The Living Water

I've written one or two posts recently about Laura Story's new song, "Blessings."  This song continues to speak to me or I should say G-d continues to speak to me through the words of this song.  This week one of the last lines of the song really jumped out at me and I cannot stop thinking about them.  The line I am speaking of is this:

What if my greatest disappointments or the aching of this life is the revealing of a greater thirst this world can't satisfy?

I think we can take off the first two words, "what if" and change this question to a statement; a true statement.  I don't know about you but I think I've spent an inordinate amount of time in my life fretting over disappointments and a longing for something I couldn't identify.  If you look around your world you can quickly identify how we are all guilty of trying to fill voids in our lives with temporal things.  As believers, we know how futile and pointless this is.  The book of Ecclesiastes is full of the author's observations concerning the things that are futile in this life.  The author concludes his observations with a statement that "all is vanity" and follows this with the solution:  "...fear G-d, keep His commandments, because this applies to every person."


This past weekend in my Beth Moore study that I've been slowly working my way through I read in Exodus 15 when the Israelites come to the waters of Mara after passing through the Red Sea and seeing G-d's great deliverance.  They had become thirsty which is understandable considering they were in a desert.  Their joy at discovering water was quickly replaced by disappointment when they tasted and discovered the water was bitter.  They quickly began to grumble to Moses.  Isn't that what we do when we face another of life's disappointments?  We try to find someone to blame and the enemey is always quick to attend our pity party and point fingers.  He will do anything to get our eyes off of our Great Deliverer and Provider.  When Moses cried out on behalf of the people G-d used a tree limb to make the waters sweet for drinking.


The study drew a parallel between this "stick" and the tree used to execute Yeshua.  The tree our sins were nailed to made the "living water" sweet for drinking and sustaining eternal life.  There is a lot we can draw on here for many meditations and analogies but I really want to point out what G-d spoke to the people after clearing the water for drinking.


He says in Exodus 15:26:  If you will give earnest heed to the voice of the L-rd your G-d, and do what is right in His sight, and give ear to His commandments, and keep all His statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you which I have put on the Egyptians; for I, the L-rd am Your Healer."   G-d provided Himself a lamb that satisfied the requirement of the law.  Romans 8:3-4 - For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, G-d did:  sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh so tthat the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.


Yeshua, the Living Water, is what we thirst for.  No other can satisfy.  When the Israelites allowed bitterness to work in their soul, G-d sent serpents to bite the people so that many died.  Yeshua says (John 3:14-15) that if we behold Him, as the people did the bronze serpent in the wilderness, and believe, we will have eternal life.  The solution to all our searching and thirsting is in Him alone.


Let us spend quality time with the lover of our soul and not use our prayer time as if we were sitting on Santa's lap spewing forth our wish list.  G-d knows our needs and is intimately acquainted with us.  He wants us to pour our hearts out to Him "but He loves us too much to give us lesser things." (from the song, Blessings")  Can we trust Him and be His friend?  True friends do not usually just visit when one wants something from the other - they visit because they love each other and enjoy each other's company.

John 15:15  No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you.