June 23 is National Hydration Day. It was created to remind everyone to drink enough water and stay hydrated, especially during the hot summer months and during exercise. It honors a football coach who invented an electrolyte-releasing mouthguard to keep players hydrated during games. But beyond just athletics, water is essential for every part of life:
- Water composes about 60% of the human body.
- It covers around 70% of the Earth’s surface.
- Water is essential for every form of life on earth to exist.
- Our bodies need a regular sufficient supply of it to be properly healthy.
- Dehydration can be serious and affect everything from body temperature and blood pressure to brain function.
Although water is one of the most basic nutrients, it’s all too easy to forget to drink enough, even though it’s critical if we want to stay alive. And it’s not just a matter of drinking enough water once—we have to keep drinking enough water again and again as fast as our bodies use it.
But Jesus offers a kind of water that will sustain us forever. As told in the book of John, Jesus speaks with a Samaritan woman by a well near the town of Sychar. As they discuss drawing water from the well, “Jesus answered, ‘Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life’” (John 4: 13-14). Jesus isn’t talking about some kind of magical electrolyte sports drink; He’s using the human need for water as a metaphor for an even greater need.
He uses this metaphor again in John 7 during the Festival of Tabernacles:
“On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.’ By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.” (John 7:37-39)
Here, He makes it clear He’s talking about the Holy Spirit. He again invites anyone who is thirsty to come to Him. And that’s not the first time the idea is used in Scripture. In Jeremiah, God calls Himself “the spring of living water” (Jeremiah 2:13). Water is so essential for life that the need for water is synonymous with the need for life. In Jeremiah, God rebukes His people for trying to dig “broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” God is the thing that sustains His people—nothing else can fill that need. So,
- God is the source of living water.
- It sustains us for eternal life the way regular H2O sustains physical life.
- It will fill us so that we never lack that living water again.
- Jesus will give that living water to all those who believe in Him. We need only go to Him and ask.
Yes, please carry a water bottle with you or set reminders to drink enough water to keep your physical body healthy. But even more essential is to be near the source of living water necessary for eternal life. Let’s celebrate living water and help others find it as well. Happy National Hydration Day!
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