Your Life's Living Water

by Meriam Matthews

Fall 2003

The Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ colors, texturizes and gives purity to our lives. Without Him, we are dead in our sins and dead to the sanctification process by which we grow daily in Christ. The powerful love of the Holy Spirit is our guide on the rocky and dangerous precipice on which we live out our daily lives. Without Him as our ever-present Living Water of life, we may trip and fall to dangers we cannot even imagine. But if we pay attention to the small voice inside of us telling us to do right, we obey the Holy Spirit's leading. Like water in a parched barren desert, the Living Water of the Spirit of Christ brings again to life all the possibilities of attaining the Mind of Christ. His voice speaks to us every moment, but we hear only when we listen. It is the difference between hearing static and hearing a symphony. The voice of the Holy Spirit does not shout. He may whisper persistently and He may be gentle and He may be as clear as Caribbean waters, but in all cases, His voice is unmistakable. He speaks to us so that through His love for us, He may have us grow in Him and bear fruit.  

Nothing else sounds like the song of the nightingale. Nothing else sounds like the rain falling softly on autumn leaves. Nothing sounds like or feels like the voice of the Holy Spirit when He speaks to us. The Father sent His Son and it is the Son's Spirit which lives in us, sent to us at Pentecost to be our indwelling companion, counselor and comforter. We choose at our peril to ignore His voice, but we choose to our benefit to listen, because He will never counsel us to do that which is not to our greater good and hence to the greater good of mankind.

Imagine your life without beauty and light. Imagine you live in an arid desert -- waterless, colorless and heavy-aired, soundless. If you can imagine life this way, you have peered into your own life without the Holy Spirit. It is oftentimes only when you recognize the Holy Spirit's work in your life that you can see that the life you led before His voice was exactly that lifeless place.

But the point is this: It is much like the woman who has been anemic her whole life but did not know she could feel better until a quite accidental diagnosis was made and a remedy deliberately prescribed. She believed everybody felt as she did -- tired and apathetic. Only after becoming cured could she see how she was functioning on only two of her eight cylinders, as it were.

So it is when the Holy Spirit indwells your life on a moment-to-moment basis. Suddenly life becomes multi-dimensional, brightly lit from within and pregnant with anticipation.  Life takes on a lovely patina, a sheen. You blossom like a tropical flower, aflame with vibrant color and a potent energy to do that which is godly and good. It is as though a dying flower was supernaturally resurrected with a mere drop of Living Water. You arrive suddenly at the fullness of a life never before seen by blinded eyes, felt with stony hearts nor heard with deafened ears.

The Holy Spirit is our compass, our rudder on starless nights at sea when all is black. He is the life-giving sun to the dank prison of Self. He is the love in a fallen world, the comfort in the loneliness of loss and the constant Companion of the empty soul. He turns all that breaks our hearts into joyful treasured moments of retrospection. He turns gray to blazing swirling colors. He makes the darkness of our spirit sparkle with excitement. He does all we cannot do for ourselves and in so doing, He makes us realize our total dependence on Him. Without the strength to yield our broken weakness to His will, we live half a life, anemic, never even knowing we are ill.

Stand under the Fountain of Living Water and drink. Turn your face to the heavens, stretch up your welcoming arms to the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ, and watch your life regenerate. Become all He wants you to be, and all you only imagined you could be -  through Him.