God desires to relate to us in ways we can understand. He knows us, even more than we know ourselves. It is interesting to observe the many ways that God taps into our human experience so we can relate to Him.
Scripture uses the imagery of hunger and thirst to demonstrate the intensity of our longing for God and satisfaction.
Psalm 107:9
For He has satisfied the thirsty soul, And the hungry soul He has filled with what is good.
There are lots of creative ideas built on physical hunger and thirst. Nutrition, taste, color, presentation, and texture all contribute to our desire. Think about your favorite recipe and what makes it special to you.
We search for and find recipes to create new ways to satisfy our hunger and thirst. Recipes are a step-by-step process, a creation. We can’t read and follow the first two lines of a recipe and skip to the last two lines and get the same result as following each step in the correct order.
Our lives are also a process. As we go through new and old, different and same, creative and routine circumstances, we practice turning to God, praising Him and trusting His process in our life.
Jesus related physical thirst to spiritual life when He talked to the woman at the well. She understood His analogy and found satisfaction for her thirst.
John 4:13-15
Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again;14 but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.” 15 The woman said to Him, “Sir, give me this water, so I will not be thirsty nor come all the way here to draw.”
In nature, a spring occurs when an aquifer is filled to the point that the water overflows onto the land surface. Jesus, the living water, fills us to the point that He overflows onto others. Only in Jesus are we satisfied and overflowing.