The woman said, “Sir, you don’t even have a bucket to draw with, and this well is deep. So how are you going to get this ‘living water’?  John 4:11 MSG¹

Read John 4:1-42

One day, as Jesus was traveling through the land of Samaria, “wearied as He was from His journey, [He sat] beside [a] well … A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, ‘Give Me a drink’” (John 4:6-7). The woman was shocked that He, “a Jew, [would] ask for a drink from [her], a woman of Samaria” (John 4:9). It was socially unacceptable. But Jesus was trying to get this woman to focus, not on the physical realm of life, but the spiritual. So, He continued, “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” (John 4:10). The woman, again physically focused, said, “Sir, you don’t even have a bucket” (John 4:11).

Imagine telling the One who created water and spoke it into existence, the One who could have, then and there, called forth a river to flow out of a nearby rock, that He could not come up with water. Imagine limiting the Limitless One to a bucket. But that is exactly what each of us does when we see only the physical boundaries before us.

It wasn’t that this woman was unspiritual that she wasn’t looking past the physical. She immediately “perceived that [Jesus was] a prophet” (John 4:14). This fact was something the Pharisees and other Jewish religious leaders often missed. She knew her spiritual ancestry saying, “‘Our fathers worshiped on this mountain’” (John 4:20). She could speak intelligently about differences in Samaritan and Jewish beliefs about where to properly worship God (see John 4:20). She was even looking for the coming Christ. She confessed to Jesus, “‘I know that Messiah is coming … When He comes, He will tell us all things’” (John 4:25).

Yet, the Messiah was sitting in front of her, speaking directly to her, and she couldn’t see Him. Her spiritual eyes were not in focus yet. Maybe it was the chaos in her physical world that overshadowed what was happening around her in the spiritual world. We get a little insight into her physical world when Jesus asks her to, “‘Go, call your husband … The woman [answered] Him, ‘I have no husband’” (John 4:16-17). Jesus then “said to her, ‘You are right in saying, “I have no husband”; for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband’” (John 4:18).

Even by today’s standards, this is a lot of baggage. At worst, this woman was very immoral. At best, she was incredibly unlucky in love. But that was in the physical world. Seeing this woman through the eyes of the spiritual world paints a very different picture.

Her messed up physical world became a segue for many in her town to enter the spiritual world. “The woman … went away into the town and said to the people, ‘Come, see a Man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?’ [The townspeople] went out of the town and [came] to [Jesus] … Many Samaritans from that town believed in Him because of the woman’s testimony, ‘He told me all that I ever did.’ … The Samaritans … asked [Jesus] to stay with them, and He stayed there two days. And many more believed because of His word. They said to the woman, ‘It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world’” (John 4:29-30, 39-42).

This woman, who “came out to draw water” (John 4:7) “about the sixth hour” (John 4:6b), or noon, presumably to avoid the condemning looks and words of the townspeople, overcame her desire to remain solitary and led those same people to the Savior of the world. She did this because her eyes were opened to the spiritual world. It no longer mattered what they thought of her. It didn’t matter that they had looked down on her. All that mattered was she had found the Messiah, and she just had to share Him with others.

What about you? Do you have a tendency to focus most on the physical world? Do God’s promises seem impossible because of some physical limitation? The spiritual world is just as real as the physical world. Pray for eyes to see the spiritual world. And pray for eyes to see others as God sees them. You never know who could be a spiritual success in a physical mess. Maybe it could be you.

¹Scripture quotations marked MSG are from The Message. Copyright 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002, by NavPress Publishing Group. All Scriptures in this article are taken from the Message.