No Bucket Needed: How to Stop Thirsting and Start Living
Ever feel like you're dying of thirst while standing next to a drinking fountain? Spiritually speaking, that’s kind of where we all start.
This week’s Bible Lesson on Life opens with one of the most radically inclusive invitations ever issued:
"Let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely."
No fine print. No secret handshake. Just—come.
But let’s be honest: simple gifts make us suspicious. Like the woman at the well, when Jesus offers “living water,” her brain short-circuits. “Sir, you have no bucket,” she replies.
Classic. We’re so used to earning, proving, or struggling that we barely recognize something that's just... given.
This whole lesson is a spiritual flipbook. Scene after scene shifts our view from survival mode to spiritual clarity:
Flip #1: From striving to receiving
Take the story of Moses as a baby. Born under the threat of death, he's floated down a river in a homemade boat. What happens next isn’t luck—it’s Love in motion. Pharaoh’s daughter draws him from the water, names him “Moses” (meaning “drawn out”), and raises him in safety. Divine Life doesn’t wait for us to prove ourselves worthy—it recognizes value, protects it, and nurtures it before we can even speak.
Flip #2: From bitterness to blessing
Next, Elisha is faced with polluted water in Jericho. The people say, “The water is bad, and the land is unfruitful.” Elisha tosses in some salt and declares, “I have made this water wholesome.” This isn't DIY chemistry—it’s a moment where spiritual perception overrides material despair. We’re not here to fix broken things; we’re here to reveal their true, whole nature.
Flip #3: From waiting to walking
There’s the man at Bethesda, parked beside a healing pool for thirty-eight years. When Jesus asks, “Do you want to be made well?” the man gives all the reasons he can’t get there—no help, always late. Jesus cuts through the narrative: “Stand up. Take your mat. Walk.” Just like that. Healing doesn’t always come with fanfare—it can be a quiet moment of refusing to let a lie define you any longer.
Flip #4: From earning to being
When a rich young ruler asks Jesus how to “inherit eternal life,” he’s thinking in checklists. Keep commandments? Done. Anything else? Jesus sees deeper: it’s not about what you do—it’s about where you place your treasure. And that’s not just a money thing. Where is your sense of worth, of identity, of security? What are you building your life on?
Flip #5: From death to Life
Maybe the most surprising flip comes when Peter raises Tabitha from the dead. He doesn’t mourn, plead, or dramatize. He speaks with authority: “Tabitha, get up.” And she does. This is more than a miracle story—it’s a radical message: Life is not the opposite of death. Life is the reality that renders death unreal.
Mary Baker Eddy writes, “The understanding that Life is God, Spirit, lengthens our days by strengthening our trust in the deathless reality of Life, its almightiness and immortality” (Science and Health, p. 487). That kind of Life is never scarce. Never gone. Never up for negotiation.
So why do we keep living like we’re parched?
Maybe because we've been taught to earn what’s already ours. Maybe because we think “spirituality” requires effort, when it actually requires surrender. Or maybe—like the woman at the well—we’re staring at the well and missing the source.
Jesus says, “The water I give will become in you a spring... gushing up to eternal life.” That’s not a once-a-week refill. That’s a full-on internal aquifer.
And that’s the real flip: Life isn’t something out there. It’s not a finish line. It’s not a reward. It’s the well you’re standing on.
The invitation is still open.
Come as you are.
No bucket needed.
_Blessed are those who trust in the Lord
-
Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord.
They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.”
The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”
Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?
Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her,
“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty.
The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”
