Living Water

Look away now if you're planning to be at Holy Trinity, Eastbourne on the evening of Sun 26th Oct as d.v. I'll be preaching John 4 and I wouldn't want to steal my own thunder.

I've listened to a few online sermons in preparation. Andrew Towner (Co-Mission website) and Jonathan Fletcher (Emmanuel Wimbeldon) both quote this striking passage from Malcolm Muggeridge:

I may, I suppose, regard myself, or pass for being, a relatively successful man.
People occasionally stare at me in the streets—that's fame. I can fairly easily
earn enough to qualify for admission to the higher slopes of the Inland
Revenue—that's success. Furnished with money and a little fame even the elderly,
if they care to, may partake of trendy diversions—that's pleasure. It might
happen once in a while that something I said or wrote was sufficiently heeded
for me to persuade myself that it represented a serious impact on our
time—that's fulfilment. Yet I say to you, and I beg you to believe me, multiply
these tiny triumphs by a million, add them all together, and they are
nothing—less than nothing, a positive impediment—measured against one draught of
that living water Christ offers to the spiritually thirsty, irrespective of who
or what they are. What, I ask myself, does life hold, what is there in the works
of time, in the past, now and to come, which could possibly be put in the
balance against the refreshment of drinking that water?

Sermon delivered at Queen's Cross Church, Aberdeen, 26th May 1968, reprinted in Jesus Rediscovered (Garden City NY, Doubleday, 1969) pp76-82 and also in Seeing Through the Eye: Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith edited by Cecil Kuhne (Ignatius, 2005) 'Living Water' p97