Unpolluted Water
Unpolluted Water
"Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless." (Ephesians 5.25-27)
Late last week I dreamed that I was preaching to an assembly of Christian leaders. While I was telling them what a truly awesome and wondrous privilege it is to speak "the very words of God" (Romans 3.2), they just went on talking amongst themselves.
"Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others...If anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very words of God...so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ." (1 Peter 4.10.11)
I then looked across to one side of the meeting where a group of these leaders had formed their own workshop. They were being taught water-divining!
"Be appalled at this, O heavens, and shudder with great horror, declares the Lord. My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and they have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water." (Jeremiah 2.12-13)
"With joy you shall draw water from the wells of salvation." (Isaiah 12.3)
"Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." (John 4.13-14)
"Whoever believes in me (Jesus), 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." (John 7.38-39)
"See to it, then, that no one enslaves you by means of the worthless deceit of human wisdom, which comes from the teachings handed down by man and from the ruling spirits of the universe, and not from Christ. For the full content of divine nature lives in Christ, in his humanity, and you have been given full life in union with him. He is supreme over every spiritual ruler and authority." (Colossians 2.8-10)
