“I Am Thirsty”

In John 19:28, Jesus is recorded as saying: “I am thirsty” when He was on the cross. It is one of 7 short statements Jesus uttered as he was being crucified. These 7 statements are known as Jesus’ “Seven Last Words”.

The fact that Jesus was thirsty on the cross reminds us that Jesus was fully human. He had lost a tremendous amount of blood through the scourgings he suffered at the at the hands of Roman soldiers and through the nails that he was pierced with on the cross.

Jesus is not just some imaginary fictional figure like the dying and rising nature gods of Egyptian and Greek pagan religions. The biblical record wants us to be perfectly clear that God’s Christ is someone who actually lived, suffered and died for the sins of the world. He actually rose from the dead and actually defeated death. He gives us a real hope.

Because Jesus physically lived, died and rose again from the dead, He is able to meet the real needs of real people.

God’s Son was fully incarnated in a human body, and became thirsty in that body for us, so that we would not have to waste our lives thirsting for and pursuing after those things which cannot satisfy. We have eternity in our hearts that only the eternal God can fill it.

Addictions arise in our lives as we seek to fill that God-shaped vacuum within us with temporal things. The prophet Jeremiah puts it this way:

My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water (Jer.2:13).

Augustine taught that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in the Lord. Jesus was thirsty on the cross and died for us so that he could redeem our hearts from thirsting after the idols of this world which can only make us more thirsty.

Let us quench our thirst by drawing from the well of salvation that Christ provides. In John 7:37-39, we read these words:

On the last and greatest day of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” 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.

No one who has taken up this offer from Christ has been disappointed. Jesus always delivers what He promises,

QOTD: Is your heart thirsting after Christ or after salt water?