John 7:37–39
Source of Old Faith Church · Sunday, March 22, 2026
[ Opening prayer ]
I. THE SILENCE OF THE EMPTY PITCHER
Matthew walked y’all through the whole shape of John 7 this morning — the three movements, the pressure building up around Jesus, that question nobody in the chapter can quite get away from. What I want to do now is take you to the top of it. To the moment the whole chapter has been moving toward. And I want you to feel what’s happening there.
The setting is the Feast of Tabernacles. It’s one of the three big pilgrimage feasts on Israel’s calendar — the kind where folks travel from all over the country to Jerusalem. When they get there, they don’t stay in houses. They build temporary shelters out of branches and canvas and they camp out for a week. The whole point of that was to remember: God once kept us alive in the wilderness when we didn’t have a thing. He was enough then. He is enough now.
But the feast wasn’t only looking back. It was also leaning forward. There was a longing built right into it. And one ceremony in particular carried all of that longing.
Every morning of the seven-day feast, a priest led a procession down from the temple to the Pool of Siloam. He was carrying a golden pitcher. He’d fill it with water, walk it back up through the Water Gate into the temple courts — three blasts of the trumpet going before him — and the whole congregation would be singing the Hallel, Psalms 113 through 118. At the altar, that water got poured out alongside a drink offering of wine, and the people would recite the words of Isaiah together: With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.
The rabbis were plain about what this meant. The Jerusalem Talmud says it straight out: “Why is the name of it called ‘the drawing out of water’? Because of the pouring out of the Holy Spirit.” That’s what the water ceremony was — Israel saying, year after year, feast after feast: we know the day is coming when God pours out his Spirit on all flesh. We haven’t seen it yet. But we are waiting.
Seven days of that. Seven mornings of procession and trumpet and singing and water poured at the altar.
And then the eighth day comes. The last day. The Great Day of the feast — the biggest, most solemn day of the whole week.
And on that day, the priest doesn’t go.
No procession to Siloam. The golden pitcher sits where it is. The altar stands dry. People gather, prayers go up, the feast reaches its highest point — and there is no water.
That’s not a mistake. That’s not somebody forgetting to do their job. It’s designed that way. After seven days of building up that longing, the ceremony on its last day finally says out loud what it never could ultimately give. It had been pointing somewhere it couldn’t take you. And on the eighth day, with the altar dry and the pitcher set down, the whole system finally admitted it.
Cyril of Alexandria was one of the great Bible teachers of the early church — been dead about sixteen hundred years, but the man could read a text. He wrote that the water ceremony was a shadow that made way for the truth right at the moment it showed what it couldn’t do. He said it was the hour when the type confesses it cannot complete itself.
The feast was always pointing somewhere. On the last day, with nothing left to pour, it finally said so.
II. THE VOICE IN THE SILENCE
And right there — at that exact moment — Jesus stood up and cried out in the temple courts.
John uses a word for what Jesus did — ekraxen — that means a public declaration (κράζω, meaning “he cried out” or “he shouted.”). This wasn’t Jesus pulling somebody aside for a quiet word. John is careful about that. Jesus stood up and he hollered. Into the silence of the empty altar. Into the moment the feast had run out and had nothing left to give.
“If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.”
John 7:37–38
Anyone who thirsts. Not: anybody who’s got their theology straight. Not: anybody whose record don’t have any marks on it. Not: anybody who was here last Sunday or has come every week or has got all their doubts worked out. Anyone.
The festival’s symbolic water is ending, and Jesus stands up to declare that he himself is the true source of living water.
That invitation was already in Isaiah 55: Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters. And it’s the last invitation in the whole Bible — Revelation 22 closes out with: Let the one who is thirsty come. That’s how God talks across every century. The invitation doesn’t get smaller the further along you go. It keeps opening up.
A single biblical invitation that begins in Isaiah, comes into sharp focus in John, and ends in Revelation as a final open call. Isaiah 55 invites the thirsty to come to the waters and receive what they cannot earn, while Revelation 22 ends with “Let the one who is thirsty come” and “take the water of life freely”.
John 7 sits in the middle of that story and acts like the turning point: Jesus is not merely echoing the invitation, he is embodying it. When he cries out in the temple, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink,” John presents Jesus as the one Isaiah’s invitation was always pointing toward and the one Revelation’s invitation still calls people to.
And look at what Jesus is offering. Not a cup. Not just a refill of that pitcher. Rivers. More than one. The kind Ezekiel saw in his vision flowing out from the temple — ankle deep at first, then up to your knees, then a river you can’t wade across, and everywhere it went, things came back to life. The Dead Sea turning fresh. The desert putting out fruit. Everything the river touched, lived.
That’s the scale of what Jesus is announcing. Not a ceremony you repeat every morning. Not something that runs dry on the eighth day. Rivers that don’t quit.
He is not saying: I’ll give you a better ceremony.
He’s saying: I am what that ceremony was always pointing at.
The lectionary reading for this week opens with Isaiah 43. If you read it before you came in this morning, you heard God say:
“Do not remember the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”
Isaiah 43:18–19
The God who split the Red Sea. Who brought water out of a rock in the middle of the desert when there was nothing there. That same God is now saying: what I’m about to do is going to make that look like the old thing. Not a memory of old provision. A new thing. Rivers in the desert.
Jesus is standing at that feast saying: this is it. This is the new thing. The pitcher’s empty/down. I’m here.
III. THE RIVER THAT DOES NOT STAY
John adds one more sentence right after the invitation. It’s one of the quietest and most important sentences in this whole Gospel.
“Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.”
John 7:39
The Spirit hadn’t been given yet. Jesus still had to go to the cross. He’d have to be glorified first — and when John says glorified, he means crucified, raised up, and ascended — before those rivers could flow. The promise was real. The outpouring was coming. But it was waiting on what Jesus was going to do at Golgotha.
Paul makes the connection plain in 1 Corinthians 10. He’s talking about Israel out in the wilderness and he says: they drank from the spiritual rock that went with them, and that rock was Christ. The rock had to be struck before the water came out. Same thing runs through John 7 — Jesus was going to be struck, pierced on the cross, and from that piercing blood and water would flow. The struck rock giving its final outpouring.
Pentecost is where John 7:37 lands. The Spirit doesn’t fall on one rock in one desert — he falls on every believer all at once, and each one of them gets turned into a source of living water for the people around them.
Which brings us to the part of this text that’s easy to miss when you’re the one who’s thirsty.
The rivers don’t stay.
Augustine of Hippo was one of the great pastor-preachers of the early church — spent his whole ministry working through Scripture with his people. He preached through the entire Gospel of John, and when he got to this passage he sat with a question: do these rivers of living water in verse 38 flow from Christ, or from the person who believes? His answer was that it’s both, and that’s exactly right. What flows from Christ flows through the believer.
Augustine writes in his Tractates on John: “He who drinks from this fountain will himself become a fountain. He shall be satisfied in himself, and from him shall flow rivers, so that others who are thirsty may come and drink.”
The one who receives becomes the source.
You don’t come to Christ and hold onto the water. You come to Christ and what he gives you starts moving. It goes toward your family. Toward the person sitting next to you. Toward the man out at the refinery sitting across from somebody at lunch who doesn’t know where to put what he’s carrying. Toward the woman down your road who’s been hauling something by herself that was never meant to be hauled alone.
Ezekiel’s vision: everything the river touches, lives.
That’s not just a pretty picture. That’s the actual job of a congregation. Not to keep the water stored up safe somewhere. To let it go.
Psalm 126 is also in this week’s lectionary. It’s short, and it’s honest, and it doesn’t dress things up:
“Those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy. He who goes out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, bringing his sheaves with him.”
Psalm 126:5–6
There are seasons where you’re sowing before you’re reaping. Where the work comes before the joy does. The psalm doesn’t explain how long that gap’s going to be. Doesn’t try to tell you why it’s taking as long as it is. It just says: the one who goes out weeping with seed in their hand is not going out in vain. The harvest is real. It’s coming.
That’s not somebody trying to manage your situation. That’s Scripture picking your situation up and putting it inside a story that hasn’t finished yet.
IV. WHERE THIS TRUTH RESTS
The crowd in John 7 couldn’t agree on Jesus. Prophet? Messiah? Man who’s got everybody fooled? Same argument breaks out in every generation. It’s not some old historical dispute. It’s the question that everybody who runs into Jesus eventually has to answer — not with a quick opinion, but with where they actually point their life.
Peter had already answered it at the end of John 6. When the crowd thinned out and Jesus looked at the Twelve and asked if they were fixing to leave too, Peter didn’t give a big speech. He just said what was true: Lord, where else are we gonna go? You have the words of eternal life.
That’s a man who’s looked at everything else and found it dry. Not because he’s got every question figured out. Because he’s heard something in Jesus he can’t find anywhere else.
The feast system was something. Beautiful, centuries old, faithfully pointing toward something it couldn’t ever quite reach. And on the last day, when the altar stood dry and the pitcher was set down, a voice rang out across that courtyard — not a ceremony, not a system, not a procedure — a person, standing up and calling out:
If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.
This is where this truth tends to land: not in having every question you walked in with this morning answered, but in recognizing that the thirst you’re carrying is the exact condition this invitation was written for.
Your thirst doesn’t disqualify you. It’s the reason he said come.
The pitcher has a limit. Jesus doesn’t.
Come and drink. And let what you receive flow.
[ Closing prayer ]
John Hargrove Seeking Truth and Reality 