Introduction
Back in 1997, when Kathie was pregnant with Ben, we went on a
mountain bike ride while on holiday in the south of France. We started off
whizzing downhill at great speed from a town in the hills called Lodeve. I
guess we must have travelled about 10-15 miles and it was a baking hot summer’s
day.
It may have been a bank holiday weekend. In any case, no shops were
open and we badly miscalculated the amount of water we needed to take with us.
We soon became quite dehydrated. Kathie felt really ill.
So we decided that I should do the manly thing and cycle back alone,
all the way up the hill to the holiday home, get the car, and drive back to
pick her up while she rested in the shade. Riding back, I honestly thought at
one point I was going to die.
When I finally got back, I realised Kathie had the keys to the
house. Our three children were out with the friends we were holidaying with. So
I lifted a wheelie bin onto the car roof and climbed over a high wall into the
property.
Just behind that wall there was a big drop into a swimming pool
and I just flopped into it, completely exhausted. That chlorinated pool water,
probably peed in by all three kids all week, tasted like the elixir of paradise!
I’ll never forget it.
And when I read Ezekiel 47 about the river of life, I remember
what acute, life-threatening thirst feels like. I’ll come back to that a bit
later.
Ezekiel
and the River of God
This
is the third of three talks between Easter and Pentecost on the book of
Ezekiel. Ezekiel, as you may know if you have been here the last couple of
weeks, was a young priest who had been forcibly removed from his home in
Jerusalem and had to live as an exile in Babylon, hundreds of miles to the east.
And
while he’s there, with no way home, just doing the best he can, God gives him a
series of amazing visions, of which this is the last.
He
is shown a river dribbling gently out of the newly built temple in Jerusalem,
and he notices that it’s getting deeper and deeper, even though it has no
tributaries running into it to swell the flow.
It
is just one source, from the presence of God himself, and down the hill it runs
from a dribble, to a trickle, to a creek, to a brook, to a stream, to a river,
to a torrent through the Arabah desert until it tips like a mighty cataract
into the Dead Sea.
What is this? Is it a prophecy about an actual river? Some people think it is
and that it will start to flow when the Lord returns. Zechariah 14 says that
when the Messiah comes to the Mount of Olives, two great rivers will gush out
from Zion; one westwards towards the Mediterranean and the other, like this
one, eastwards down to the Dead Sea. Well, maybe…
But the early church fathers
saw this river in more symbolic terms as a vision of the increase and outpouring
of the Holy Spirit. I think they got it right.
All the way through Scripture, and not just
when the Lord comes back, there is a running river, a place of refreshment and
revival and life.
Right back where it all starts in Genesis 2,
there are streams that irrigate paradise. In the very last chapter of the
Bible, Revelation 22, the river is still flowing, clear as crystal, watering
the tree of life with fruit all year round and leaves that make the sick well again.
It’s about heavenly provision and supernatural healing.
And all the way through God’s word, this river runs. Psalms 36 and 46 speak of drinking from God’s river of delights, a source whose streams make glad the city of God. It’s about happiness and pleasure.
Zechariah 13 and 14 speak of a fountain of pure,
living water that washes away people’s dirtiness and shame. It’s about purity
and cleansing.
Isaiah 43 speaks of God doing a new thing; streams
springing up in the wasteland and a watered wilderness. It’s about change.
Joel 3 also speaks of a source flowing out of
the Lord’s house and water the valley of acacias. What a gorgeous picture of
lush abundance and life!
For Ezekiel, looking at all this, it was a vision of the future, of
what God wanted for his humiliated people. Ezekiel 47 is, in fact, one of the
defining passages of the Old Testament in looking forward to what will happen
when Jesus comes. It’s about increase and growth – the waters
run ever deeper, ever faster, ever louder.
And when Jesus does arrive, he speaks in John 4 about life-giving water that you put to your dried, cracked lips and you never thirst again. Then three chapters later he calls out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink, and rivers of living water will flow from within them.”
What is this river if not the very presence
of God and the soul-refreshing, life-giving, spiritually reviving outpouring of
his mercy and grace? There’s nothing else like it. It’s the place to be.
When I was a boy, my dad used to read me The Wind in the Willows. Have any of you read that book?
There’s a scene near the beginning where Mole meets Rat, who’s actually a water vole, but never mind...
“So-this-is-a-river?”
says Mole.
"The
River," corrects Rat.
"And you
really live by the river? What a jolly life!" says Mole.
"By it and
with it and on it and in it," says Rat. "It's brother and sister to
me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It's
my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not worth having,
and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing.”
If you’re
wondering what it’s like to swim in the river of God’s presence and pleasure
and blessing, well, I agree with Rat, what it hasn't got is not worth having,
and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing.
Thirsty World
We should remind
ourselves often how desperately thirsty our world is. The whole earth is longing for this river. Our society is spiritually
dried out, it craves and yearns for this water of life.
Kilroy J. Oldster is an American Trial Attorney.
He’s seen a lot of crime in his career. He’s seen some dark stuff. He wrote a
book called Dead Toad Scrolls in which he says, “Every road leads to
sorrow. All aspects that make life beautiful – friendship, love, art, and truth
– will end... we came from nothingness and will return to the great void that
birthed us.”
The human heart is parched. It’s like an arid
desert, panting, thirsting, gasping for life-giving water.
Bertrand
Russell was a leading and vocal atheist in the mid-20th Century.
He wrote an essay called Why I Am Not a Christian.
But
when his daughter wrote a biography of her father she said this: “Somewhere in the back of my
father’s mind and at the bottom of his heart, in the depths of his soul, there
was an empty space that had once been filled by God and he never found anything
else to put in it.”
Pascal said there’s a God shaped-hole in
every human heart. We have this instinctive longing for the watered garden of Eden.
We look over our four score years and ten and say, “Is that it? Is this all
there is? It’s not enough. There must be more. Where can I drink?”
Every 12 years about 120 million pilgrims head
off for the Kumbh Mela in India. Something inside them knows there’s a river of life somewhere. And they head for a
literal river, the Ganges.
They know they are spiritually unclean and tainted.
They know they need salvation and cleansing. Their hearts tell them that every
day. They walk for days to congregate in a great mass of humanity dipping
themselves in this squalid, brown, bacterially infected, mosquito ridden water,
hoping somehow to wash their sins away.
Upstream there are toilet drains that empty into
the Ganges, but such is the desperation of some pilgrims, that they drink the
waters hoping they’re sacred, looking for purity and forgiveness.
The whole world is
a scorched spiritual wilderness.
And the devil loves the desert. The first
time he appears in the Gospels is in the desert. He gravitates to dry and
barren wastelands, Death Valley, where nothing lives and nothing grows.
Getting into the River of Life
If you’ve ever been a victim of flooding you
know how devastating it is. The nearest I’ve got to it is a thoroughly miserable
week’s camping in torrential rain where my leaking tent proved to be completely
useless, the groundsheet got left at home, and my bedding ended up like a waterlogged
sponge. That was 1996. I vowed never
to camp again and I have kept my word.
A few weeks ago, the grandchildren were
staying and – you know when you’ve got a two-year-old in the house and it goes very quiet? Well, I was working in my
office when suddenly I heard Kathie yell from the kitchen “Oh no!”
One of our two-year olds had decided it would
be a great idea to turn the kitchen tap on and leave it running. By the time
Kathie got there, it was like a scene from Paddington Bear. Water was running
down the front of the kitchen cabinets and starting to spread all over the
floor.
In Ezekiel 47, God leaves the taps on in the temple and causes a flood
that gets deeper and deeper. But instead of causing damage and devastation,
it’s a life-giving source that flows out from the presence of God, to irrigate
desert places of dryness and lifelessness.
People’s lives produce rotten fruit, leaves that
curl up brown and dry. But where the river flows, fruit trees spring up on the riverbanks. The
fruit never fails. The leaves on the trees never wither. Salt water becomes
fresh. Even
the Dead Sea comes to life and begins to teem with fish.
And notice that Ezekiel doesn’t just watch.
He is not a casual observer; he is invited into this flowing stream.
The invitation is to step into the river of
life, and ever deeper into the experience of God’s presence.
Ezekiel is very specific about the aspect of
the temple and the direction of the flowing water.
He says the temple faced east. That’s where
he was, in Babylon. Due east. The east was always for God’s people the
direction of danger, of hostility, of foreigners, of enemies, of those estranged
from God. But the water runs out towards the east.
You don’t have to go up the hill to find it;
the river comes down the hill to you. Grace flows out to lonely, dry, desert
places, to the Arabah.
But notice also, that it flows out east from
the temple on the south side, which is the side where all the pilgrims went
out. In other words, this stream of life-giving water is following the people
of God as they leave worship.
So it’s an invitation to journey deeper and deeper in our experience of
God, having encountered him and feasted on his presence in worship.
And here’s the invitation:
First of all, you’re ankle deep. Just dipping
your toe in. This is maybe like when you first become aware of God and the life
of faith. It’s unlike anything you’ve known before. Perhaps you venture to
splash about a bit as the experience is so new and exhilarating. But some
people never go further than this. All their life is spent in the spiritual
shallows where it’s perfectly safe.
But the invitation is to journey further, to
go knee deep. Wading knee deep is a bit harder than when the water is up to
your ankles.
The knees naturally remind us of prayer.
Whenever we go further in prayer we go further into God.
Thy Kingdom Come, this season of prayer we
are in now between Ascension and Pentecost, is challenging us to pray for
people to come to faith in Jesus Christ. Thousands are uniting together to ask
God for an outpouring of the Spirit. I hope you will wade deeper into the river
of God in these days.
But the invitation is to go yet deeper– up to
the waist. In waist-deep water your feet are still on the ground but you can’t
run anymore. You are more affected by the current of the river. You have less
control of where and how fast you go.
In Ephesians 6, it says to fit around your
waist the belt of truth, so you might see water up to the waist as maybe a
reminder of your need to go deeper in your engagement with God’s word.
Finally, the waters are too deep for your
toes to touch the riverbed. You’re at the mercy of the current and you have to
swim. Ezekiel says it flows out to the Arabah (which in Hebrew literally means “desolate
and dry area”). It pours into the Dead Sea, a great depression at the lowest
point on the earth’s surface.
The Dead Sea is ten times saltier than the
ocean. Nothing lives in its toxic brine.
But that’s where the river goes; towards
desert places. The river of God brings complete transformation. Nothing stays
the same when God is at work. Marshes and deserts break out into blossom.
Violent career criminals go straight and become
responsible fathers. Miserable people cheer up and become filled with joy.
Lonely people find a family. Sick people get well. Dead churches come alive.
Tight old misers become joyful and generous givers. Self-centred people start
to look to other people’s needs.
This is what happens when the people of God
leave the place of worship, full of the Holy Spirit; they become conduits of
blessing and healing all the way to the great depression of spiritual death and
decay.
Are you going to step forward into deeper
waters today? For some, that’ll be from dry ground to ankle deep. For others it
will mean from the ankles to the knees. For still others the year ahead is
about going from knee-deep to waist-deep. And for some, it’s time to launch off
in total surrender, to wherever God leads, to the exhilaration of being out of
your depth.
Some of you have swam in deep waters before but
you’re back on dry ground now. Don’t waste your life just looking at it from
the banks. God is calling some of you this morning to step back into the
current and let God be God.
Let’s stand to pray…
Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 13 May 2018
No comments:
Post a Comment