Streams of Living Water
Good morning! It’s great to see you here this morning! I know we still have some people taking advantage of Spring Break, so welcome to those of you watching online, as well. You may not know this, but on any given Sunday we have people watching our service from all over the United States and even in other countries from time to time. It’s a good reminder that the Gospel is not limited by the boundaries that we tend to think of. It can unite us across geographical, cultural, and language barriers. This past week was a great reminder of that for a few of us who had the opportunity to go to Brooklyn and serve City Life Church. We were able to worship with them on Sunday. It’s a church about our size, and they have an active hearing-impaired ministry, numerous nationalities represented, and more than half of their congregation attends their Spanish service.
They also have a Christian School, and our students were able to be in the classrooms on Monday and Tuesday helping the teachers and loving on the kids, and we were able to serve the teachers and staff lunch, which was a big deal for them because they don’t typically get a break at all during the day. And, as we walked around the city, we were able to pray with some people on the streets and hand out care packages that included a Bible, a blanket, and some other necessities.
Thank you for praying for our team and those who even gave financially to help make the trip possible for our students to go! We look forward to going back in the future and continuing the partnership. As you can imagine, ministry and even life as a Christian in New York is difficult, and it can feel very isolating due to the volume of people, extreme diversity, and demanding living conditions. But City Life Church, along with several others in the area, is working hard to be a light in the city, and they are making an impact in their community….it’s a great example of the 3D Living we’ve been talking about for the past few weeks. And, because of the tough environment where a lot of the comforts we know are stripped away, being there was a reminder for me that living as a disciple of Jesus is not something we can do on our own. We need Christian community, but we especially need the power of the Holy Spirit.
If we’re not careful, we can approach the three D’s (discover, deepen, display) like they’re just checkboxes….read the Bible, spend a few minutes in prayer, go to a small group, attend church, serve, give,..and all those things are right and good, but if we are doing them by our own power, then they will be fruitless. It will be like trying to grow a garden without water. And my guess is that you’ve felt like that at one point or another. You’ve felt dry and fruitless…. like all the life has been sucked out of you. Even if you’re trying to do the right things, you’ve felt the thirst for something more.
We’ve all been there because of the broken world that we live in, the spiritual enemy that rules the darkness, and even our own sins that beat us down. Those things aren’t life-giving, they are life-taking. But the good news is there is life-giving water available to us through Jesus, who gives us his spirit. The Holy Spirit is the essential part of 3D Living that we can’t overlook. The Spirit is what allows us to live a fruitful life, no matter what city or circumstance we find ourselves in. The Spirit is the difference between sipping from the fountain and swimming in the river.
To better understand this, we’re going to look at several passages of Scripture today, but before we get there, I want to introduce a theme that exists in Scripture starting at creation in Genesis 1. The Bible says that, "darkness covered the surface of the watery depths, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.” The ancient world would have understood the waters here to represent chaos, a lack of order. But as God creates, all of that chaos is brought into order as each element takes on its place and function, and notice that the Spirit of God is there, present in the entire work.
As we get to Chapter 2, Adam and Eve are in the garden, and there is an eastward-flowing river that waters the garden. This river allows the plants and animals to grow and thrive. It’s not chaos, it’s order and life. This is where God walks with Adam and Eve, and the water represents his life-giving presence.
In chapter 3, Adam and Eve sin, and God sends them out of the garden….to the east, which is important because, remember, the river is flowing east. In other words, God sends them out of the garden, but he’s not completely abandoning them.
As we move through the Bible, this imagery continues to weave its way through the story. The Israelites have several key encounters with water as they travel through the desert…passing through rivers and even drinking water from a rock.
As you get into the wisdom literature and the prophets, this theme continues. Psalm 1 says that the one who delights in the Lord is, “like a tree planted beside flowing streams
that bears its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
Whatever he does prospers.”
Isaiah 55 offers an invitation to come to the water and describes the life that will follow. There is similar imagery in Proverbs, Amos, and more. But perhaps the most explicit description of the living water is given in Ezekiel 47. This is a vision that God gave Ezekiel, and if you have your Bible, you can turn there (it’s in the OT, 7 books after Psalms), and we’ll also have it on the screen.
Chapter 47 picks up in the middle of the vision where God has been showing Ezekiel a whole series of things about his people and his coming Kingdom. He takes him to the temple in Jerusalem, and God shows Ezekiel that there’s water flowing out of the temple toward the east. Sound familiar? The water runs down the steps and out through the gate. Then, he leads Ezekiel into the water and starts measuring the depth of the water. It starts ankle deep, but the further they get from the temple, the deeper the water gets, and until finally, it gets so deep Ezekiel can’t touch the bottom, he has to swim. We’ll pick up there in verse 6.
6 He asked me, “Do you see this, son of man?” Then he led me back to the bank of the river. 7 When I had returned, I saw a very large number of trees along both sides of the riverbank. 8 He said to me, “This water flows out to the eastern region and goes down to the Arabah. When it enters the sea, the sea of foul water, the water of the sea becomes fresh. 9 Every kind of living creature that swarms will live wherever the river flows, and there will be a huge number of fish because this water goes there. Since the water will become fresh, there will be life everywhere the river goes.…. 12 All kinds of trees providing food will grow along both banks of the river. Their leaves will not wither, and their fruit will not fail. Each month they will bear fresh fruit because the water comes from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be used for eating and their leaves for healing.”
At this time, God dwelled in the temple. His presence was manifested on the mercy seat in the Holy of Holies. So, the river flowing out of the Tabernacle represented God’s presence flowing and growing as it moves east! And wherever his presence flows, there is life! Ezekiel sees life flourishing around the water….animals swarming, people fishing, an abundance of trees…there’s fruit to eat and leaves that heal! It’s a vision that alluded to the Garden in Revelation 2 and John’s vision of heaven in Revelation 22, and it showed that God was going to reclaim the wasteland and return it to its Eden-like state.
I don’t know about you, but this stirs something within me. I want to go to the water. I want to experience the abundant life. It makes me think of some of the natural springs we have in Florida. My family likes to go to Kelly Rock Springs and float down the river. It has beautiful, crystal-clear water with lush vegetation. We’ve seen butterflies, birds, deer, otters, raccoons, and snakes…. It feels like an oasis; sometimes, it doesn’t seem real.
When we read this vision in Ezekiel, it almost seems unreal…like just a vision…a mirage instead of a reality…. But guess what? This imagery doesn’t stop with the Old Testament prophets. Let’s flip over to John 7.
In John 7, Jesus is in Jerusalem for the Feast of Booths. This was an important holiday for the Jewish people. They would travel to Jerusalem and sleep in tents for an entire week. It was a Feast that God instituted as a celebration of his provision and presence with them through the wilderness years and as an anticipation of the coming Messiah who would come to dwell (tabernacle) with his people. What’s interesting is that on the last day of the feast, all the people would gather at the temple and the priests would bring water from the Pool of Siloam and pour it down the steps of the temple. This represented an outpouring of the Spirit of God just like in Ezekiel’s vision. So, keep that context in mind as Jesus speaks in John 7.
37 "On the last and most important day of the festival, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. 38 The one who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, will have streams of living water flow from deep within him.” 39 He said this about the Spirit. Those who believed in Jesus were going to receive the Spirit…”
This is an incredible claim by Jesus! He is identifying as the Messiah and claiming to have the Spirit of God pouring out of him like the living water from Ezekiel’s vision. But, what’s also incredible is that he says anyone who believes in him will have that same living water flowing out of them because they will receive the Spirit of God within them!
Later in John’s gospel, Jesus taught his disciples that he would be going away, but would send them a helper, the Holy Spirit, to live with them forever….Jesus said, ”he remains with you and will be in you.” In Romans 8, the apostle Pauls says, “9 You, however, are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you.”
This is a powerful and yet often overlooked teaching of Jesus and the Bible, and a lot of us don’t know how to respond to teaching about the Holy Spirit, or talk of the Holy Spirit, because it just seems a little too weird or dangerous. And that’s largely because we’ve seen some weird things on TV, or heard some far-out stories, or maybe even had a personal experience that was manipulative or even abusive in the name of the Spirit. That’s terribly unfortunate and is evidence of our sinful flesh and how our enemy loves to take a gift from God (just like sex, power, money, and relationships), and distort it into something self-centered and antithetical to God’s Kingdom. And, just like with these other gifts that get distorted, we can allow some bad teaching or a bad experience to give us a cynical view of the Holy Spirit and in an effort to be “safe,” we can miss out on the greatest gift God has for us.
That’s exactly what happened when Jesus spoke in John 7. What he said was controversial, and it divided the crowd. Some believed Jesus, and others wanted to arrest him, but they didn’t really know what to do, so they just went home. I think if we’re not careful, we, too, can hear this message, be intrigued by it, but then just go home. I hope that’s not what happens today, so if you’re open to it, I want to give you three things to consider about the Holy Spirit and the living water that flows through Scripture.
The first thing to point out is The Invitation.
In Ezekiel’s vision, notice that God didn’t just show him the vision, he led Ezekiel directly into the water….into the deep water, where he had to swim. That was a physical picture of the invitation that’s extended to us. Earlier I mentioned Isaiah 55 which says,
“Come, everyone who is thirsty,
come to the water…”
Jesus said in John 7:37, “If anyone is thirsty let him come to me and drink.”
This water is exquisite, but not exclusive. There is an open invitation for anyone to come and drink. The only qualifier is that you have to be thirsty. In other words, you have to know you need the water. In 1994, Italian marathoner, Mauro Prosperi, was competing in the 156-mile Marathon of the Sands in the Sahara desert. The first 3 days were going great, but on day 4, a strong sand storm took Prosperi unknowingly off course. He continued running, but when the storm finally passed, he realized he was lost in the desert. Wanting to keep moving, he eventually stumbled upon an abandoned Muslim shrine and took shelter there for several days. By this point he was so thirsty, that began sucking on wet wipes to get any moisture he could, he licked the dew off of rocks, he drank his own urine, and even drank the blood from bats he found living in the shrine. Convinced he was going to die, he attempted to take his own life, but he was too dehydrated to bleed out. Miraculously, after 9 days in the desert, Prosperi did eventually find a village and was rescued.
Without Jesus, we are just like Mauro Prosperi. We are walking through the desert and desperate for something to drink, desperate for water to satisfy our souls, and we will try anything to quench our thirst. But just like Prosperi, it’s never enough. The money is never enough, the travel is never enough, the experiences, and pleasures are never enough… King David cried out to God with this need in Psalm 63:1,
“God, you are my God; I eagerly seek you.
I thirst for you;
my body faints for you
in a land that is dry, desolate, and without water.
We are living in a dry and desolate place, and there is only one person who can quench our thirst. Thankfully, we have an open invitation to drink from the living water! If you’ve been drinking from all the wrong places, then I want to encourage you to come to Jesus. His invitation is clear, and it’s also backed up with a promise.
In Acts 2, when Peter is preaching at Pentecost, he said,
38 “Repent and be baptized, each of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 For the promise is for you…
Again, we see the invitation, but then there’s The Promise to receive the Holy Spirit.
The gift of the Spirit is a promise made to all who put their trust in Jesus. There’s no other special condition required, no waiting period to pass, no level of maturity to attain,…you believe, you receive. If we’re honest, this is where we start to doubt because it seems that if the Spirit is living inside of us, we should feel it…and we don’t always feel it. But that has everything to do with us, not God. We have to learn to attune our hearts to the Spirit and to be mindful of his presence. It is a practice that we can learn and grow in, just like all acts of obedience to God. We could do a whole teaching series on the Holy Spirit and we don’t have nearly enough time to get into the full work of the Spirit today, but what I want us to walk away with is a firm belief in the promise and presence of the Spirit of God in the life of a believer. Because, if we don’t at least have that, there will always be a felt and perceived distance between us and God. It’ll be like we’re here and he’s there…and in order to experience his peace or gain his wisdom or show his love or anything else, we have to somehow figure out how to tap into his power, like we’re using dial-up internet and we’re just hoping we can get a good connection… But that’s not what Scripture teaches us.
John 4:14 says, “ But whoever drinks from the water that I will give him will never get thirsty again. In fact, the water I will give him will become a well of water springing up in him for eternal life.”
We don’t just get one stop at the fountain (like waiting in line at Disney). Jesus says we will never thirst again and that the water will flow from within us, and that’s because of the Spirit’s presence inside of us. His presence is real inside of us, and if that’s true, it also means (third point) that His Power is real inside of us
In Acts 1, Jesus is speaking to his disciples right before he ascends to heaven, and he says in verse 8, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
The fact that we have the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives means we also have his power! It’s the same power that turned water into wine, it’s the same power that multiplied the fish and loaves to feed thousands, it’s the same power that healed the blind, and it’s the same power that conquered the grave! …But how often do our lives reflect that?
It doesn’t do any good to try and be a disciple of Jesus by our own power. It’s like Bruce Banner without the power of the Hulk. We can go through the same motions, we can even paint ourselves green, but we’re not going to accomplish much.
Again, we don’t have time to get into all the ways the Spirit’s power works in us, but from a high-level view, theologian Wayne Grudem says, “The work of the Holy Spirit is to manifest the active presence of God in the world, and especially in the church”….and I would add, in our lives. In other words, the Holy Spirit takes the work and power of God and makes it a known and felt reality. That doesn’t mean we turn into superheroes, but it does mean things happen in our lives that would happen otherwise. We can feel what God feels, desire what He desires, do what he wants, speak by his power, pray and minister in his strength, and know with the knowledge that he gives.
And we see that played out in the book of Acts and the rest of the New Testament after the Spirit comes. Acts 2 says,
4 Then they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them…
43 Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and signs were being performed through the apostles. 44 Now all the believers were together and held all things in common. 45 They sold their possessions and property and distributed the proceeds to all, as any had need…..They ate their food with joyful and sincere hearts, 47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. Every day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.
That’s not normal human behavior…that’s Spirit-empowered behavior. To me, that sounds a lot like the scene of abundant life in Ezekiel’s vision, and I believe this is the kind of work God still wants to do in and through us. That doesn’t mean we’re going to see all the same miracles and works in the same way that the apostles did, but the Spirit of God should still be at work in us. The river that winds through Scripture and represents the life-giving presence and power of God should flow directly through and from the heart of every believer.
City Awakening, Jesus has invited us to the water and given us the power of life in us. And, if we’re ever going to see a city awakening, then we’re going to have to let that water well up from deep within and overflow to the people around us. But I’m afraid that either in our ignorance, fear, or lack of faith, we’re going to miss out on all he has for us.
One thing that I’ve realized in my own life is that the times that I’ve been least joyful are the times that I forget or struggle to believe in the Spirit’s presence and power in my life. It’s when I allow my circumstances, my sin, and my desire for comfort and control to cut off the flow of the well within me. It’s like author and pastor Tyler Staton says, “Instead of storming this river like kids on the first hot day of summer, we do our best to manage the chaos of our lives on our own, constantly reorganizing our circumstances, forever convinced that we can plan and life-hack our way to peace. We’re managing from the riverbank instead of wading in. But we haven’t been invited to observe the river; we’re invited to swim.”
History is filled with people who jumped in and swam.
Hudson Taylor moved to China in 1853. After immersing himself in the culture, he started the China Inland Mission which was responsible for bringing over 800 missionaries to China, started 125 schools, and led to over 20,000 conversions.
George Muller was an evangelist in England who had a heart for orphans. Throughout his lifetime, he cared for more than 10,000 orphans and started 117 schools.
Adonira Judson was one of the first missionaries to Burma. It took him 12 years to see just 18 converts to Christianity, and at one point he spent 20 months in prison. But by the end of his life, he had translated the entire Bible to Burmese and helped start over 100 churches, which led to more than 8,000 believers.
These are just a few ordinary people who showed what can happen when we give room for the Spirit of God to work in and through us. This past week, I even saw some ordinary teenagers allow the Spirit to work through them by just saying yes and being available.
The Big Idea of the message is that the Spirit of God is a river that flows from within the heart of every believer and has the power to produce life wherever it goes. The question is, will it flow through you? We are a people traveling east of Eden, in the wilderness, but Jesus has made it possible for us to get back to the garden where John tells us in Revelation 22, that there will be “the river of the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 down the middle of the city’s main street. The tree of life [is] on each side of the river, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree are for healing the nations, 3 and there will no longer be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will worship him.
We can be a conduit of living water wherever we go. We can be a source of life to our city if we allow the Spirit to work in and through us. Let’s be an Acts 2 church that meets together, prays together, gives as there’s need, and because of our joyful and sincere hearts, has the favor of the people around us. Let’s pray God would pour out his Spirit on us, and we would be a place of abundant life!
