Good morning. Did everybody get a bottle of water when they came in? Don’t you think that was nice of us to give you water? How many of you would have preferred an air conditioner? We are going to take an offering right now for the air conditioning. Actually, the good news is we have installed some air conditioning this past week. The bad news is it is in the nursery and the children’s area so you have to work down there and change a few stinky diapers and you will get cooled off. We don’t have to worry about bottled water. We don’t have to worry about air conditioning because Jesus offers us this thing called living water. If you open your Bibles to the book of John today we are going to see about that living water. As you know, we have been looking at the gospel of John. We are in chapter 7. You may recall that chapter 7 is about Jesus going up to the Feast of the Tabernacles. You may recall that the Feast of the Tabernacles was a festival for the Jewish people to commemorate the time spent in the wilderness where God continued to provide for them for up to 40 years. About halfway through the feast, Jesus got up and began to speak publicly. He spoke with such authority that people were blown away by his teaching. He didn’t have a degree. He wasn’t a formal teacher. He hadn’t gone through the formal schools of the Rabbi. Jesus said if anybody does the will of the father, they will know whether this teaching that he speaks is true or not. Last week, we talked about how Jesus continued to speak at the festival and how a rumor started happening that Jesus might actually be the long-awaited Messiah because the Jewish authorities hadn’t yet arrested Jesus. Jesus told the people you really don’t know me. If you knew my father, you would know me. Today, we continue on with Jesus speaking at the Feast of the Tabernacles, but this time it is the last day of the feast. He gets up and doesn’t say he is the Messiah. He doesn’t speak of his authority. He speaks of the fact that he offers them something they can’t get anywhere else. He offers them living water. We are going to read from chapter 7 and we are going to start back in verse 37. John 7:37-44. (Scripture read here.)
So here we have the situation where Jesus is at this festival. The festival would have certain ceremonies. One of the ceremonies that they would have would be a ceremony of water. What they would do on the last day of the feast is have these golden urns filled with water to the brim. They would be at the top of the temple steps. The priests would slowly let the water and out and it would cascade down the steps and all the while people are singing praise to God. That is what is going on there. In the middle of this holy moment, Jesus being Jesus decides to stand up and make a little announcement to get the attention off the water and on to him. He says “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.” This scripture probably doesn’t mean a whole lot to us. But I guarantee it meant a whole lot to the Jewish people. They didn’t just look at this ceremony as a way to commemorate an historic event in the past where God miraculously provided water in the wilderness. They saw this event as somehow predicting what would happen in the future when God would provide the living water. When God would pour out his spirit to the people. Jesus implies that they know what he is talking about because he says “as the scripture has said”. The problem with this verse is that we really don’t know which scripture he is talking about. There is a lot of scripture in the Old Testament that speaks of this idea of water and connects water to the spirit. One particular verse that some suggest he is talking about comes out of the book of Isaiah. Isaiah 44:3 says “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.” You may recall if you are familiar with the Old Testament prophets that Isaiah was one of the big prophets in the Old Testament times. He was one of the prophets that originally spoke wrath upon the people and warned the people if they didn’t straighten up their act, God was going to send them off into exile and was going to take them from their land. But he also prophesized in the later part of Isaiah that the people would come back. The temple would be restored and there would be a form of spiritual renewal. The spirit would come back. God would come back and put his blessing upon the people. Jesus is taking the symbolism of the ceremony, he is taking the Old Testament scriptures, particularly the scriptures from the prophets, and he is beginning to apply them to himself. He is saying he is the spirit. He is the one who is going to provide the living water. He is the one that is going to provide the spiritual refreshment. He is the one that is going to provide the Holy Spirit.
The apostle John makes it clear if we go back to that verse is that what Jesus is talking about is not living water. He is not talking about physical water. He is talking about the Holy Spirit. He says it right here. He says “By this he meant the spirit whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the spirit had not been given since Jesus had not yet been glorified.” We have Jesus basically letting the people know that the Spirit was coming. The Spirit wouldn’t come until Jesus has been glorified. As a side note, to be glorified speaks of his ultimate death, burial, and resurrection, and at the point specifically when he ascends back into heaven and is seated on the right hand of the father. When he is exalted back to the place where he left to come down and become a human. He is talking about returning to the place where he left. We see that in Philippians when Paul talks about the humbling of Jesus who took on the form of a man and then consequently God raised Christ up from the dead and exalted him back up. What Jesus is saying here is that things are about to change. Things are speeding up here a little bit. He spent the first seven chapters pointing out to the Jewish people their hypocrisy. Although they had been given the temple system, the sacrificial system, the traditions, and the ceremonies, somehow they got off track. The things that were designed to make them holy and bring them towards a holy God they messed up. They could not keep it. They had made the laws a burden on the people. Here Jesus is basically saying things are about to change. In six months from this verse, we are going to see Jesus go to the cross. We are going to see him headed toward the cross. We are going to see him allowing himself to be put upon the cross, die that terrible death, be buried, and be in the grave for three days. After three days, we are going to see him rise again. Not only is he going to rise again, but he is going to send his Spirit down upon the people. He is going to pour out the Spirit to the people. The Spirit is going to change their hearts of stone. He is going to put a new Spirit into them that is going to allow them now to keep the law and to keep his commands.
We see that pretty well in the prophet Ezekiel who wrote, speaking for God and predicting this same thing, he said “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh, and I will put my spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.” We have these prophets predicting the thing that Jesus said is also going to be happening very soon upon his glorification. We saw this when we studied the book of Acts. Do you remember what was going on in the very first chapter? Jesus is getting ready to ascend up into heaven and he tells the disciples, the 120, just sit back and wait a little bit. Wait for me because in a few days, I am going to baptize you with the Holy Spirit. They sat in that upper room and waited and prayed. All of a sudden, the sound of a might wind began to rush in and the tongues of fire came and set on their heads. It was the spirit that came and filled that room. So much so that the people went out of that room and went into the streets giving praise to the wondrous works of God. They began to speak in foreign tongues. Peter began to preach like he had never before. The people were blown away. The people thought they must be drunk. Peter goes on to explain that what you see is what was promised by the prophets. When he is giving his sermon, he gets to a point and explains what is happening. He says “God has raised this Jesus to life and we are all witnesses of the fact. Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear.” We have Peter confirming what Jesus had said. You had Jesus confirming what the prophets had said. We have this situation where Jesus is letting the people know that something is about to happen. He is about to pour out the Spirit on his people. He says the only requirement, the simple requirement is for them to believe. Looking back at that passage, he says “Whoever believes in me as the scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” As we know, the Jewish people struggled with this idea of belief. Some of them wanted to seize him. Some of them wanted to embrace him. We know at the end of that passage the people became divided. It is a situation very similar to today. Either people believe or they don’t believe. They want to seize him or they want to embrace him.
That is really all the scripture I wanted to cover today because, for one, it is hot in here, and two, I just want you to really think about this short passage. We come to a place again where we ask ourselves what do we believe about this stuff. Do we believe the promise that Jesus gave was really for this select group of Jewish people that he happened to be speaking to at the Feast of the Tabernacles? Or possibly that he outpouring of the Spirit was something that was limited to the first century church and the people in the upper room? Or is it something that applies to us today? That is the question we ask. To me, the evidence as to whether or not we would believe it comes right here. It says if you believe that, then streams of living water would flow from within. I began to think about it and it seems there would be some evidence of the belief. The first evidence would be that the type of streams we would see would be obvious streams of ministry. Many of you have been around here long enough to know we have probably about a dozen or so ministries. We have the First Impression team. We have the ushers. We have the Fellowship team. We have the children’s people. We have Sunday school teachers. We have property. We have music. We have all these ministries. Some people think you have ministers and leaders of ministries so everything is covered. Wrong. Our job isn’t necessarily to do ministry. The leaders’ job is actually to administer ministry. In other words, the leaders’ job is to administer the gifts that have been given to the congregation. We are to help facilitate. We are to help organize it so that those gifts can be used effectively. Christian theology teaches that when Christ went up, the spirit came down, and we received the gift of the Holy Spirit. Is that correct? But we also received spiritual gifts. Some of those spiritual gifts are quite easy to identify. Things like mercy, hospitality, leadership, prayer, and faith. But there are also ones like administration and knowledge and prophecy. There are about 30 gifts in all. Once again, we believe that every Christian that has made a heartfelt decision for Jesus Christ and accepted Christ the Lord and has received the spirit of God has spiritual gifts not to hold on to but to give out to be able to be used for the common good of the church both inside the church and outside the church. Do you get that? That is what we believe. What happens is that as we believe that we receive the spirit; as we believe we receive spiritual gifts, and then you get the streams of ministry that begin to flow out inside the church and outside the church. Things start to happen.
Now the manifestation of those gifts can happen in a variety of ways. A simple way is if you have the gift of service, maybe it is just handing out a bottle of water in the foyer. Or maybe it is handing out a bottle of water at the sidewalk sales days that the outreach team did a few weeks ago. Or getting involved in teaching. Or getting involved in leadership. Or it could be more complex. There are people out there that have some really good ideas on how to get those streams out there really flowing. I will use a friend of mine, Jose. He is an engineer and works in Boston, but he is from the Dominican Republic and he has a real heart for the Dominican people. He makes trips down there often. On the most recent trip, they were going to build a recreation center for the kids, but he realized that the last one they built they don’t use anymore. He started thinking maybe we are not addressing the real needs. What he did was he began to travel around the Dominican Republic in the outlying areas of the main cities and he began to talk to people. He saw this cycle of poverty going on around there. He was trying to figure out what is going on. Why can’t people get out of poverty? What he realized after talking to people, especially the college-age people, is that they want to go to school. They want to get a degree at the university but they can’t seem to make it happen. He couldn’t understand why because the university is free. What he found out is that although the university is free, the housing is not. What happens is these students from the outlying area come into the big city and register for school, but they have no place to stay. They have no place to live so they end up on the street and they get distracted. They get into drugs and alcohol and all that kind of stuff. The simple solution was to start a housing project in the city for students who wanted to go to university that come in from the country to stay at that housing project in a safe, Christian environment and get people in America to sponsor each student to pay for them so they can get their education in a safe, Christian environment. Very simple solution. Streams of ministry. We can do that stuff. That is just using the gifts that they have been given.
We see, as the Spirit begins to move in the church, real tangible streams of ministry. Another stream you would see would be called streams of praise and worship and prayer. Spirit-filled people in a Spirit-formed church believe in what I would call enthusiastic praise. Anybody here go to a Steelers or Penguins or Pirates game? Are you enthusiastic when you are there or not? You are enthusiastic about it. The interesting thing as I studied this word enthusiasm is it is actually a word better applied to the church. Enthusiasm in its original Greek means en theos, in God. It means that you are filled up with God (or a god). It actually had a pagan association where the people that were involved in the pagan religions would want to get filled up with their gods almost to a demonic state so they could have this form of ecstasy going on, and they would be called enthusiasts because they were filled with this foreign god. We are enthusiastic because we are filled with the Spirit of God and the Spirit of God is a gentleman. You don’t have chaos when you have the Spirit of God within you but you have enthusiasm. You end up having a spirit of praise and worship. People that are filled with the Spirit often can’t help but lift their hands in praise. They can’t help but worship. They understand worship to mean something also. It comes from the word simply worth. When you worship something what you are doing is attributing the due worth to that person. In our case, we are attributing worth to the one who created us, the one who redeems us, and the one who sustains us. In other words, we are attributing worth to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. We are attributing worth to the Trinity when we come in to worship. Also enthusiastic people are people that are willing to pray. They are not afraid of what somebody thinks of them if they get down on their knees because they know that prayer is the language of God. They need to get on their knees. When they get on their knees, they know that they are going to be communicating with God, God is listening, and they also come in with the expectation that they are going to receive something from God. What we are talking about is enthusiastic worship, praise, and prayer.
I was at a workshop a couple weeks ago in California. It is the fourth time I have been out there. I was able to take Debbie this time. Every Wednesday night they have a service. It is a multi-ethnic church. I experienced it three times and I wanted Debbie to see it. In my mind, I really saw it as enthusiastic worship. I remember going to the service and I just love the service because the minute you get in there you sense the enthusiasm. You sense the presence of God and you sense that people who really want to be there. These are people on a hot July night and they are going to be at church and the sanctuary is full. Everybody has their own Bible. They have their notepad and their pens and they are sitting there waiting and the band is warming up. They are just sitting there talking and chatting and the ushers are into it. They are seating people. You sense this enthusiasm. Then the music starts and the praise starts and people begin to lift their hands in praise. They don’t care who is looking at them. They are just praising God. They are having a good time. The music starts going and after four or five songs, they say we are going to stop now and find three or four people and turn around and ask them what is the greatest need you have in your heart right now. How can I pray for you? For complete strangers. In a multi-ethnic community you are praying for each other and praying with sincere heartfelt prayer and not just sitting their chitchatting with the person. You are getting right to prayer. If you don’t know anything to pray for, then they put something on the screen that says pray for our local leaders. Pray for the government. Pray for the jobs. Pray for all the situations. Just pray. You pray for 10 or 15 minutes and then you go back into three or four more songs of worship and then the preacher comes in and you spend about 45 minutes listening to a sermon and two hours later you are out of there. The people leave enthused. They are not looking at their watches. I will be honest with you; it makes me jealous. I know that I cannot duplicate something like that. I was thinking what is the difference. It really made me realize it is people that are filled with the Spirit of God and believe it. They believe they are filled with the Spirit of God. They live enthusiastic worship. They live in enthusiastic prayer and praise. They are hungry for God. They want to know his word. They anticipate hearing this word. They anticipate that God is going to move in the sanctuary in a might way. There might be somebody healed. Somebody might get a word of knowledge. Somebody might be spoken into their ear that they need to hear to get them through for another day, another week, or get out of a bad marriage or get into a good one or whatever. They are just confident that God is at work. It all boils down to belief.
As you experience those streams of ministry and as you experience those streams of praise and prayer and worship, what happens is you experience streams of witness. In other words, as a church, we become witnesses to the one that we believe in. We become witnesses to Jesus. We become witnesses of the fact that we do believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins. We do believe that he was buried. We do believe that he was raised from the dead. We do believe that he sent his Spirit down to infill his church. We believe that.
I believe the reason the church is ineffective, and I am not talking about just our church, I am talking about the church in America, is that we don’t believe it. We do good things. We do cool things. We give out water and we do different things. God doesn’t want us to do good things. He wants us to great things. God is about great things. He isn’t about doing good things. He wants us to do great things. He is standing back there with this fire hose fully charged and ready to go and he is sitting over the North Boroughs. He has it pointed all down there and he says I want to let this go, but I can’t unless you believe. As people start to believe, he starts pulling the lever back and the water starts coming out. At first it comes out as a trickle and then it starts to come out full force. Before you know it, what is going on is you have the water washing down the North Boroughs. You have the water going into the cubby holes, the muck and the yuck of the North Boroughs and cleaning out the stuff that needed to be cleaned out. What you are doing is beginning to meet the physical, the emotional, and the spiritual needs of people. But you have to let that hose go. You have to let that nozzle go. You have to let the water out. You have to let the water flow out. We don’t do a very good job of that because we don’t believe. It boils down, once again, to belief. You have to believe. I know there are people who believe in Jesus Christ. If I was to take a survey and you are a Christian, you would say of course I believe in Jesus. I stood up there and said I believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God, and I have accepted him as my Lord and Savior. My answer is so what. The demons believe too. I have said it before; belief affects behavior or should affect behavior. What you believe should affect how you live and how you live out your faith. There are people who believe that they get on an airplane and they believe that airplane is going to fly so they get on it. There are people that believe certain things about themselves and you see them acting like the way they believe it. There are people out there that believe they are losers and they act like losers. There are people out there that believe they are a child of God and they act like a child of God. There are Christians out there who believe they are Christians but they don’t act like Christians or the way they should act. Belief should affect behavior. If you believe that you are a child of God, if you believe you were born again, you believe that your sins are forgiven, you should believe everything Jesus says and he says whoever believes in him that streams of living water will flow out from within them. In other words, there will be streams of ministry going out into the community, into the world, into the lives, into the homes, into the schools. The church will make a difference. But you have to believe.
I was thinking about an illustration. A couple years ago when we had a heavy freeze, one of my pipes broke in the garage that connects to the backyard hose. I am kind of a procrastinator so we didn’t get it fixed. Summer came and no hose, so we had to take the watering can out into the garden. We have a long back yard and we had to carry the water can out to both gardens and do this three or four times a night. After the next summer, Debbie said we have to get this fixed. You guys know me. I don’t know the difference between a monkey wrench and a monkey’s behind. I needed somebody to fix it. I called my good friend Ed and he came over and fixed it just like that. It was a cool thing. The bottom line is I could have continued to use the water can. I believed it was fixed so I turned the water on and the water came out. What happened is my life and Debbie’s life got easier, and the garden began to get green. All we did was turn on the faucet and see that water continue to flow out.
That is what we are talking about here. We were born with this pipeline to God. Our spirit was meant to commune with God’s Spirit. That thing called sin basically broke the pipe. Broke it right in two so that connection didn’t work anymore. Jesus said I can fix that for you. I didn’t call on Ed, I called on Jesus and Jesus said I can take that and I can fix it. I can die on the cross and solve that. I can make that connection again. I can make it whole. Sure enough that is what happened. Once that connection was made and once we believe it, then the Spirit comes down and it sits there just waiting to be used. It is up to us at that point to decide we are going to turn that on. Are we going to believe it? Are we going to turn the faucet on? Are we going to believe what he says? Are we going to turn that faucet on or are we just going to do nice things in the community? Are we just going to be known as the church that does nice things or are we going to be known as the church that does powerful things and amazing things and things that only God can do? Are we going to experience the infilling of the Holy Spirit in the individuals lives in the lives of the church or are we going to be merely a shadow of what we could be, of what God wants us to be as individuals and as a church? We have the situation where it is up to us. We need to believe that pipeline is there and that it has been fixed. We have to be willing to open it as full as we can. We need to learn how to experience God. We have to open it fully and we have to allow the love of God to work through us and recognize and understand that we have these gifts and allow the spirit to empower us to begin to use the gifts in the community. To begin to meet the physical needs of people. To start with the physical needs but then to also begin to meet the emotional needs; the addictive behavior, the dysfunctional home, the abusing homes, the job loss, and all that kind of stuff. We need to begin to allow the Spirit to move within us to come up with creative solutions for that. Ultimately, we need to help people meet their spiritual need; their need for the living water. Their need for Jesus Christ. As we do those things, as we learn to pray, praise, and learn to use our giftedness, what happens is it becomes a confirmation that we do believe. We not only believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, but we believe that he is the one that is going to provide that living water to the thirsty. Let us pray.
