“The woman said to him, ‘Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep.  Where do you get that living water?'”  (ESV – Read the chapter)

Put yourself in the shoes of the woman at the well for a moment.  Jesus was offering her something which sounded way too good to be true.  Even thinking literally, this was the case.  She thought Jesus was talking about a literal kind of water that you could drink and never be thirsty again.  Spiritually, it sounds even better.  But, as good as it sounded–or rather, because it sounded so very good–she did not believe it was really something He could do.  How often have we been in the same kind of place?

How often have we been in the place where we honestly don’t believe God can do in us what He has promised He would if only we will let Him?  We hear that He wants to bless us with abundance beyond imagining.  What we accept from Him, though, is only what we can manage to achieve under our own power.  In doing this, we limit the power of God in our lives.

Think for a minute about what Jesus accomplished during His earthly ministry.  He turned water into wine.  He fed 5,000 men (and likely many thousands of women and children) with a few small loaves and fish.  He had a conversation with saints who had been dead for centuries.  He raised the dead to life again.  He healed diseases of all kinds and origins.  He walked on water and quieted a raging storm.  The plain truth is that He is almighty.  There are no limits to what He can accomplish in our lives if we are willing to stay out of His way and receive it.

But then, like the woman at the well, we say, “But the well is deep.”  What we mean is that we cannot imagine accomplishing such things as He is proposing on our own, so how could He accomplish them either?  Such a heart cannot receive the depths of what God desires to accomplish in us because it does not believe He can do them.  More precisely, we believe He needs our well, our abilities, to accomplish them, and we don’t believe our abilities are sufficient to the task.  Yet, if it is something He is accomplishing, while He certainly desires to work in and through us, it is not our power and abilities that He will be using to get the job done.  It will be His.  And His are unlimited.

Let us not be like the people of Capernaum whose unbelief resulted in a limitation of Jesus’ ability to do many miracles in their midst.  Let us instead heed the assurance the angel Gabriel gave to Mary: With God, all things are possible.  Now, this isn’t a basis for some kind of a blank check or name-it-and-claim-it theology, but rather an assurance that if God intends to accomplish something in or through us, there is no limitation to His ability to do so.  Let us not stand in His way.