Streams of Living Water - Pentecost 2009
Isaiah 43:18-21 “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland. The wild animals honour me, the jackals and the owls, because I provide water in the desert and streams in the wasteland, to give drink to my people, my chosen, the people I formed for myself that they may proclaim my praise.
What a glorious promise of God’s blessing. Water in the desert and streams in the wasteland to give drink to God’s chosen people. Time and again water the Bible writers use water as a picture and a symbol of God’s provision and God’s rich blessings. Water bringing refreshment. Water bringing cleansing. Water bringing life.
Isaiah 44:3 For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour out my Spirit on your offspring, and my blessing on your descendants.
Isaiah 12:3 With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.
Isaiah 58:11 The LORD will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.
Psalm 36:8-9 They feast in the abundance of your house; you give them drink from your river of delights. For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light.
When you get hot and thirsty, the most important thing in life is to find a wonderful cooling refreshing lifesaving drink of water.
Psa 42:1 As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. 2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?
These verses remind me of the time in Uganda I went with John and Ann O’Connell to the baking hot dry dusty village of Ala. For them the nearest mud pool was a mile away but the nearest clean safe borehole water for drinking was a 20 mile round trip. They remind me of another very hot day another missionary home from Africa Robert took a little group of us up Snowdon the harder route along Crib Goch. Because he was used to being hot all day in Zaire it never occurred to Robert to suggest we took anything to drink with us. It’s a long way up. And it was very very hot! And especially in a hot land, it is important to have enough to drink!
So it is no surprise that Jesus also spoke of water as a symbol of God’s blessing.
At Jacob’s well Jesus said to the woman of Samaria John 4:10, 13-14 … “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” … “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst – NEVER, EVER, EVER thirst again. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
And today on Pentecost Sunday we celebrate God’s gift of that spring of water which wells up inside every believer, God the Holy Spirit living inside us!
John 7:37-39 On the last and greatest day of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive.
Streams of living water. A spring of water welling up to eternal life. We saw this morning how it is God the Holy Spirit who brings us all the blessings of salvation. In almost every respect the gift of salvation IS the gift of the Holy Spirit living within us. It is the power of the Holy Spirit which brings us to faith and repentance. Upon our faith and repentance God forgives our sins. With the barrier of sin removed, GOD HIMSELF, God the Holy Spirit comes and lives inside us – the almighty power of the Almighty God at work in you and me! The Holy Spirit teaches us about Jesus and helps us to pray. The Holy Spirit brings Christ’s resurrection life into our lives. God the Holy Spirit changes us to make us like Jesus – making us Holy. The Holy Spirit helps us continue God’s mission as witnesses to Jesus and the Holy Spirit continues God’s mission in signs and wonders. No wonder that when Jesus talked about the salvation God gives us he talked about a new life starting – a new birth. ALL these activities of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer together make up the new birth and the new life
Sadly not all Christians experience all these blessings all of the time. Sometimes it can seem as though the well has dried up. Our peace can disappear, our joy evaporate. Our Christian life can become dry and even lifeless.
There can be different reasons for this.
Jer 2:13 “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.
Imagine living in a hot country like Uganda – or Israel! You’re bound to get very thirsty. We all need 6 pints a day just to stay healthy. If you need water you could dig a big hole in the ground to catch the rain, patch the sides up with mud to stop leaks and drink the rainwater that has collected and stood there over the months. The problem with that kind of water tank is that the water is always cloudy and tastes muddy. More than that, in dry weather they have a habit of springing leaks and letting you down when you need them most.
Or of course, where it is available, you could always take your water from the same fresh spring that your village has always drunk from, a cool refreshing, never-failing stream of life-giving water. You have your choice - build a water-tank, or drink from the spring? Only an idiot would refuse to drink from the spring if it was available. Only an idiot would reject a spring and build a water tank instead - but that was what the Israelites in Jeremiah’s time were doing!!!
And that is what so many people in the world have chosen to do! Our own nation, once so strongly influenced by the church and the gospel, has turned away from God to substitutes, just as Gemma was telling us this morning. Substitutes like money or relationships or careers – or chocolate. So many of our neighbours and friends think they don’t need God, they can get by on their own. When we offer them living waters they would rather have the latest brand of fizzy drink which rots away teeth and guts but at least it comes in a nice pretty bottle!
Sometimes even Christians too can turn away from the springs of living waters. Perhaps the first water tanks the Israelites built were to collect and store up water from the spring, “just in case the spring ever runs dry.” So they began to live on yesterday’s water and last week’s water - instead of today’s fresh supply. And Christians can so easily do that - living on yesterday’s experience, last week’s blessing, last year’s encounter with God, instead of drinking fresh every day from the springs of living water. Personal prayer and Bible study and regular worship and fellowship aren’t optional extras for Christians - without FRESH water we become parched and sick and eventually die.
On the other hand, some Christians get lazy. Instead of going to the springs themselves, drinking straight from the life-giving streams, they are content to let somebody else go to the stream and draw the water and bottle it up for them and sell it to them. So some Christians rely on other people’s experiences of God instead of their own, kept barely alive by an occasional blessed thought from one of today’s celebrity preachers, but too lazy to open their Bibles or get face-to-face with God in prayer and drink for themselves.
But then Israel’s second sin was just as fatal
They have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.
So many people today are building their own water tanks - satisfying themselves with polluted muddy stale water. All the false gods of the New Age movement.The false gods of Money and consumerism with their Temples at Lakeside and Blue Water (how curious that they should both incorporate the imagery of water in their names). So many other Temples now open 24 hours a day to satisfy the desires of people who think they need to spend, spend, spend. And there is the false god of Entertainment, with not only television but now the Internet to distract people for hours on end from the important things in life. So many designer drinks which leave people even thirstier than they were before, and distracting them from seeking out the LIVING waters!
We Christians are not immune to these temptations. Are we really always thirsting after righteousness, or do we compromise when it comes to holiness because a part of us is also thirsty for popularity or success or wealth or entertainment. We should be entirely satisfied drinking from the spring of living waters - so satisfied that we don’t need ANYTHING else to quench our thirsts!
Jeremiah 2:13 “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.
Israel’s two sins – are these ever our sins too? You remember that advert ? “It’s the real thing?” One of the top 3 best known brand names in the world!! Coca cola. And do you remember the outcry when it became public that because of the pressures of advertising mothers in the Third World were feeding their tiny babies on coca cola instead of on milk. Because Coca Cola ISNT the real thing. Only milk will help tiny babies grow. For them only milk is the real thing. For human beings , only God is the real thing! The springs of living water welling up to eternal life! That’s the real thing!
Even Christians can turn away from God and look to substitutes for the streams of living waters. But there are two other ways we can end up missing out on the blessings God has for us, and to explain these I draw upon our family’s unfortunate experiences with our water pipes. Not once but twice, in two separate manses, the water supplies have failed – and these events hold lessons for us all. Back in Queens Gardens in Tunbridge Wells we lived as the last house in a very secluded private drive probably a hundred yards from the road. The house was lovely but quite old. And the water pressure was appalling. On a bad day it could take half an hour to fill the cistern upstairs. On a very bad day it would take five minutes to fill a kettle in the kitchen. So to the not so great delight of our neighbours, the church arranged for some men to dig up the whole length of the drive and replace our water pipe. They took about a month to do the job, which made our neighbours even less pleased. But in the end we gained a decent water supply! You will of course have guessed the problem. We saw the old pipe and it was all furred up - filled with limescale! Instead of rushing through an inch diameter pipe, water had been trickling through just a tiny hole in the very centre. Furred up pipes.
God promises us streams of living waters. But sometimes we only experience the trickle. It is as if the pipes have got furred up. Pressures of this life. Little temptations we give in to. So many different sins, so small by themselves, but together they fur up the pipes and stop the living waters of the Holy Spirit flowing through our lives.
When we came to Doddinghurst Road we had problems with the water here too. Pressure was low. And even when all the taps were off there was this gurgling whooshing sound as if water was still flowing. The nice men from the water board came with their nice machine which listen to pipes and confirmed that we did indeed have a leak. They discovered that the pipe bringing water into the manse was broken, right in the middle of the road. Which is why a few years ago Doddinghurst Road was completely closed for a few days while the nice men dug a great big hole, all to replace the water supply for Number 16, just for us. The pipe wasn’t furred up this time, it was just split! The water meant for us wasn’t getting to us at all, it was just leaking away underground.
That split pipe is a picture for me of the living waters of the Holy Spirit destined for our lives but never actually getting there. And that can happen if we choose to close our lives to the Spirit’s work. If a person refuses to let God work in their lives in some particular way, that breaks the pipe. That stops the Spirit working in other areas too. This is picture language – but I think the picture is valuable. It is a picture of what happens if people are closed to the Holy Spirit making them holy. If they reject God’s love, joy or peace. If they refuse to forgive somebody else. If their lives are closed to one or all of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The pipe breaks – a little of the living waters can still stream through – but only a trickle.
Forsaking the spring of living water, building broken cisterns, furred up pipes, broken leaking pipes.
“Whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst – NEVER, EVER, EVER thirst again. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.”
Hear God’s gracious invitation afresh tonight.
Rev 22:17 Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life.