"If you knew the gift of God," Jesus spoke to the woman at the well, "you would ask, and I would give you, a spring of water welling up to eternal life" (Jn. 4:10).
One of the very first verses that "spoke" to me in the bible was Is. 12:3: With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. Later, when I came to John 4:10, I remembered how much I had loved the passage from Isaiah. What Jesus was offering the Samaritan woman was the gift of JOY! Now, "salvation" may be to abstract an idea to excite many people, but, really, who does not want JOY?
Many people seek happiness for much of their lives, only to discover that what they were really looking for all along was joy --- joy that persists even when life fails to make us "happy." And that joy has only one source: Jesus. It's what He came to give us: My joy I give to you, not as the world gives...
It's the joy He experiences from and with the Father of all life, the joy that 'overcomes the world,' the joy He died that we might experience. Faith, after all, is not an intellectual concept. It is experiential. A person believes she understands what love is --- until she experiences it. And then she knows what cannot be explained.
The joy Jesus wants us to experience is one of the 'fruits' of the Holy Spirit; that is, it is the result of the Holy Spirit dwelling within us. We cannot manufacture it, or give it to ourselves. It is sheer gift -- and one of the signs that the Spirit of Jesus dwells within us.
If I could have anything in the world that I wanted, this is what I would ask: that all those I love would discover the gift of Joy within themselves, that the Holy Spirit would teach them the joy that comes from being drawn into fellowship with the God who loves them without limit -- the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Joy is a gift that we must want if we are to experience it. Jesus taught us to ask the Father for the "good gift" of the Holy Spirit: Ask, Seek, Knock......If you, evil as you are, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father give the Spirit to those who ask.
To awaken a desire for the Gift of God, it often helps to know what it is we are asking FOR. The following scriptures are a beginning. Take a week to look up and write out each reference in a notebook. At the end of the week, you might notice a kind of thirst welling up in your spirit -- the thirst that drove the Samaritan woman to ask and to receive the Holy Spirit: Please, Sir, give me this water!
John 7: 38-39
Ezekiel 47:1-12
Isaiah 44:3-4
Isaiah 55:1
Isaiah 58:11
Revelation 22:1-2
Ask the Father for what you desire -- and then let's meet again next week!
No comments:
Post a Comment