SATISFACTION
We started our occasion this morning with Hymn 376, and the last verse confirmed the thought I had in relation to preaching the glad tidings this evening. Verse 4 says;
‘O Lord, with deep emotion
Thyself we magnify;
And own Thy love suffices
Our hearts to satisfy’.
As believers, we sang that the love of the Lord Jesus is able to satisfy us. It is a wonderful thing to have satisfaction and to be a satisfied person! We would have to say that there are not very many in the world. I suppose even the children here would know what it is to have a desire or a need, and to have it satisfied. Maybe on a hot day you are very thirsty, you know what it is to have a thirst and to be longing for a drink of water, then you have a long cold drink of water and it is just what you need; it satisfies you. Or to be hungry, and then to have something to eat, and to have that hunger satisfied, so that you are no longer hungry. But God has made each one of us in such a way that we have a desire, or a need, that cannot be met by anything that this world can offer. It can only be met by one Man, Jesus, and God is presenting Him in the glad tidings for your acceptance.
God has a right to act for Himself, to plan and purpose for the satisfaction of His own heart. He has done so; He did it before time even began. We can read something of what God has purposed to have for Himself eternally in the first chapter of Ephesians. Paul speaks about God’s good pleasure – according to “the good pleasure of his will” (v.5). God has a right to do what is pleasing to Himself and He has done so, and He has what is pleasing to Himself. But the blessed news in the glad tidings is that God will have an inheritance in the saints, an inheritance in believers. Part of God’s great plan is to secure persons like you and me for His own satisfaction and thereby securing your satisfaction. What a wonderful thing!
In Haggai, God said to the people, “Consider your ways”. God said it twice, in fact, “Consider your ways”. He would say, as it were, ‘Stop and think for a minute’. There is a lot of activity, but what does it yield; “Ye have sown much, and bring in little”. These persons were eating but were not satisfied, they were drinking but were not filled with drink; “ye clothe yourselves, but there is none warm; and he that earneth wages earneth wages for a bag with holes. Thus saith Jehovah of hosts: Consider your ways”. God might say to you in the glad tidings tonight, ‘Pause for a minute’. Life is busy. I suppose at the present time we might say that life is busier than it has ever been. Most of us would say that there are always things that we would like to do, but can never find the time to do, and Satan would occupy us with things that would stop us from thinking about eternal realities.
I remember a preacher telling a story about a young person who was just leaving school and an older believer asked him what he was thinking of doing. He said, ‘I would like to study this subject and get this qualification’ and the older man said, ‘And what then?’. The young person said, ‘I would like to get such and such a job and work for a company in this line’. The older believer said, ‘I see, and what then?’. He said ‘Once I have learned enough about it, I might start my own business and become prosperous; that is what I would like to do’. The older man then said, ‘I see, and what then?’. ‘Well, I suppose I would like to retire quite early and have a long and happy retirement’. ‘And what then?’. The young person said, ‘Well, I suppose eventually I will die’, and the older believer asked, ‘And what then?’.
What then? Have you thought about the ‘what then’? God would have you to pause and consider the ‘then’. We are made in such a way that our desires cannot be satisfied in any other way than by Christ, but we also have needs, and we have a great need of salvation. Scripture says that “whatever is not of faith is sin”, Rom.14:23. What an all-embracing, sweeping statement that is. If you are not acting in faith, it is sin. What does that mean for you and for me? It means that I am a sinner. Another preacher said, I do not need to know your history; scripture tells me that “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Rom.3:23), therefore we have a need to get right with God. God does not need to get reconciled to us, we need to get reconciled to God while we still can, while the glad tidings continue to go out in wonderful grace, and God is still waiting. I was affected recently by that scripture in Corinthians where it speaks of “God as it were beseeching …”, 2 Cor.5:20. Mr Darby’s footnote says, ‘it amounted to that’ (note ‘g’), God as it were beseeching men in the glad tidings that we might get right with Him while there is still time. He has provided a blessed Man in whom that salvation is available, and He is having Him presented here again tonight in the glad tidings. God is not giving options in the glad tidings, He is presenting a glorious blessed Man who has done everything for Him and has done everything for men. He is the One who is being presented for your acceptance in the glad tidings tonight.
In the temptations at the outset of the Lord’s public service, He was carried by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil (Matt.4). In the last temptation, the devil took the Lord Jesus to a very high mountain (v.8) and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and said to Him, “All these things will I give thee if, falling down, thou wilt do me homage”. I suppose in one sense, the whole earth is the Lord’s, so Satan made a pretentious claim to say that he could offer the Lord Jesus all these things. Nevertheless, scripture says that “the whole world lies in the wicked one” (1 John 5:19); there is a system brought about by Satan in this world that is independent of God. You can trace it in Scripture. In Genesis, man made a city (Gen.4:17) and called it after the name of his son – pride was there. The harp and the pipe came in, the music system. You can hardly go anywhere these days without seeing people with headphones on listening to music. They are in one sense under the thrall of Satan, they are under that domain, they are under his control. But it says in one of the psalms that Jehovah looseth the prisoners (Ps.146:7). In Acts 16, Paul and Silas were in the prison in dreadful circumstances, and yet they were singing, and rejoicing in all that God had done for them, and it says that the prisoners listened to them.
I remember a brother saying, ‘This world is full of prisoners’. Are you a prisoner of Satan? God would have you emancipated! Satan has a vast array of things that appeal to me, and things that will appeal to you, but God has something much better in mind, because the things that Satan can provide you with will never satisfy your heart. I say that through bitter experience. Scripture speaks about “the deceitfulness of sin” (Heb.3:13); somebody said about sin that it promises much, but the pleasure in it is gone as soon as the sin is committed. I remember going in for things that I thought were going to satisfy me; I really looked forward to them and maybe enjoyed them to some extent, but afterwards I was left with a hollow, empty feeling inside. I was never satisfied. Someone said too that even if you were able to indulge in all the vast array that Satan has to offer, all that the world has to offer, it would never satisfy your heart. But the Lord Jesus is the one Man whom God is presenting and He is able to satisfy every human heart. In the Glasgow Science Centre, they have a counter displaying the population of the world; it is going up by about three every second. There are 7.4 billion people on this earth, and the Lord Jesus is able not only to save them, but to satisfy every one in this world, and He is able to satisfy you! That is a wonderful thing!
I read about this woman in John’s gospel because she is a sample of a person who tried to find satisfaction in this world. The Lord Jesus found her, and not by chance, and in verse 16, Jesus said to her, “Go, call thy husband, and come here. The woman answered and said, I have not a husband. Jesus says to her, Thou hast well said, I have not a husband; for thou hast had five husbands, and he whom now thou hast is not thy husband”. What a revelation that was to this woman. She knew that she had had five husbands but here was Someone who knew it too. It must have set her thinking. But she is an example of a person looking for satisfaction in this world and unable to find it. I suppose she thought that her first husband would have given her lasting happiness, and he did not, so what did she do? She looked for another and perhaps she thought she would find it in him and she did not, and another and another and another. So it went on, and with it degradation. Perhaps she came to the well at noon when the sun was at its hottest because she did not want to be there when others were around; she was probably a social outcast because of her moral history.
Why was the Lord Jesus there? We read of it in verse 4, “And he must needs pass through Samaria”. As far as I know, He made this journey with one object in view, and that was to secure this poor woman. Of all the people in Samaria who might have come to this well, He came to save her. What a blessed matter! The Lord Jesus did not come to save righteous persons – there were none anyway – He came to save sinners. Is that not wonderful? Your salvation does not depend on how good your history has been, or how bad it has been, or how good you will be, or how bad you will be. It depends on the work of our Lord Jesus and it depends entirely on your acceptance of what this Man has done, on His finished work. What a wonderful matter; “he must needs pass through Samaria”. We might say, He must needs pass through Aberdeen tonight. He is passing through – here is an opportunity to hear about the Saviour, here is an opportunity to get right with God.
He says to this woman, “Give me to drink”. Is that not another wonderful thing, when you consider who this Person is, that He should say that to her at this well? Who was He? He was and is none other than God Himself, Creator of the world, God over all blessed forever, a divine Person, the One who made the universe. But He entered into the universe, and drew near to man as God’s beloved Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. What a wonderful thing that He drew near to persons just like this woman, to display all the love of God, and to make God known. The love of God was told out when Jesus was here, and it was told out in no greater way than when Christ suffered and died on the cross in order to save persons from their sins. The veil of the temple was rent from the top to the bottom. He came out from God and was going to God (John 13:3).
You might say it was like a circuit, but it was not a haphazard circuit; “the Son of man indeed goes as it is determined”, Luke 22:22. It was all marked out before; “the blood of Christ, foreknown indeed before the foundation of the world”, 1 Pet.1:19. It was all according to the great divine plan. An unregenerate man, Caiaphas the high priest, had an insight that one man should perish for the people (John 18:14), and that Person is the Lord Jesus Christ. He was a different order of Man; “the holy thing … which shall be born” (Luke 1:35), “who did no sin” (1 Pet 2:22), “who knew not sin” (2 Cor.5:21), “in him sin is not”, 1 John 3:5. A different order of Man was here for the pleasure of God. All that God desired to see in man was set out in one Man in the very place where God had been dishonoured by generation after generation. God was entirely honoured and not only honoured by that one Man, but He was glorified by the Lord Jesus. Jesus could say to the Father in John 17, “I have glorified thee on the earth” (v.4).
When this woman first came across Him, she said “How dost thou, being a Jew …”. That was all she could see at first, but as He spoke to her, it began to be revealed to her what He really was. “I see that thou art a prophet”; there was more here than met the eye, and then she came to it, “is not he the Christ?”. That is who the Lord Jesus was, the anointed One of God; He was the One who was here doing the will of God when every other man had done their own will. You have done your own will and I have done mine; “All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way”, Isa.53:6. The Lord Jesus did nothing else but the will of God. Nothing else – only the will of God. What it cost Him! Think of the inward sufferings of Christ in relation to the bearing of sins and the judgment of sin from a holy God. The extent of the obedience of the Lord Jesus was that He became “obedient even unto death, and that the death of the cross”, Phil.2:8. Does that not touch your heart? Did He have to die because of anything He had done? No, He had to die because of God’s purpose to secure man for His pleasure.
Just before Jesus began His public service, He was baptised by John the baptist. Others came to John and were baptised, confessing their sins, and then the Lord Jesus came, One who had no sin. He could say “Suffer it now”, Matt.3:15. Think of the Lord Jesus identifying Himself in grace with that movement of a repentant people, and now here He was thirsting, weary with the way He had come, not turning aside for any. “The lion, mighty among beasts, which turneth not away for any”, Prov.30:30. We see that in John’s gospel, the One who did all the will of God in a steady, calm and undeviating way; “the Son of man indeed goes as it is determined”, Luke 22:22. It involved not only that He should suffer from the hands of man. What a verdict of men that was. Man was tested when Christ was here and the verdict of men was, “We will not that this man should reign over us”, Luke 19:14. The final test for man was Christ. Man had been tested previously under the law, but the final test was Christ. Man failed that test, and we fail that test too. But then Jesus went into death and bore the believer’s sins “in his body on the tree”, 1 Pet.2:24. He was qualified to be the sin bearer by virtue of His sinlessness. If there had been any defect in the animals offered in Leviticus, they would have been disqualified from being suitable, but there could not be any defect in Christ. Whatever way you view Him, from whatever aspect you look at Christ, you see perfection in every way. The hymn writer could say ‘Divine perfection in a Man!’ (Hymn 20).
Jesus bore the believer’s sins in His body on the tree in those three hours of darkness. He exhausted God’s judgment against sin and He went into death, lay in death, but it could not be that He was left in death. It was a moral impossibility that the One who had perfectly and wholly pleased God could be left in death. He lay in the stillness of death, but He was raised “by the glory of the Father”, Rom.6:4. He could also say as to His life, “I have authority to lay it down and I have authority to take it again”, John 10:18. Although He had that authority because of who He was, yet He exercised it as a dependent Man, so that He could go on to say, “I have received this commandment of my Father”. Even in that, there is subjection seen in the Lord Jesus, there is moral perfection in every way in that Man.
How worthy He is of your heart. He laid down His own life. No one of us will lay down our life. Our lives are taken from us, but Jesus laid down His life and went into death, then He was raised again. He had “authority to take it again”, and He was also raised “by the glory of the Father”. He appeared to many and then was received up into glory. Peter speaks of Him in his preaching as the One “whom heaven indeed must receive”, Acts 3:21. It was a moral necessity that Jesus should be received, that the Son of man who is in heaven (John 3:13), the One who is native to heaven, should return to heaven. He is there now, and He has been given the first place. As Man, He has been given that place at the right hand of God; and because of who He is in His Person, He has “set himself down on the right hand of the greatness on high”, Heb.1:3. That is what He has done Himself, but He has also been given that place at the Father’s right hand, and He is now available to you as a Saviour.
I need Him, and I can say, thank God, I have Him. But you need Him too! We can come into the gain and the blessedness of having the Saviour by simple faith in what He has done and by repentance towards God. Another has described it as taking sides with God against myself. It is not that I am just a little bit sorry about not being quite up to the mark. No, repentance is a thorough thing and it involves that you can say, I have offended God and I do not have anything to claim, but I can see that God has provided a Saviour for me. You can reach out in faith and simply ask the Lord Jesus to save you from your sins. No one will be turned away; what a wonderful thing!
The woman said in verse 29, “Come, see a man who told me all things I had ever done”. The Lord Jesus had spoken to her about her history, and it clearly had been a sinful one, but she knew that He knew all about it, and I think she knew by faith that He was on the way to clear everything for her. Regardless of what your history is, the scripture says that the blood of Jesus Christ God’s Son cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:7). It is a wonderful thing that, as you put your faith and trust in Him, your history is gone in any penal sense from before God and you are imputed righteous by God.
In verse 10, the Lord said to her “If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that says to thee, Give me to drink, thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water”. The Lord was really saying to her, If you knew how good God is, you would have asked, and if you had asked Him, He would have given you living water. There would be no doubt about it. We can tell you about the goodness of God tonight, in that He has given His only-begotten Son; “He who, yea, has not spared his own Son, but delivered him up for us all”, Rom.8:32.
Who else would give their own son? Mr Coates has a lovely touch about Romans 5 where it speaks about the love of God: “For scarcely for the just man will one die, for perhaps for the good man some one might also dare to die; but God commends his love to us, in that, we being still sinners, Christ has died for us” (vv.7,8). There you get the just man – that is the righteous man, the man who pays all his bills and does what is right. You might die for a just man. Then “perhaps for the good man some one might also dare to die”; that is the benevolent, charitable man. There might be more cause to die for that man. But “God commends his love to us, in that, we being still sinners …”. Who would die for a sinner? Who would die for someone who only offends God? Well, Christ has died for the sinner. That is the truth!
What does that tell you about the love of God? Is it not wonderful that God has told out His love in such a way? Does it not melt your heart, does it not make you want to give your heart to Christ and come into all that He has in mind for blessing for you? He has great things in mind. In verse 28, it says “The woman then left her waterpot and went away into the city, and says to the men, Come, see a man who told me all things I had ever done”. I suppose the waterpot is a symbol of her dependence upon this world’s springs, but now she finds a Man that captivates her heart and eclipses everything else. She is able to leave her waterpot, and in principle she is independent of things here. That is what God has in mind for every person, that we might become independent of other things and find everything in Christ and begin to live in relation to Him.
In verse 13, “Jesus answered and said to her, Every one who drinks of this water shall thirst again; but whosoever drinks of the water which I shall give him shall never thirst for ever”. What a promise; “never thirst for ever”, never again, never ever! Here is the Son of God telling you that if you want satisfaction for your soul, you will find it in Him. I have tried and I have not found it anywhere else. You come by way of faith and repentance and you will find it in Him. But He is really speaking of the Holy Spirit; “the water which I shall give him shall become in him a fountain of water, springing up into eternal life”.
The Spirit is spoken of in different ways in Scripture, you get rivers and wells and so on, but here is a fountain. There is life in a fountain, there is energy and vigour. We need power to walk here, power to go against the stream. You will find that power in the Holy Spirit of God, in God’s unspeakable free gift. We have spoken of the gift of faith; well, here is another gift. We cannot really limit God’s unspeakable free gift to the Spirit, but I think He must be included. God would give you of His own Spirit. Another divine Person has come here to indwell the believer and give each one a new appetite, new desires, desires after Christ, desires for divine things, desires for holy things, desires for pure things, things that are not corrupted and degraded. This world corrupts persons, and those that sow to the flesh reap corruption from the flesh, but then those that sow to the Spirit reap eternal life (Gal.6:8).
What is eternal life? It is spoken of in different ways in Scripture, but for the believer here, while moving through a scene where there is death all around, and corruption all around, God has provided an area that is pure and holy, where life as we will know it in the eternal day can be known in some measure now, where sin has no intrusion. We may know it particularly as gathered together. The Spirit is also spoken of as “the earnest of our inheritance” (Eph.1:14); we can have a foretaste of what we will come into in a full way in the eternal day. In the old days, people would speak about an earnest payment. It was like a deposit; you put down a percentage and it would show your intention to buy whatever it was. We have the Spirit as the earnest of our inheritance; you get a sample of the real thing now. You get to enjoy divine things and the glory of them and the beauty of them, the purity of them and the blessedness of them. You get to enjoy them here and now, even in a scene where there is death and corruption all around.
What do you get? In one sense, if you put your faith simply in Christ, you get the title to everything. We are all “God’s sons by faith in Christ Jesus”, Gal.3:26. You get sonship, you get righteousness imputed to you, you get peace with God, you get assurance of eternal salvation. You get all of these things, you get title to them all. God would lead you a certain way. He would cause you to have exercise in your life, as you go against the stream down here, and you find that Christ has become your object, “the leader and completer of faith”, Heb.12:2. He would cause you to pass through experiences so that you might become a worshipper. The Lord Jesus speaks of that here too; He says, “the hour is coming and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth; for also the Father seeks such as his worshippers. God is a spirit; and they who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth”.
God is looking for worshippers. He has found many in this room and He is looking for you to become a worshipper too; something which He has wrought in your heart and which is going out to Him in an unhindered way.
May you come to faith in Christ tonight for His name’s sake.
Preaching of the gospel, Aberdeen, Scotland
2 April 2017
C.J. McKay