J. C. Ryle - The Remedy

a. He who thirsts and wants relief, must come to Christ Himself. He must not be content with coming to His church and His ordinances, or to the assemblies of His people for prayer and praise. He must not stop short even at His holy table, or rest satisfied with privately opening his heart to His ordained ministers. Oh, no! He who is content with only drinking these waters 'shall thirst again' (John 4:13). He must go higher, further, much further than this. He must have personal dealings with Christ Himself: all else in religion is worthless without Him. The King's palace, the attendant servants, the richly furnished house, the very banquet itself — all are nothing unless we speak with the King Himself. His hand alone can take the burden off our backs and make us feel free. The hand of man may take the stone from the grave and show the dead; but none but Jesus can say to the dead, 'Come forth and live!' (John 11:41-43). We must deal directly with Christ.

b. He who thirsts and wants relief from Christ, must actually come to Him. It is not enough to wish and talk and mean and intend and resolve and hope. Hell, that dreadful reality, is truly said to be paved with good intentions. Thousands are yearly lost in this fashion, and perish miserably just outside the harbor. Meaning and intending they live; meaning and intending they die. Oh, no! We must 'arise and come!' If the prodigal son had been content with saying, 'How many hired servants of my father have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! I hope some day to return home', he might have remained forever among the swine. It was when he arose and came to his father, that his father ran to meet him, and said, 'Bring forth the best robe and put it on him ... Let us eat and be merry!' (Luke 15:20-23). Like him, we must not only 'come to ourselves' and think, but we must actually come to the High Priest, to Christ. We must come to the Physician.

c. He who thirsts and wants to come to Christ, must remember that simple faith is the one thing required. By all means let him come with a penitent, broken and contrite heart; but let him not dream of resting on that for acceptance. Faith is the only hand that can carry the living water to our lips. Faith is the hinge on which all turns in the matter of our justification. It is written again and again that 'whoever believes shall not perish — but have eternal life' (John 3:15, 16). 'To him that works not — but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness' (Romans 4:5). Happy is he who can lay hold on the principle laid down in that matchless hymn:

"Just as I am, without one plea,
But that Your blood was shed for me,
And that You bid'st me come to Thee,
O Lamb of God, I come!"

How simple this remedy for thirst appears! But oh, how hard it is to persuade some people to receive it! Tell them to do some great thing, to mortify their bodies, to go on pilgrimage, to give all their goods to feed the poor and so to merit salvation, and they will try to do as they are bid. Tell them to throw overboard all idea of merit, working or doing, and to come to Christ as empty sinners, with nothing in their hands and, like Naaman, they are ready to turn away in disdain (2 Kings 5:12). Human nature is always the same in every age. There are still some people just like the Jews, and some like the Greeks. To the Jews, Christ crucified is still a stumbling-block, and to the Greeks foolishness. Their succession, at any rate, has never ceased! Never did our Lord say a truer word than that which He spoke to the proud scribes in the Sanhedrin, 'You will not come unto Me that you might have life' (John 5:40).

But, as simple as this remedy for thirst appears, it is the only cure for man's spiritual disease — and the only bridge from earth to Heaven. Kings and their subjects, preachers and hearers, masters and servants, high and low, rich and poor, learned and unlearned — all must alike drink of this water of life, and drink in the same way. For eighteen centuries men have labored to find some other medicine for weary consciences — but they have labored in vain. Thousands, after blistering their hands, and growing gray in hewing out 'broken cisterns which can hold no water' (Jeremiah 2:13), have been obliged to come back at last to the old Fountain, and have confessed in their latest moments that here, in Christ alone, is true peace.

And simple as the old remedy for thirst may appear, it is the root of the inward life of all God's greatest servants in all ages. What have the saints and martyrs been in every era of church history — but men who came to Christ daily by faith and found 'His flesh food indeed, and His blood drink indeed'? (John 6:55). What have they all been but men who lived the life of faith in the Son of God, and drank daily out of the fullness there is in Him? (Galatians 2:20). Here, at all events, the truest and best Christians, who have made a mark on the world, have been of one mind. Holy fathers and Reformers, holy Anglican divines and Puritans, holy Episcopalians and Nonconformists, have all in their best moments borne uniform testimony to the value of the Fountain of life. Separated and contentious as they may sometimes have been in their lives, in their deaths they have not been divided. In their last struggle with the king of terrors they have simply clung to the cross of Christ, and gloried in nothing but the 'precious blood,' and the Fountain open for all sin and uncleanness.

How thankful we ought to be that we live in a land where the great remedy for spiritual thirst is known, in a land of open Bibles, preached gospel, and abundant means of grace, in a land where the efficacy of Christ's sacrifice is still proclaimed, with more or less fullness, in twenty thousand pulpits every Sunday! We do not realize the value of our privileges. The very familiarity of the manna makes us think little of it, just as Israel loathed 'the light bread' in the wilderness (Num. 21:5). But turn to the pages of a heathen philosopher like the incomparable Plato, and see how he groped after light like one blindfolded, and wearied himself to find the door. The humblest peasant who grasps the four comfortable words of our beautiful communion service, in the Prayer Book, knows more of the way of peace with God than the Athenian sage. Turn to the accounts which trustworthy travelers and missionaries give of the state of the heathen who have never heard the gospel. Read of the human sacrifices in Africa, and the ghastly self-imposed tortures of the devotees of Hindostan, and remember they are all the result of an unquenched thirst and a blind and unsatisfied desire to get near to God. And then learn to be thankful that your lot is cast in a land like your own. Alas, I fear God has a controversy with us for our unthankfulness! Cold indeed, and dead, must that heart be which can study the condition of Africa, China and Hindostan, and not thank God that he lives in Christian England.

- J. C. Ryle (Holiness, Chapter 17: Thirst Relieved)