desire most in your life?
When we got up Tuesday morning, we were ready to go. We ate a hearty breakfast and then took with us sandwiches, soda, and a few bottles of water. We chose an old utility road as our path up the side of the mountain. If you know anything about climbing mountains, switching back is the preferred way to get up. This road, being a utility road, didn’t switch back at all; it just went straight up. Every step was like climbing up the bleachers of a stadium, except this stadium was close to 10,000 feet in height. It was one of the smaller mountains in Colorado, but when you’re doing a direct ascent, size doesn’t matter too much, at least, it didn’t to me. Our plan was to picnic on the top of the mountain, and that we did, but not without finishing our last beverage. The way down we would hike dry. By the time we got near the bottom, the temperature was somewhere in the mid 90s, a relative hot day for the state, and the cattle water troughs were starting to look pretty good. We finally got to the main road, reached a farmhouse, and after placating a barking, but hungry, dog with a left-over peanut butter sandwich, we were able to ask the farmer for a drink. He offered glasses, but we asked for the hose. That water was pumped from a mountain well and was the sweetest, best tasting, most desired, perhaps most needed water that I have ever had in my life.
The deepest physical need that the body can have is the need for water. Without this precious substance, our bodies would dehydrate to the point of death in three to four days. Anywhere that man has ever gone to live, he has either taken a supply of water with him, or he has settled in an area where there is an abundant source of water. The human body both wants and needs water.
Jesus experienced this very human sensation when he approached a woman of Samaria and asked her for a drink (John 4:5-7). This Samaritan woman thought it strange that Jesus, a Jew, would ask of her a drink of water. Ever the master teacher, Jesus replied not with a comment motivated by physical desires, but by spiritual. “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water” (John 4:10 NKJV). When Jesus offers the “water of life,” He offers the very thing upon which the life of our soul depends the most�truth. Just as the body desires, demands, and depends upon water, so also the soul cannot survive without that water which Jesus gives. Jesus told Pilate, “For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice” (John 18:37).
Dear friend, do you desire God’s truth to be in your life as deeply as you desire the most desperate element your body demands? Is your soul in need of that satisfying drink of the water of life that springs up unto eternal life? Do you desire for all of your spiritual needs to be quenched through the cool and satisfying imbibing of this water? I hope that you do; I hope that your desire for God’s truth will motivate you greater than any physical desire for water that you may have and I hope that you are not satisfied until you have drunk deeply of that water and come to understand all the truth that God has to offer through Jesus, His Son. “And the Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come!’ And let him who hears say, ‘Come!’ And let him who thirsts come. Whoever desires, let him take the water of life freely” (Revelation 22:17). There is no greater necessity of the human soul than truth. Will you desire, demand, drink, and live?