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I. THE NATURE OF THE GIFT. Spring water, i.e., Christ Himself the Life is His own gift.

II. ITS CHARACTERISTICS.

1. Always fresh.

(1) History is a storehouse of buried memories, some of which are galvanized into momentary life by antiquarians, but which soon die away since they belong to a past age and do not answer to our wants or correspond to our sympathies. But Christ's words spoken 1800 years ago have the same force and attraction as though they were novelties of yesterday. His actions, His life as a whole speak to the nineteenth century as to the first, provoking the same hostility, winning the same empire.

(2) As He is in history, so He is in the soul. In that treasure house of the dead, amid all that is stagnant, all that belongs to the irrevocable past, all that bears the mark of change and corruption, there is for Christians one thought that is for ever fresh, one memory for ever invigorating, one tide of pure passion — Jesus.

2. A spring of water is in perpetual motion; so —

(1) Christ, in history and in the soul, is ever different and yet the same. The sky presents the same outline of clouds on no two days; the sea, visit it when we may, never looks quite as it looked before. Yet they are the same. So Christ is to us what He was to our forefathers, and yet displays to each successive generation new aspects of His power and perfection: at the same time stability and progress.

(2) He is the source of movement in the soul. He has set it moving, and keeps it moving — even the very intelligence that would drive Him from His throne; for His truths have moved the depths of our being, so that whether a man accepts them or not he cannot rest as though he had never heard them. Faculties dormant for years are stirred to meet Him, and He keeps them in motion by fresh aspects of His power and beauty.

(3) In Christian theology. The Christian creed is said to be the stagnation of active thought. Undoubtedly it gives a fixed form to our ideas, so as to render superfluous the discussion of matters on which the light of Divine certainty has been thrown. But fixed thought is no more the antagonist of active thought than the rim of the well was hostile to the springing water.

3. Springing water fertilizes.

(1) Christ is the great fertilizer of the soul of man — of(a) The intellect; for He made it capable of the productions of genius.

(b) The affections. Family life in Europe is His work. His authority reflected in the Christian father, His tenderness in the Christian mother, His obedience in the Christian child.

(c) The will; making it capable of new measures of sacrifice and heroism.

(2) Christ is the fertilizer of nations, and without Him the civilization of Europe would be exchanged for the civilization of China or Japan.

III. THE SCENE OR SEAT OF THE GIFT. "In Him."

1. Others have done great works —

(1) Effecting vast changes on the surface of human life in founding empires, changing customs, laws, and languages.

(2) Some have gone deeper — founding empires of ideas.

2. Christ has done more — more than the founding of a kingdom or of a philosophy; for a government may be hated while obeyed, a philosophy accepted without love. But Christ reigns and teaches in human hearts as a friend.

3. Hence Christians know the secret of man's dignity. Before Christ came the dignity of man as man was unknown. When He came He placed within the reach of emperor and slave the only ennobling gift — His presence and power within.

4. This gift is also the secret of the Christian's spiritual independence. If Christians were dependent on the things of sense, the world might crush it out. The world prescribed Christian worship, destroyed the Scriptures, but was powerless against the presence of the Divine Redeemer.

IV. ITS EFFECT. "Everlasting life." Without it man would not be happy in heaven.

(Canon Liddon.)

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KJV: The woman saith unto him, Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep: from whence then hast thou that living water?

WEB: The woman said to him, "Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. From where then have you that living water?