Revival is about your personal seeing, watching, feeling, or experiencing something. You might understand water, but you must experience the blood the Jesus Christ. Many of us feel poured out and emptied right now. The Christmas season is officially over. Now we go back to whatever we were doing before we were interrupted from our other kinds of business. But I’m tired and sick or was that “sick and tired?” Last week I introduced you to the 12-year-old Jesus, who asks whether you will be found in the temple of the Spirit of God when He comes looking for you. The Sunday before we experienced being the Three Kings of Epiphany a whole two weeks early, because I expected our poured out and emptied feeling to crop up this Sunday as we are ready to forget the gift giving side of Christmas so quickly.
Jesus’ baptism demonstrates our understanding or collective working knowledge about how He did not need to be purified, but how He connects Old Testament cleaning rituals with all of our need for cleaning from our sin by a new baptism of water and spirit. Traditional understanding and experience says that in the baptism of Jesus symbolizes His kenosis (that is His emptying of Himself) for you, for me and for all creation.
But Jesus wants you to personally experience how His life’s blood cleans and purifies the stagnant and putrefied waters of your soul with His eternal living water and not just for short lived quick fix worldly wants and desires.
Christ’s blood cleans and purifies our stagnant and tired existence like the flowing unhindered waters of the Jordan where he stood with John and the others who heard the Holy Spirit’s voice: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
Jesus said, "Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him." -John 7:38 (NIV)
My children gave me a father’s day present each year by paddling downstream on a crystal clear river in central Florida. There should be a river like this near us – both figuratively and literally speaking. Looking into its depths, you can see the sand, water animals, fallen leaves and tree limbs near the river-bottom.
Usually somewhere near these flowing swimming pools you will see an occasional stagnant pond – slightly off from the river’s shore. Unlike the river, the pond builds up slime and muck because it does not flow. Its stillness makes the water foul and undrinkable. One lesson here is that the same rain that fell from the sky fills both the river and the pond. But the river's constant movement has kept its water fresh.
The other lesson out of this experience is that the pond and the river teach us about God's outpouring love. If I allow God's living water to just remain within me, it becomes stale. Worse yet, if my heart fails to pump fresh blood to any part of my body then that body part will soon die.
But if I allow God’s love to flow out and to bless others, it stays fresh. An your heart is beating right now so as to remind you that the members of your body are blessed, while your life’s blood continues to flow and share nourishment and fresh oxygen.
By handing out the flyers, announcing and inviting others to our Friday through Monday Revival this week you are making sure that God’s living water and goodness will not be hoarded here at Dexter or in Montgomery. If a verse of scripture, a song, or a book has touched you this week, then share it! When God has loved you in a special way, pour out that special love on someone else! Smile when you realize just how refreshing this living water is to others!
“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet – so get a Bigger Bucket!”
Romans 11:33 says, “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord?”
Do you remember going to the beach for the first time? Annemarie and I used to take our three small children and some of their neighborhood friends to the beach. Everyone ended up just sun bathing or swimming. Once, the children started making sand castles, which led to digging a huge hole in the sand just a little ways up from the shore. The smaller children ran to the water, filled pails with water, poured it into the hole, and then went back for more. The rest of us asked what they were doing. They said, 'We're emptying out the ocean!'"
At first we laughed. Imagine using pails and shovels and trying to empty the ocean into a hole in the sand! But those children spoke with such confidence. As God’s children we are called to empty ourselves like Jesus Christ emptied Himself with God’s love into His whole (not hole) creation.
Let us pray: Dear Heavenly Father, our hope and prayer is to "know the love of Christ" and "be filled with all the fullness of God" (Ephesians 3:19). Knowing You is a never-ending process. Your love is so great that we will never exhaust its riches. Your love is more limitless than the ocean.
Prepare us for Your upcoming revival by energizing us with childlike enthusiasm like those little children at the beach. Let us experience and share the depth of Your love. Help us to “Give, so it will be given to [us]. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over . . . poured into our lap (Luke 6:38).” Help us to share with others so that our lives refresh those around us. Please help us to share Your living water in very special ways during our revival services this week and the next. There are many who have never tasted Christ’s living water, Lord. Pour out Your Spirit like running waters, in justice and mercy as a mighty stream (Amos 5:24). Let us dip into Your love and and use our big bucket Dexter Avenue UMC to fill up and spiritually revive Montgomery. In the precious name of Jesus Christ who baptizes us with His water, blood and spirit, Amen.
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