Hydrate or Die-drate

Anybody who's spent enough time around athletes has probably heard some version of “hydrate or die drate.” It's funny until you've watched somebody try to practice in the heat after barely drinking anything all day. Athletes know hydration isn't something you think about only after your body starts shutting down. If you wait until you're completely depleted to decide water might be important, you've already made the job a whole lot harder.

I think there's a pretty strong spiritual comparison there, but we have to be careful with it because Jesus isn't giving hydration advice in John 4, and the “living water” He offers isn't a command to spiritually recharge ourselves every day so we don't run empty. What Jesus is talking about is much bigger than that.

In John 4, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at Jacob's well and asks her for a drink. That conversation would've already crossed some serious social and religious boundaries because He was a Jewish man speaking publicly with a Samaritan woman, and the relationship between Jews and Samaritans carried generations of hostility. As their conversation develops, Jesus takes something completely ordinary, physical water, and uses it to show her that she has a much deeper need.

John 4:13 through 14 (ESV) says, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again.” Jesus continues by saying, “The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

That's where we need to get the theology right. Jesus isn't saying Christians need to repeatedly receive salvation because our spiritual tank keeps running empty. The living water He gives leads to eternal life, and later in John's Gospel, Jesus again uses living water imagery in connection with the Holy Spirit. John 7:38 through 39 makes that connection clear. Salvation isn't something we keep losing because we missed Bible study for a few days, and Jesus isn't offering a temporary spiritual boost that needs to be constantly refilled.

What He is saying should hit us harder than that because we spend an incredible amount of our lives trying to satisfy a thirst that the things of this world can't permanently satisfy.

Athletes should understand this because sports can make you thirsty for more in a hurry. You want the starting position, and then you get it and want the scholarship. You get recruited and want to play immediately. You start playing and want the award. You get the award and want more recognition. You want more followers, more attention, a bigger role, better stats, another win, another offer, another person telling you how good you are, and somehow the thing you were positive would finally make you feel satisfied becomes normal about five minutes after you get it.

That's what temporary water does. You drink it, and eventually you're thirsty again.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to accomplish something in sports. I want athletes who are hungry, competitive, and willing to work their butts off for something difficult. Chase the scholarship. Fight for the starting position. Train to become great at what you do. Want the ball when the match gets tight and don't apologize for wanting to win, but you'd better understand that none of those things were designed to carry the weight of your identity, purpose, or worth.

If volleyball is where you're going to get your worth, you're going to need volleyball to keep proving you're worthy. If recognition is where you're getting your confidence, you're going to need people to keep recognizing you. If winning is what makes you feel valuable, losing is eventually going to make you question your value. That's an exhausting way to live because you're asking temporary things to satisfy something they were never capable of satisfying.

That's why the conversation in John 4 matters so much. Jesus isn't telling the Samaritan woman to try harder to become spiritually fulfilled. He's telling her that what she actually needs is something only He can give.

That should create some conviction for Christian athletes because sometimes we say Jesus is enough while living like everything else has to go right before we're okay. We say our identity is in Christ, but our entire mood changes based on our playing time. We say we trust God, but a bad match can wreck us for three days. We say sports aren't everything, but getting benched feels like our whole world is falling apart. We say we don't care what everybody thinks, then check our phones every ten minutes to see who liked the post.

At some point, we've got to be honest about what we're actually drinking from.

The Samaritan woman came to the well because she was physically thirsty, but Jesus knew there was a much deeper story standing in front of Him. As their conversation continues, He exposes parts of her life she hadn't volunteered, including her history of relationships, and yet He doesn't walk away from her. He leads the conversation toward who He is, and in John 4:26 (ESV), Jesus tells her, “I who speak to you am he.”

That's the center of this story. The answer to her thirst wasn't becoming more religious, cleaning herself up enough, finding better circumstances, or finally getting her life together. The answer was standing in front of her.

Jesus.

That's why I wouldn't tell athletes that we have to keep “drinking from the living water of salvation” as though salvation is something we repeatedly refill. Once we belong to Christ, spiritual disciplines such as prayer, Scripture, worship, Christian community, confession, and obedience matter tremendously, but they don't keep Jesus alive inside of us. They help us know Him, follow Him, obey Him, and grow in our faith.

There's a big difference between earning spiritual life and living from the spiritual life Christ has already given.

For athletes, I think the hydration comparison still works if we use it correctly. You wouldn't expect your body to perform well if you consistently ignored what it needed, and you shouldn't expect a strong relationship with God while giving Him whatever scraps of your attention happen to be left after everything else gets done. If you have time for hours of practice, lifting, film, TikTok, Snapchat, Netflix, gaming, and scrolling but somehow can't find ten minutes to open Scripture or pray, that's not really a time problem.

That's a priority problem.

And before somebody turns this into another checklist, reading your Bible for ten minutes doesn't earn you points with God. Prayer isn't a streak you maintain so God will bless your season, and going to FCA doesn't make you spiritually mature just because you showed up. You can sit in church every week, post Scripture every morning, wear a cross around your neck, and still give Jesus very little authority over the way you actually live.

The question isn't whether you have enough Christian stuff around you. The question is whether Christ actually has you.

If He does, that should eventually show up somewhere. It should show up in how you treat teammates when you're frustrated, how you respond to coaching when your pride gets hit, what you do when nobody is watching, how you handle success without becoming full of yourself, and how you handle disappointment without letting sports tell you that you've lost your worth. Following Jesus doesn't mean you'll never struggle with those things, but it does mean you can't keep surrendering every part of your life except the ones you don't want Him touching.

So yes, hydrate or die drate. Drink your water, take care of your body, and don't show up to practice completely depleted because you ignored something you knew you needed.

But when it comes to your soul, understand that Jesus is offering something infinitely bigger than another way to feel better when you're running low. He's not one more source of temporary satisfaction alongside sports, success, relationships, attention, and achievement. He's the source of eternal life, and John 4 makes it pretty clear that everything else eventually leaves us thirsty again.

The harder question isn't whether you're thirsty. We all are.

The question is what you keep running to when you are, because whatever you're expecting to satisfy you is going to tell you a whole lot about what you're actually trusting.