THE LIVING WATER

Welcome

We welcome you to our Sunday Worship and are glad to have you in God's house. We also welcome all who join us online. Let's clap for our online viewers.

Tithe and Offering

Giving to God is a big part of our worship experience, and we do this every Sunday to demonstrate our love for God. What marks us as a church is that we don’t just come to church every Sunday for God to give us something to receive. We also want to be a church that is a channel of blessing. The outcome of your giving is that it brings glory to God, bears much fruit, and blesses others. I will call on our ushers to pass around the offering plates, and please follow the instructions on the screen on how to give.

Please greet some folks around you, and welcome them to worship.

Announcement

Please look up on the screen as we make our announcement. Today, right after service at 1:00, is our New Member Class, so if you sign up for the New Member Class, please be sure to stay after church. Our Leaders’ Meeting is Saturday, April 20th, at 12:00 p.m. MEN’S BREAKFAST is Saturday, April 27th, at 10:00 a.m. All the men are invited to the Men’s Breakfast on the last Saturday of the month. Our church’s weekly WEDNESDAY NIGHT CONNECT BIBLE STUDY is at 7:00 p.m. Bible Study is one of the most significant ways to connect with God through meaningful and authentic engagement with His people. For this week’s Bible Study, we will be studying Luke chapter 17, and the topic is “Hear and Be Healed.” Let’s connect with God and each other around DYNAMIC DEVOTION, RELEVANT TEACHING, and BIBLICAL APPLICATION.

As a church, we are trying to impact people’s lives, and we are grateful for all the members who serve and find a place to help us get Ministry done. For those interested in serving, the kingdom of God needs you. So, I encourage you to find a Ministry where you can serve to help our church advance the kingdom of God.

PRAYER FOR ILLUMINATION

Father God, we pause to praise You for Your ways above ours this morning. We praise You for choosing us in Christ Jesus and bringing us into Your faith family. So, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing in Your sight, O LORD, our Rock, and our Redeemer. Amen.

Declaration of Faith in God

Let us stand and say the Declaration of Faith in God together.

SERMON INTRODUCTION

The Holy Spirit as living water provides the ongoing experience of spiritual life and satisfaction to all willing to receive it. Today, people need the Holy Spirit to live their lives fully, experience heaven on earth, be spiritually fulfilled, and be repeatedly fed from the never-ending source of truth. Because an individual’s spiritual reservoir can often run dry, it needs to be filled with life-giving nourishment. Like water nourishes the body, the Spirit gives the same to the soul. For spiritual nutrition, believers must be willing to go to the right source. That raises the question of what the right source is. The right source is Living Water, another name for the Holy Spirit in our sermon series on the Names of the Holy Spirit.

SERMON EXPOSITION

And so, today, I want to talk to you about the Holy Spirit as a “Living Water.” Jesus Christ is in the context of the Feast of Tabernacles, and we are told in John 7:37 that it was the last day of the great feast. God instructed the Jewish people to do the Great Feast of Tabernacles to remind them of their journey and experience through the wilderness. While traveling through the wilderness, they were banking on God for water.

To put this another way, they were trusting in God for water. God opened the Red Sea to get them into the wilderness and let water gush out of a rock so the people of Israel could drink in the wilderness. At Marah in Exodus 15:23, God also turned bitter water into clean water so they could function in the wilderness. He became their H2O supplier as they went through the dry spell of the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land.

In the Feast of the Tabernacle, they built booths, tents, and, if you will, a tent city for them to live in to remind them of their wilderness journey and how God supplied them through the wilderness experience.

And one of the greatest supplies they needed was water to sustain them on their journey. Today, you and I are on a journey from salvation to glory; sometimes, it gets dry. You and I are on a journey from time to eternity, and it gets crusty. You and I are on a journey from where we are to where we need to be, but sometimes, it gets hot and humid, and you need to be able to get a drink of water. In the context of the Feast of Tabernacles, Jesus makes this statement (this public announcement, if you will) to take us to this next truth, symbol, and name of the Holy Spirit. Jesus was referring to the experience of Israel recorded in Exodus 17:1-7.

He says to them in verse 37, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.” Jesus raises the question of the need for thirst. Jesus says, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come.” He takes what they were physically reminded of when the priest poured water on the altar during the Feast of Tabernacles to let the folks know that the same way they were supplied refreshment in the wilderness, he has come to provide spiritually for the soul and the life of people.

So, the first question is, are you thirsty? Are you thirsty? Because Jesus says, “Let him who thirsts come.” “Let him come to Me and drink.” Let's look at the word drink. To drink here means to appropriate Christ for oneself. To drink here means to trust Jesus as Lord and Savior. It means to take Jesus for His Word and Him into our lives as we would take a glass of water into our bodies.

Now, how do you know if your soul is thirsty? If you are living a life of discontent and discomfort, it is because you have a thirsty soul. If you are living a life of confusion, it is because you have a thirsty soul. If you are living a life of frustration, not a frustrated moment, but a frustrated lifestyle, it is because you have a thirsty soul. If you are living a life of perpetual failure (every time you try to move forward, you see yourself going backward), it is because of a thirsty soul.

The thirst in the soul is manifested by a life of dissatisfaction, discontentment, unforgiveness, bitterness, or sin dominance (control). All of these things reflect the fact that there is a dry spot in the soul begging for water. We try to fill our thirsty souls with illegitimate water that has been tampered (corrupted) with. We go to things that are not designed to quench our thirst. We wind up drinking spiritual saltwater (salty and contaminated water), which only keeps us more thirsty.

And so we look at illegitimate means of people, friends, entertainment, anything that can give us a temporary boost or relief to help us forget how thirsty we really are, only to discover it didn't quench the thirst. It just distracts us from the thirstiness we are dealing with. He says if anyone is thirsty or living a life of discontent, there is something that is twisted in the soul. And if that doesn't get addressed, you will always wind up going for artificial sweetener substitutes. You will always look for cheap replacements that are not designed to be authentic thirst quenchers.

And so He says, “If anyone is thirsty...” You can even use religion as water. If I am religious enough, long enough, perhaps my thirst will be quenched. Only after you get your religious Coke drink and you become thirsty again by the time it wears off before you get home because you have not gotten the water Jesus offers.

So, today, I want to offer you, by means of our passage, a thirst quencher. He says, “If anyone is thirsty...” I like what Jesus said, “If anyone is thirsty,” because that phrase means there is enough water for everyone who is thirsty. The folks that Jesus is talking to are made of people who want to get rid of Him. Let’s go back to a few verses in John chapter 7. In verse 32, “The Pharisees heard the crowd whispering these things about Him, and the chief priests and the Pharisees sent officers to arrest Him.” The religious leaders of the day were trying to get rid of Jesus, and in the midst of all this, Jesus said, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink.”

You see, the water that Jesus is offering is not ordinary. This is the Living Water in the person, name, and symbol of the Holy Spirit. So, this sermon will only relate to folks who are thirsty and need Living Water. My sermon will only relate to you if you recognize a lack of fluid in your soul that needs to be refreshed to wipe away your discontentment and dissatisfaction with life and flush away the impurities controlling you.

Let me explain to you what thirst is. Thirst is a conscious craving or longing of the empty soul. Thirst means that you are in a spiritual dry place. If anyone, so no one is excluded from Jesus’ invitation. No matter how bad, how long, or how deep it is, all you have to do is be thirsty. If anyone is craving in their souls because of discontent, failure, weakness, sin, loss, or sickness, Jesus says, “Let that person come to Me.”

Church, this is not an altar call that we do at the end of the service. This is an invitation from Jesus to come to Him, and He will take care of your spiritual thirst. Verse 38 proves that to come to Christ and drink is the same as to believe in Him. Jesus invites you to come to Him, embrace Him, and partake of Him.

Now, I know what some of the religious and spiritual folks here today are saying in their heart.

I have already come to Jesus and accepted Him many years ago, and I don’t need to go to Him a second time.

If you are all Christians, that means everyone here has come to Jesus. You have accepted Jesus as your substitute. You have believed in Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins and the gift of eternal life. You have acknowledged that you are a sinner, you need a Savior, and you have come to Jesus for forgiveness. You say, Pastor Elijah, “ I have already come to Jesus.” And I hope that you have already come to Jesus, and if you haven't done so yet, I hope that before you leave here today, you will come to Jesus for salvation.

But if you read the whole passage and read the verse slowly, the passage says, “If anyone is thirsty, let Him come to me and drink.” Come to me means you must appropriate Jesus into the internal operation of your life. You are on your way to heaven because you have accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, which is very good. But it is not enough to heal thirty souls on earth. Jesus says you must come to Me and appropriate Me in every area of your life. Come to Me first. You must take of Jesus and allow Jesus to operate in you.

Many people today come to church for information only and read the Bible for information. Jesus did not die on the cross so that you can have information about Jesus. Jesus does not say, “Come to an information session about Me.” God doesn’t want to be an information center for your head. God wants to be a life experience for your heart. God wants you to experience some of heaven while you live here on earth.

And then we come to verse 38. He says, “As the Scripture said, ‘From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.” Notice church. He said that rivers of living water will flow from the innermost being. Here we come with the “Living Water.”

Illustration on the Living Water (Explain Very Slowly)

While preparing this sermon yesterday, I read on the news that a water crisis impacts millions of people in Columbia because the water reservoirs have reached historically low levels. The world is facing a water crisis because people struggle to get the quantity and quality of water they need. For Christians, the good news is that God has already placed a pump or reservoir inside our souls to produce flowing water.

This water, by the way, is not ordinary. It is Living Water, which means running water. Water that is full of life. Jesus says, “If you come to me and drink, I will place inside of you, in your innermost being a river, a stream of water that is alive because it is flowing. In other words, I will send you a flow that will bring you life. It is called the Living Water. So, I am going to bring life into your thirsty soul.” Jesus gives you a water pump. He provides every Christian with a water pump to pump the Living Water that He says He will put in your innermost being.

In Jeremiah 2:13, the prophet Jeremiah accused the people of Israel of committing two sins. “They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” God is our source of spiritual renewal, and Living Water is a life nourished by God.

So, if you have come to Christ, you have a pump inside of you designed to pump life, Living Water into your soul. When you accept Christ, God puts a pump inside your human spirit, and the pump, in verse 39, is the Holy Spirit. He says, by this, Jesus spoke of the Spirit. You heard me say this before about the Holy Spirit works in the life of a believer. The Holy Spirit invades your human spirit and gives life, spiritual life, inside your human spirit. And so, your body allows you to function in the physical world. Your soul allows you to function with you. Your spirit allows you to function with God. The soul is inside the body, and the spirit is inside the soul.

The Living Water moves from the spirit inside the soul, bringing healing, contentment, order, and strength into your soul so your soul can begin giving new information to your body because the Spirit has been infused with a pump called the person of the Holy Spirit, whose job it is to make the water flow into the soul. So, if your pump inside of you is not working, it is because your soul is out of order, and this is not a pump issue.

One reason people today are so mean to others is that they are so messed up in their souls and don’t know how to be nice. Folks today don’t want to serve other people because they only want to serve themselves because they are so messed up that they don't have any water to share with anybody else. The good news is that you are hooked up to a reservoir, which will keep flowing Living Water if you glorify Christ, spend time in His Word, and get close to Jesus.

Faith Appeal and Call to Action (Conclusion)

In closing, when you live in alignment with the Spirit, it transforms your soul completely. This is the Spirit’s job. This is the job of the Living Water. Water is a key to life. When that water flows, it becomes alive because it breathes life into what it touches. As a believer in Christ, you have a well of flowing living water coming up from your spirit, into your soul, and out of your body to breathe life.

The Holy Spirit is one of Jesus’ great promises to the church and every believer. The Holy Spirit is like a well pumping up water through you. The beauty is that you don’t have to go find life out there because you have this well flowing from here to bless out there.

Many Christians today are looking for something they already have, and that is a pump inside their innermost being that is producing life if they would recognize it and utilize it. The Holy Spirit is present in every believer’s life, and the Holy Spirit is a flowing stream that will never end, never stop, never run dry, and will flow from time into eternity, breathing in this life and the life to come. Water is one of the symbols of the Holy Spirit in the Bible. Water for washing is a symbol of the Word of God. Water satisfies thirst and produces faithfulness, so the Spirit of God satisfies the inner person and enables us to bear much fruit.

Jesus offers the folks living water during His day, and today, He is offering you living water and eternal satisfaction. The choice and decision are in your hands, so I encourage you to accept this invitation from Jesus if your soul is hungry and thirsty for Living Water.

Altar Call

And if you are here today and are lost, lack spiritual life, and need a Savior, I want to invite you to come to Jesus and accept Him as your Savior. Jesus invites thirsting souls to come to Him, not to the church or the preacher, but to Him and drink. I want you to go to Jesus right now, trust Him as your Lord and Savior, and take Him into your life as you would take a glass of water into your body. And if you are here today and need prayer or would like to rededicate your life to Christ, please come forward so we can pray for you.

Almighty Father, may it come to pass. May those who require knowledge of You experience the Living Water, liberation, and freedom. May all individuals who need to wholeheartedly dedicate their lives to Jesus, releasing the past and embracing the new life in Christ Jesus. Amen.

Let’s pray.

Benediction

My prayer for everyone, Lord, is that we will hunger and thirst for righteousness to satisfy our souls. I pray that we will follow Your voice, lean into You, and follow You faithfully this week. Lord, we thank You for a powerful time in Your word. In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen! God bless you, and thank you so much for spending time with us; we will see you next week at 10:30 a.m.