Life can feel so parched and dry – even when we’re doing all the right things.  But God has a plan – a plan for rivers to flow through the desert, a plan for abundant life, a plan to quench your thirst.   

Sometimes life can feel, well, parched and dry. We can be doing all the right things – living life, being a parent, working, whatever it is we do – but it’s as though we’re giving out all the time and not drinking anything in. And we look at life and think, “Hang on, I’m doing all the right stuff. Why does it feel as though I’m running on empty?”

And so people go looking in all sorts of weird and wonderful places to fill up again. Day spas, meditation, holidays, coffee shops, yoga, you name it and we look in some funny places for that … I don’t know … spiritual reality.

So, how thirsty are you? How dry, how parched do you feel? Let me invite you on a journey this week because as it turns out Jesus understands that dry and parched and thirsty thing, and my hunch is He has a plan.

It’s funny reality, but living life can drain the life out of us, it’s a paradox isn’t it? But it’s true, whether you do work or study or maybe work at home, you’re a husband or a wife or mum or a dad or a volunteer or doing all the good things in life that we do. Giving out like we’re meant to do, it’s all great, but you can stand back and you take a look at that – all the things that we do in life, that stuff together that we call life – and even in the midst of all that good stuff there can be something missing.

We live in a world that’s thirsty for a spiritual reality. There’s a hunger in so many people’s lives and can I say, even in people who say, “I believe in Jesus.” There can be emptiness and dryness and an unsettled feeling to say, “I’m doing all these things but there’s something missing, there’s some spiritual reality that’s not in the puzzle and until that particular piece of the puzzle is there, I’m not whole, I’m not complete.” I wonder if you know anyone like that?

Our soul and our spirit can feel like a dry, parched land, like a desert and we need to drink in that authentic something, a deep draft of fresh, clear, living water. I wonder if it wasn’t always part of God’s plan that we need that something, that we need Him. Have a listen to what He writes. He says in the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament:

I will make rivers flow on the barren heights and springs within the valleys. I’ll turn the desert into pools of water and the parched ground into springs. I will put in the desert the cedar and the acacia and the myrtle and the olive. I’ll set pines in the wasteland, the fir and the cypress together, so that people may see and know and may consider and understand that the hand of God has done this, that the Holy one has created it.

See, God knows that life drains the life out of us, God knows that sometimes our life is like that parched land, like that desert and He turns around, through Isaiah and says:

I want to make rivers flow, I want to put springs in that place, I want to turn your desert into pools of water and the parched ground into springs. I want to put trees and life into that void for you and the reason I want to do it is so that when you look at it, you’ll know it was my hand that came to do this for you, that it was I who breathed life into you, fresh, living water.

God uses this picture all through His word, through the Bible, the Old Testament, the New Testament about the way that He pours life and His sprit into us.

There’s a beaut story when Jesus … His disciples had gone on into the town and He’s at a well outside the town but He doesn’t have a bucket to put down into the well and draw water. And there’s a woman there, a Samaritan woman. Now the Jews and the Samaritans did not get on, I have to tell you, and this woman was out there in the middle of the day in the heat lugging water because she herself was an outcast. And He comes to the well and He says to her, “I need some water“. This is the story:

When this Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” because His disciples had gone into town to buy food and the Samaritan woman says to Him, “You’re a Jew and I’m a Samaritan woman, how can you ask me for a drink?” Because the Jews didn’t associate with the Samaritans, and Jesus answers her and says, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked Him for a drink and He would have given you living water.

 She said, “Sir, you have nothing to draw with in the well it’s so deep, where are you going to get this living water from? Are you greater than Jacob who made this well?” And Jesus answers her, “Everyone who drinks this water, you get thirsty again but whoever drinks the water that I’ll give them will never thirst. Indeed the water that I will give them will become like a spring inside them, this water welling up to eternal life.

And the woman said, “Sir, give me some of that water so that I won’t get thirsty again and have to keep coming here to draw water.” And Jesus says, “Let anyone who’s thirsty come to Me and let the one who believes in Me drink and from their heart will flow rivers of living water.”

Now He said this about the Holy Spirit. So how thirsty are you? How much do you want this fresh, living water, the Spirit of God pouring into your life? Jesus said, “Come to Me and drink but it’s not for everyone.” He said, “Those who believe in Me can come to me and drink.” So what about you? Do you want this living water? Let me pray for you right now.

Father, sometimes when we hear what You have to say and we hear the words of Jesus it can all get a bit scary, we can get a bit apprehensive. God getting this close to us, I remember Father how scary that was for me and opening ourselves up and letting You pour your Spirit into us in abundance, we can get apprehensive.  

Father I pray for each of us right now. Lord, will you give us the peace to know that what we just read and what we just saw is You speaking to us in a supernatural way. Lord will You open us up to be filled up afresh today with your Holy Spirit, this fountain of living water.

Father, we ask You in the name of Jesus to put that fountain inside us today. Lord, we want to have this fresh living water so that we are never, ever spiritually thirsty again. So that in an instant Father, we can turn to You and know that You are like a well in our hearts and in our souls and in our spirits to give us fresh life. Father we ask for this, to be filled with Your spirit in Jesus Christs name. Amen.

It’s an amazing thing that when we are in the desert, when our lives are dry, when we think that God has disappeared, that’s the very time that He shows up – like He has today through His Word – and makes a promise. And that promise is very simply this, He wants to turn our desert into a rich, abundant valley of life.

The promise is this, that if we believe in Him we can go to Him and say, “Father, give me this fresh living water, give me this well inside of me. Fill me to overflowing with the Holy Spirit so that every minute of every day I can know that you are in this place.”

Jesus said some funny things.  Just before He was crucified, He said to His disciples – ‘You know something, it’s good for you that I’m going away.’  What was that all about?

The only way we really get to know someone is to live with them.  Problem is that today, that can just mean shacking up.  But God has a plan to make His home in us – and it’s so much more than what the world has to offer.

The only way really to know someone is to live with them in the same house, day after day, year after year. Boy meets girl and they get engaged, they get married and on their honeymoon they think they already know each other but the reality is they don’t really and they’re going to spend the rest of their lives trying to figure one another out. That’s the wonderful mystery of marriage. When I signed up with Jesus, when I made that decision to give my life to Him, to follow Him, I thought, “I just don’t want some Sunday religion thing, I want to know Him and the only way to know someone is to live with them.”

Nowadays living together, couples just moving in, is an accepted part of life in our society. Many people decide never to get married at all. In any case the whole marriage thing, well it ain’t what it used to be, somewhere between a third and a half of all marriages end in divorce. The idea is that you move in on your own terms without any permanent commitment and if you want you can leave, it’s the way of the world, it’s a lifestyle choice.

Sounds good until you talk to someone who’s been through divorce or been through a separation, when a man and a woman share each others homes and lives and souls and bodies and when they sleep in the same bed they become one flesh, that’s Gods plan. The two become one and when you tear that apart it hurts something terrible, it’s an unbelievable pain.

So what about God? If we want to know Him we have to live with Him and that’s the way it goes but what does that plan look like? What if it ends up in divorce? How do we live with God? Jesus has a plan, it’s a beautiful, eternal, wonderful plan for you and me to get to know Him. And it’s not like the worlds plan that says, “Stay as long as you feel like it.” It’s a perfect plan, it’s a plan made on God’s terms and not ours. Have a look at this, this is what Jesus said. We looked at this yesterday and I’d like to look at it again today.

He says, “If you love me you’ll obey what I command and I’ll ask the Father and He will give you another counsellor to be with you forever, the Spirit of truth. The world can’t accept this spirit because it doesn’t see Him or know Him but you know Him because He lives with you and He will be in you. I won’t leave you as orphans, I’ll come to you, before long the world won’t see me anymore but you will because I live you’ll live too and on that day you will realise that I am in my Father and you’re in me and I’m in you. Whoever has my commands and obeys them that one loves me and the one who loves me will be loved by my Dad and I too will love Him and show myself to Him and we will come and make a home with them.”

A promise of Jesus to be with us, in us, make His home with us through the Holy Spirit forever and ever and ever, but it’s not for everyone. Let me say that very clearly, I was talking to a man a little while ago who wanted God but wanted to live his life on his own terms. He wanted the relationship but he didn’t want to live it God’s way. Look at what Jesus said again:

If you love me you will obey my commandments and I will ask the Father and He will give you another counsellor to be with you forever, the Spirit of truth.

In other words this is on Jesus terms.

If you love me, you’ll obey me.

Jesus isn’t some cuddly lap dog, some fluffy soft toy, not some buddy to perform tricks when we want Him to and to get us out of a pickle.

God is God, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. Not a bunch of rules, not saying you’ve got to do all these things in order for me to love you but if we want to be in a relationship with Him we have to be in that relationship on Gods terms. He is looking for someone with a heart that’s open to learn from Him:

If you love me, if you really love me you will want to obey my commands and I’ll send another comforter just like me.

I love that second bit.

I’ll send you the Holy Spirit to be with you forever.

Not shacking up, not a try before you buy arrangement, I mean I accepted God as a teenager but as I grew up into adulthood I turned my back on Him, I wandered so far away I didn’t even know if He still existed but He was still there in my hour of need because the promise of Jesus was:

I’ll be with you forever.

And I’d accepted Him and for eighteen years I wandered in this wilderness and forgot all about Him but He didn’t forget about me. And the third part of His promise, firstly that God will send us another counsellor, Holy Spirit who’s just like Jesus. The second part is that He will be with us forever; the third part is a promise of intimacy. Jesus says, “I won’t leave you as orphans, I’ll come to you. The world won’t see me but you will and I’ll be in Dad and you’ll be in me and we’ll be together and I’ll come and Dad and I and the Holy Spirit will make our home with you.”

That’s the language of marriage, that’s the language of intimacy. The promise is the presence of God in us through the Holy Spirit. Jesus, Dad, the Holy Spirit making their home, living together in us forever.

When you think about a husband and wife they share every room in the house, they share their body and their soul, it’s the same with Jesus but deeper. With the Holy Spirit we get to share our spirit with Him, that deepest, deepest part of us. Now some people want to keep Jesus out of this room or that room and then they wonder why there’s no intimacy. “Well I want all of Jesus but I don’t want Him in this part of my life” or “I still want to go off and do this and not obey Him” and think well, it’s not working, that’s because Jesus said:

If you love me you’ll do what I command.

It’s on His terms; the amazing thing is Jesus doesn’t actually say “don’t do this” very often. There’s a handful of things that He says, “they’re not good for you – don’t do them” but if we want to go against them, if we want to be angry, if we want to criticise people, if we want to lie or cheat or be dishonest, we’re not going to know this peace and this intimacy and this relationship.

Will we let Jesus and the Holy Spirit into every room in our lives, work, school, homes, thoughts, dreams, hopes, fears, anxieties, everything? Will we have a relationship where there’s no room that we don’t let Him into? No part of our lives that we don’t share with Him, the Holy Spirit and me, the Holy Spirit and you.

God has a plan, that plan is for a wonderful intimacy, that plan is for Him to set up His home in me, in you and to live together not for a month or a year or five years or ten years until we divorce but forever and ever and ever. And even when you and I blunder and we go off on our own and make mistakes, Jesus never forsakes us, He never leaves us, never goes away because His promise that when we accept Him, He will come and dwell in us forever and ever and ever.

The Holy Spirit is how He does it; the Holy Spirit is God in us.

Often, the biggest thing that keeps us from drawing close to God is the fear of condemnation.  He’s perfect and I’m not – so I’m in trouble.  Makes sense.  But fortunately, God’s grace isn’t logical.      

The biggest fear I ever had of getting close to God was the fear of judgement and condemnation. I didn’t understand what Holy meant but I understood that if God was God then He was holy and He was good and He was perfect and I wasn’t.

And so the only logical thing for God to do if I let Him get close to me was to judge me. I could just hear Him, “Well now let’s have a look at your ledger, hmm, no you’re not worthy. No you’re not good enough, no go over there and sit in the corner.” That would be logical, it would be fair too, but fortunately, fortunately God’s grace isn’t logical and His mercy isn’t fair, maybe that’s why they call it the Good News.

It’s a bit of a dilemma isn’t it? Because when we look in the mirror we know that there are things that we’re doing wrong and when we talk about the Holy Spirit and Holy God, holiness means that God is perfect that’s why this week we’re having a look at the Holy Spirit and me. Who or what is the Holy Spirit? And if I’m meant to get close to God, which I am and you are, how do we do that? When God and His Spirit is holy, perfect and I’m not and you’re not.

The Holy Spirit is the most misunderstood of the three persons who are God. Father, Son and Holy Spirit and I guess that’s because we can understand Dad, we can understand Jesus the Son but we don’t have a picture in our heads about this Holy Spirit.

Earlier on this week we saw that it was an amazing part of Gods plan for us to have a really close intimacy with God, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit and Gods desire to take our life, which is sometimes a desert and to bring it to life, to put rivers of living water through it. To fill it with peace and joy and life, that’s what Gods plan, is and it comes to life in us and through us, through His spirit, His holy spirit but me, I look at God and I’m just not up to it.

Now some people these days would laugh at that, “Come on Berni. We’re all good enough, if it feels good – do it. We eat and drink for tomorrow we die so let’s just get on with it.” But get those people in a quiet honest moment and that sense of deep inadequacy, of failure, of emptiness, of uncertainty, it’s out there in plague proportions. And that very need is so often the thing that keeps us from drawing close to God, from seeking Him out and having an intimate real relationship with Him through the Holy Spirit who, over the last couple of days on the program we’ve seen that God promises us, if we believe in Jesus, if we give our lives over to Him, if we love Him and obey Him, He wants to fill us with the Holy Spirit. He wants to come and make His home in us through the Holy Spirit.

This problem of us being imperfect and God being perfect, is something the Apostle Paul writes about. If you have a Bible you can check it out later in Romans, chapters 7 and 8. He writes something along these lines, he says:

“You know what my problem is, I know what’s good and I know what’s bad and I want to do what’s good but the problem is that I can want to do what’s good but I just cant do it, in fact this is how it works for me, whenever I want to do good, evil is right here with me. There’s nothing good in me,” says Paul, “Nothing, I’m so wretched and pitiful. Who’ll save me?” Thank God Jesus will.

In fact,” he writes, “there’s no condemnation for those who believe in Jesus. None because in Jesus God did something that rules and regulations can’t do. He did away with sin because Jesus paid the price with His own body on the cross and now that struggle between good and evil isn’t my problem anymore because Jesus set me free from that.

So here’s the choice that I have, if I set my heart and my mind on things that are wrong, that’s where I’ll end up, an enemy of God but if I set my heart and mind on the things of God, on the things of His spirit, that’s where I’ll end up, with abundant life. It’s not a self-help program anymore, if I draw close to the Holy Spirit, He’s the one that changes me, He’s the one that brings life to my otherwise dead body, He’s the one that makes the freedom that Jesus bought for me on the cross a reality here and now in my life today.”

Isn’t that great, Paul’s coming to a realisation. I mean, here’s a man, God gets him to write almost half the books in the New Testament, he has the same problem that you and I do. He knows what’s good, he’d love to do it, he just can’t and that’s our problem. The self-help program doesn’t work. We can pedal and struggle and try but ultimately we can’t change ourselves.

Paul is saying here, “You know something; I’ve finally figured it out. Even though I’ve made mistakes, even though I continue to make mistakes, I believe in Jesus and Jesus is my salvation and Jesus is the one through whom God forgives me and because of Jesus dying on the cross and rising again, you know something, I go to God and there’s no condemnation because Jesus paid the price for me.

Now I have a choice to live; now I can do one of two things. I can either set my mind and my heart on things that are wrong or set my mind and my heart on the Holy Spirit and when I set my mind and my heart on the Holy Spirit, He changes me from the inside out, He changes me.” And that’s been my experience.

I get so much joy from God. So much peace, so much life, so much enthusiasm, so much strength, so much power that I can’t conjure up on my own. Power to be humble, power to be honest, power to be decent. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not perfect and I never will be until that day when I stand before God but God is busy changing me from the inside out and that’s the way it works.

And you know the days when I really, really make a mess of it, they’re the days when I haven’t set my heart on Him. They’re the days when I haven’t stopped and rested and just prayed and spent some time with His word in the morning and set my heart and my focus for the day on Him.

Come on, God wants to change us, God wants to give us power and life through His spirit and the message of the Bible is that it is not a self-help program. It’s about setting our hearts and our minds on the Spirit and walking in the Spirit, spending that time with Him in the mornings, walking with Him during the days, worshipping God, making melodies in our hearts to Him. Thanking Him, turning to Him in every circumstance, every step, every situation, every struggle, every victory He changes us.

He heals us from the inside out instead of us trying to change ourselves from the outside in but not only does He change us, He imparts Gods forgiveness into our spirit so that we know, that we know, that we know that we’re forgiven.

This is what Paul writes in the same chapter that we just read over, Romans. “We that are led by the Spirit of God are God’s kids and God didn’t give us a spirit of slavery so that we’d fall back into fear but He gave us a spirit of adoption so that we can cry out ‘my God, my Dad’, that’s the very spirit of God bearing witness in our spirits, that we’re His kids.”

Father it is hard sometimes for us to accept your forgiveness and to know it. I pray in the name of Jesus Christ that you would pour your Spirit into us right now, that you would witness your love to us through your Spirit, Lord that you would open our hearts and blow us away with your awesome wonder and joy and power through your Holy Spirit. Father I ask it in Jesus name.

We chug-a-chug on through life – and pretty soon, we’re running on empty.  And then we try filling up with all sorts of different things.  But running on the wrong fuel can have disastrous consequences.