"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." (John 7:37-38)
"Bodily thirst is notoriously the most painful sensation to which the frame of mortal man is liable. Read the story of the miserable sufferer in the black hole at Calcutta. Ask anyone who has traveled over desert plains under a tropical sun. Hear what any old soldier will tell you is the chief want of the wounded on a battlefield. Remember what the crews of ships lost in mid-ocean, tossed for days in boats without water, go through. Mark the dreadful words of the rich man in the parable, 'Send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water to cool my tongue for I am tormented in this flame' (Luke 16:24). The testimony is unvarying. There is nothing so terrible and hard to bear as thirst.
"But if bodily thirst is so painful, how much more painful is thirst of soul? Physical suffering is not the worst part of eternal punishment. It is a light thing, even in this world, compared to the suffering of the mind and inward man. To see the value of our souls and find out they are in danger of eternal ruin; to feel the burden of unforgiven sin and not to know where to turn for relief; to have a conscience sick and ill at ease and to be ignorant of the remedy; to discover that we are dying, dying daily, and yet unprepared to meet God; to have some clear view of our own guilt and wickedness, and yet to be in utter darkness about absolution; this is the highest degree of pain - the pain which drinks up soul and spirit and pierces joints and marrow! And this no doubt is the thirst of which our Lord is speaking. It is a thirst after pardon, forgiveness, absolution and peace with God. It is the craving of a really awakened conscience, wanting satisfaction and not knowing where to find it, walking through dry places, and unable to get rest.
"And surely it is not too much to say that all of us ought to know something of this thirst, if not as much as Augustin, Luther, Bunyan or Whitefield. Living as we do in a dying world; knowing, as must do, if we will confess it, that there is a world beyond the grace, and that after death comes the judgment; feeling, as we must do in our better moments, what poor, weak, unstable, defective creatures we all are, and how unfit to meet God; conscious as we must be in our inmost heart of hearts, that on our use of time depends our place in eternity, we ought to feel and to realize something like 'thirst,' for a sense of peace with the living God. But alas, nothing proves so conclusively the fallen nature of man as the general, common want of spiritual appetite! For money, for power, for pleasure, for rank, for honor, for distinction - for all these the vast majority are now intensely thirsting. To lead forlorn hopes, to dig for gold, to storm a breach, to try to hew a way through thick-ribbed ice to the North Pole, for all these objects there is no lack of adventurers and volunteers. Fierce and unceasing is the competition for these corruptible crowns! But few indeed, by comparison, are those who thirst after eternal life. No wonder that the natural man is called in Scripture 'dead,' and 'sleeping,' and 'blind,' and 'deaf.' No wonder that he is said to need a second birth and a new creation. There is no surer symptom of mortification in the body than the loss of all feeling. There is no more painful sign of an unhealthy state of soul that an utter absence of spiritual thirst. Woe to that man of whom the Savior can say, 'You know not that you are wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked' (Rev. 3:17)." (Holiness, J.C. Ryle)
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