What kind of week?
10 = awesome – 0 – Zero
What kind of day week life should we as followers of Christ expect to have?
Promises in Bible Extra Ordinary.
In bible many descriptions/promises of kind of life we should be looking for as followers of Jesus.
Descriptions extra ordinary but they are presented in a way that makes us understand that we can realistically expect them to be.
John 7
Feast of tabernacles. In Jerusalem.
Jesus make statement = centre or controversy.
Ordinary man, flesh and blood, standing amongst guests and friends and he says John7:37
In a loud voice – everyone to hear
Thirsty – anybody who has got unsatisfied desires, anyone who feels restless anyone who feels discontent about anything at all.
Does not necessarily mean that you have a need or have deep spiritual yearnings, anyone who is thirsty, anybody who is unsatisfied, unhappy, discontent, did not have a really good week, hasn’t had a really good life, let him come to me.
Old KJV and out of his belly will flow rivers of living water.
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The Belly
NB – abs – shaping tummy.
Corleia = greek word – centre of your being.
Knots – anxious, butterflies – nervous
Empty or hollow – dissatisfied, unhappy or lonely.
The Criteria and the Key
Jesus says anyone who is discontent, that’s the only criteria. Anyone who is unhappy dissatisfied, and comes to me and trusts me and begins to follow me,
…. right down in your guts in your belly, you will be flowing with energy hope love and power.
Now the key. What does he say that this picture of flowing water, of running living waters stand for. ..Read on
Ability to have new life – promised life, is tied up with Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit is in you says Jesus.
John 10:10
Same promise – different illustration…
Shepard and sheep. Thief
Life in abundance – running out of their ears.
Notice though the thief. Expect some opposition, not going to be without challenge or barrier.
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1 Peter
All over NT promises of a life- full abundant, flowing with blessings – a life offered through Jesus by the spirit.
1 Pet 1:8 = another example.
READ
He says of the people to whom he is righting, you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth. So that you have sincere love for one another. A community of sincere authentic love. No faking it;
Getting rid of malice, deceit, hypocrisy, slander.
Humbled themselves under Gods mighty hand.
Describes you?
Filled with inexpressible joy? People comment on your joy.
You are ridding yourself of malice deceit hypocrisy slander. Your belly – you inner core is flowing with rivers of living water?
And on top of all of that you have more or less mastered humility. Too humble to admit that publicly.
Honeymoon
Many say yes to Christ. This promise of this joyful beautiful life. Overwhelmed by this NT vision. Filled with love for God. Drawn towards the bible. They tell others about Jesus.
Some things change for the better. Language.
Serve – involved.
But over time, progress and sense of growth stalls.
Amazing promise – verses reality = gap
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Anger, worry job money jealousy. Pass judgement way to easily, casually.
Devotional life, prayer, personal studies = up and down.
Sound familiar?
Talking of NT promise = confused, discouraged.
Promise vs Reality and Questions
Life promised of beauty, joy, energy captivated human race for over 2000 years.
Reality does not look like that.
What do people do when over time they are not closing this gap anymore? What do people do when they want to be sincere followers of Christ, they are involved in a church but there seems to be a gap between reality and promise and it is not getting smaller?
Core issue.
It holds people back from expressing their commitment. It holds them back in their vooma for Christ. We are not the type of people who shrink back, but we are proud to be Christian.
Holding you back. You just cant align your life with promise. Reality is not the same.
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Resolution 1 – Self Fix
Try and fix it yourself. I have to try harder, do more, study more diligently. I am just not heroic enough in my spirituality.
Frankly we may have slipped into that rut.
Close the gap through sheer spiritual elbow grease.
I will get up earlier I will pray harder, I will read another book, I will listen to another tape or CD, I will learn more disciplines I will server more, I’ll try more to be nicer to peopler.
Praying at 4am
Someone else who gets up at 4 in the morning to pray and you feel guilty because you think you don’t pray enough.
Resolve to get up early and pray. Not a morning person - dazed and confused and groggy and grumpy and no one wants to be with you at 4am in the morning. Even Jesus does not want to be with you at 4 in the morning.
Hard, exhausting and miserable so it must be Gods will for my life, Must be spiritual, must be good for me.
Several days weeks, months cant sustain it. Then guilty.
Guilt grows hear of someone else doing something else appease guilt start – not you cant keep it up and so the cycle goes.
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Getting Tired
All along through this series of heroic attempts to close gap - getting pretty tired. And I don’t mean just physically tired. I mean you are weary in your soul. And you are weary and you are afraid that this gap is never going to close.
If that’s how you feel. Listen as Jesus is speaking to you. “Come to me all you who are weary and heavily laden and I will give you rest. “
This was not for generally stressed, busy
Talking to oppressed and exhausted by system of futile spiritual effort
Says to you I will give you rest.
Many of you these words by Jesus confusing.
Tried: many churches
Heroic spiritual quick fixes to close gap.
Preachers
ALL EXHAUSTING
Changing the things that Jesus asks you to change is exhausting enough. But trying to close the gap, that’s oppressive.
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Resolution 2- Pretend
Pretend gap is not there.
Know they supposed to have this promised life, know what it looks like so they fake it.
Their life, when they talk to you, their life is a miracle a minute. They smile a lot, every prayer gets answered, every decision is a word from God, and every sentence ends with praise the lord, they get real good at impression management.
Fake happiness is better than genuine depression. Fake happiness is better than reality.
Church sub culture teaches us if you are not there if that gap is not closed, pretend.
Supposed to have deep emotional connection with God – not there – make it look and sound like there is one.
Exaggerated by folk who lead in church.
Tempted to create this illusion that there is more emotion, more urgency more something than there really is.
Is genuine urgency needed.
Is a lot of emotion in our journeys,
Is it genuine or are we as we strive for this life as jesus promised, creating a church where, people learn how to pretend and they don’t even know they are doing it.
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Resolution 3 – Recommit
Repeatedly rededicate their lives to God
Re-experience the emotional high they felt when they first gave their life to God.
Kind of like serial conversions.
Try to go back and get that first love. After a few days or weeks wore off. Did not close the gap.
Resolution 4 – Church Hoppers
Keep switching spiritual venues. They switch churches traditions denominations
Non charismatic church - different approach to prayer or healing or tongues or worship or if I could just go to that kind of church , that would close the gap.
Charismatic church - experience orientated they are so shallow, if I could just go to a church for some deep theology and they go off to a real heady church.
It does not close the gap.
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Resolution 5 – Give Up
So eventually some people just give up. Gap too painful
Read of new life or hear it preached feel discouraged or hopeless = such a different way of life, is not possible.
Don’t admit to anyone else – not even self.
Stay a Christian - keep going to church - maintain their involvement in church life, they even maintain the hope that they will be blessed with eternity in heaven when they die. But the zest is just not there. The joy from their belly is missing.
They inwardly and secretly give up. And the truth is some of you are just about there.
What if there is another way?
What if Jesus was right? What if he really meant what he said about rivers of living water flowing out of your belly, the core of your being, what if he really meant it and he really did know what he was talking about. What if such a life really was possible.
What if it is really possible for you to become increasingly authentically alive with love and joy and truth and peace and courage and it was not all about just trying to close a gap that just would never close? And it was not like trying to ramp yourself up into fits of emotion and deeper levels of commitment and trying so hard yet loosing pace half way through?
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Who Does The Work?
More verses – tells us who will work at this gap
Paul writes “ I am confident of this he who began a good work in you – when you were converted when you first turned toward Christ, he who began that good work will carry it through to completion.
Continuet to work out your salvation with fear and trembling for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.
Paul again to church in Corinth – Now the Lord is spirit and where the spirit of the lord is there is freedom…we are being transformed into his likeness with ever increasing glory. Which comes from the Lord who is the spirit.
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Gap
When presented with the gospel or from having journeyed through churches and been exposed to fundamentalist messages that scare you into having a greater gap than what you started with
God - Us - Sin
What you are looking at is the gap that you have between reality and promise.
Only God close gap.
Commit based on what is promised, but then reality sets in.
We want the promised so much that we will do anything to bridge the gap.
We will fake it, move around all our lives to find, recommit to it 7 times a day, do anything however unnatural or uncomfortable, whatever it takes you will try and use your own power your own effort to close the gap in your life between reality and the life promised.
Effort by itself can not close bridge or patch any gap unless by the grace of God. You see to Christians - Grace is power. Grace is what enables us to do all things.
Its been said that true Christians don’t need much grace caus they don’t sin much – saints use more grace than anyone else. Because that’s what they r running on that’s their fuel that’s the good stuff. That’s what keeps them ticking.
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Rob Redford. – A River Runs Through It.
The river that runs through this place in the movie is a picture of grace.
Words for river or stream are used over 150 times in the bible. They are often used to portray spiritual life or being - and for good reason.
Israel was a dessert. - it was dry.
Wadis = Troughs or gulleys in the sand that contained sometimes nothing more than a muddy sludge for water.
After a rainstorm they would fill with water, but usually they would be dry troughs of sand.
Israel understood the value of a river.
A river was a gift. A full river was life, but a dry wadi was death.
Eden
Gen 2:10 A river watering the garden flowed from eden. So we don’t know what it looked like, but a river runs through it.
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A River Was Life.
Bible uses this image as a picture of spiritual reality not a metaphore but a reality.
That in this world a flow of Gods presence and Gods power that gives life – Ps 46:4
River = unobstructed, all kinds of good things will happen. Plants trees bathing crops, thirst animal.
Jer 17:8 – Always in touch with the water.
When a river flows = life
River damned up obstructed polluted cut off – that’s death
Psalm 42:1
As the deer pants for the water
We sing this song sometimes and we often misunderstand it.
Not bambi in lush forest – brook
This is dessert country and all the wadi’s are dried up.
And this deer is going to die if it does not find water. Not about casually to seek out the river of life.
It means a whole lot more than that we enjoy singing a song or two or saying a prayer or two. It means a whole lot more than that. It means life or death.
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Its not a statement of desire, it’s a statement of fact. If the water, the availability of the spirit of God is blocked off, my existence will be a prolonged experience of unsatisfied desire spiritual dryness moral failure and ultimately emotional death, and that’s just reality
With God or not = dos not matter here – simply put - If I am cut off from God, it means absolute death. If I am cut off from the flow of the spirit I could never ever expect that gap to ever close. God is life and if I am drawing closer to him I am drawing closer to life
Cut off from the flow of God, and we will die. Maybe not physically, but definitely in every other way than you can imagine.
The river is life
The river is grace.
Rev 22:1
This picture is so central to spiritual life than in the very last chapter of the bible, Rev 22:1
As clear as crystal. Thats the river of life. Clear unpolluted uncontaminated, that’s life.
Conitnue reading
There was a river at very beginning people of god lived without riversl, but in the end there will be a river again.
And then …continue reading
Could the nations use any healing right now?
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Summary
From the opening words of Gen to the closing chap of rev, God creates and then redeems at infinte cost and then recreates a world that he intends to filled with life and a river runs thru it.
What If
..the spirit of God is like a river, and it is flowing all the time. And we keep hopping from one place to another or serve more, or to rev up our emotions or pretend like everything is ok when its not, what if God really is at work in every moment in every place..
Dutch theologian, said there is not an inch in space or a moment in time about which Jesus Christ, does not say this is mine.
No place river does not flow - and all your job is, is to jump in the river.
And your job is to figure out just this one question – how do I stay in the flow?
How do I not do those things that close me off to the Holy Spirit? How do I keep myself aware and submitted so that river of living water is flowing thru my belly, is flowing through my being?
How do I learn to flow with the spirit?
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Surfing EG
Don’t have to make the wave. When you fall wipe out – there will be another wave.
They just keep coming. God just keeps making them – wave machine
There is a word for that –the word is grace- when you mess one up there is another one coming right behind it and you can just get back on the board.
1 Th5:19 – Don’t Quench the Spirit.
Spirit is already at work in you. The spirit is there. Not us!
Bigger and stronger patient with your gaps and your failures and your inadequacies, and your pretending he is more patient about that stuff than you are.
He is committed to helping you 24 7
So Paul says in a sense that your only job is - just don’t get in his way.
Just don’t quench the spirit
Open vs. Closed
All the time we are either doing things that are opening Scriptures refer - walk in the spirit, keep in step with the spirit or sow to the spirit,
Or we do thing close us off to Sp – don’t quench don’t grieve
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Spirit is Shy
The spirit in one sense is the shyest and gentlest person because he will almost always never override your choice to close him off.
Eg’s in script God needed will done - overrides mind or will. Great exception for very good reason.
God wants you to voluntarily say yes to flow of the spirit.
Transforms us in a way that involves us in which we say yes from our hearts. And so the spirit sometimes allows us to make decisions that quench him.
But then all I had to God I am sorry – I don’t want that – forgive me – I don’t want that life. I am back in river and here comes another wave. Don’t beat yourself
Get back in grace.
Here is the deal – spiritual surfing
Close off or keep wet
How!
You can say God if there is something to do – let me know- God I am open to you.
Flow out of church this morning
Why At Oaktree
I am deeply committed to this because this church is so amazing – unspeakably sad if we got this so far .. Fabulous services fantastic programs wow p and w. etc etc – but we did it with people who were tired and dry and empty and lonely.
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Conclusion
Jesus says this life is possible- We can be part of this fab wonderful kingdom – A river runs through it – and you can jump in any time.
Feel like deer…
How…
You need to get into the water. Start by simply accepting that there is a river of life.
Its dry and you are looking = must deep down be saying that there is somewhere to drink.
