Streams of Living Water

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of sanctification and growth from John 7:37-39.

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It is an enormous privilege for me to be back with you in this church. It has been some time since I have been here, since before Daryle Worley was here. It is a treat not only to be back with you, but also to celebrate his third, God willing, of many years in ministry here. I would like to direct your attention this morning to John, chapter 7. Just three verses. John, chapter 7, verses 37 to 39. This is what Holy Scripture says.

“On the last and greatest day of the feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, ‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.’ By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.”

This is the Word of the Lord. Let us pray.

Now may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. We ask through Jesus Christ the Lord, amen.

For many years, I lived in England. I have landed at one or another of its airports again and again (I have no idea how many times) and marveled at the greenness of the vegetation. It’s not too surprising when you get that much rain. Only twice in perhaps 10 or 11 summers there, did I see the ground brown. Those were years of extraordinary drought by British standards. Circling into Heathrow, everything was brown.

The percentages are just the opposite coming into O’Hare in the summer. Most summers you come down and everything is brown for miles around. Just the odd summer you find so much rain around that everything seems green. If you land in the semi-arid states down in the southwest, absolutely everything is brown all the time except for these circles.

These circles where someone has dug a well, perhaps down into the Ogallala Aquifer and there is a spout of water that’s come up along some pipe that circles around and around and around and looking down you can see exactly where the irrigation is. Everything else is brown. We’ve all had such experiences. They drive home in visual ways the connection between water and life. Where there is no water, there is no life.

In semi-arid states like Israel and other Mid-Eastern countries or down in the southwest, often you have intermittent rains. In Israel an early rain, which makes the desert bloom and then the rain stops and everything seems dead. Dead as a dodo. Then the later rains come and everything blooms again. You have visual evidence that water and life are connected.

In a nutshell, that’s the connection both Jesus and his hearers (who are all agrarians, after all) presuppose in this metaphorical use of water in John 7, or more precisely, in the connection he draws between water and the life-giving Spirit. Where there is no life-giving Spirit, there is no life.

Yet for all of its fundamental simplicity, a simple metaphorical connection between water and Spirit, this passage carries layers of Old Testament allusions plus, I have to acknowledge, one or two disputed points. It is well worth our while to take a few minutes to think it through carefully, not only to understand what Jesus is teaching here but to see how it applies in our lives today. I think it will help to organize our study into three unequal parts.

First, the background passage in the Old Testament. “On the last and greatest day of the feast,” we’re told. Which feast? That’s already stipulated for us in chapter 7, verse 2. We’re told, “When the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles was near, Jesus’ brothers said to him …” and so forth. Then by the time we get to verse 37, “On the last and greatest day of the feast …” That is the Feast of Tabernacles, or sometimes called the Feast of Booths.

This was one of three great feasts that were originally established after the Exodus. The people of God, saved by God from slavery in Egypt, crossed the Red Sea. Then partly because of their own disobedience, they spent 40 years in wilderness wanderings, sort of nomads. They were in temporary dwellings until they entered into the Promised Land 40 years later.

As a result of that, God wanted them to remember the years of mobility, transience, homelessness when they lived in (we would say tents) temporary dwellings before God brought them into the Promised Land. Years where they were tested and tried, but also years when they were carefully looked after, when God provided them with all that they needed.

So we established the Feast of Tabernacles, the Feast of Booths. What the people were supposed to do was gather some branches from surrounding trees in the country and build little temporary shelters, booths. In fact, once people were living in towns and cities and so many of the houses had flat roofs in those days, sometimes they would build them right on top of their rooftops.

For a whole week, they were supposed to live in these booths to remember their history, to remember when God saved them from slavery, to remember that God looked after them, and also to remember that in some ways, they were pilgrims still. They had not yet reached the glory and the perfection of the consummation. They were still pilgrims.

It’s just a bit too easy to get attached to our houses here and to remember that there was a time when they lived in shanties, they lived in temporary dwellings and, thus, recall their pilgrimage and God’s grace. That was the origin of the Feast of Tabernacles or the Feast of Booths. During that week, there were various rites and ceremonies.

This is one of two things that establish this passage with the Old Testament background. It was a seven-day feast. On the seventh day (the rites had been developed a wee bit), a golden flagon filled with water at the pool of Siloam was carried in procession by the high priest to the temple. As the procession approached the Water Gate on the south side of the inner court, there were three loud blasts of a trumpet, a shofar, which was the trumpet of joy. It was an instrument of joy.

I suppose for our culture, a banjo. Did you ever hear a banjo played at a funeral? It’s an instrument of joy. You are happy with it. Those were the cultural associations with the shofar in the Old Testament. Three loud blasts of the shofar, a joyful trumpet, and the priest then processed around the altar with the flagon, and the pilgrims watched, the choir sang the hallel, which is Psalms 113–118.

Then when they got to Psalm 118, every male pilgrim shook a lulav, which was a mix of willow and myrtle twigs tied with a piece of palm. That was always in the right hand. In the left hand, each pilgrim raised a piece of citrus fruit signaling the ingathering of the harvest, because this also happened to come at the harvest period.

It was a mixture of remembering God’s blessing in the past and also remembering God’s goodness even now in bringing the harvest in year by year, year by year. All cried, “Give thanks to the Lord! Give thanks to the Lord! Give thanks to the Lord!” Three times. Then the water was offered to God. It was poured out before the altar at the time of the morning sacrifice along with the wine offering that was also poured out to the Lord.

In Jewish thought, this pouring out of water at the Feast of Tabernacles was symbolic of God pouring out his Holy Spirit in the last days. Yes, God had saved them in the past. Yes, they had lived their lives in these temporary shanties in the past. God had provided them with all that they needed to live and survive. In intervening years, he brought in the harvest, year by year.

But there was a time coming when God would pour out his Spirit in abundance upon them, so that the same feast looked backward and forward in anticipation. It signaled a time when the life-giving Spirit would be poured out on the people of God, flowing over the whole earth. A time expected in the Messianic age.

“On the last and greatest day of the feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, ‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.’ ” In fact, once every seven years, the feast went to an eighth day. It was normally a seven-day feast, but prescribed already by Moses, every seven years on the last day, which usually was a special day, the eighth day (that’s what’s going on in Nehemiah, incidentally) they had a Bible conference.

Because, after all, many people in those days were illiterate. Even if they could read, they didn’t own their own copies of what we call the Old Testament. That was far too expensive. There were no printing presses. So they made a point then of teaching the Bible at these conferences, but especially every seven years they would take time before the whole assembly to read huge chunks of Torah, the Law of God.

That was the time then when the booths were taken down. So in a sense it was the end of this festivity, but still upholding the Word of God. There is evidence that in the first century when people spoke of the last day of the feast, they really meant the eighth day. That was so with the historian Josephus, for example, who writes about the same time Paul does. When he speaks of the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles, he means the eighth day.

So imagine it. They’ve had all of this feasting. The booths have been built. Now they’re all coming down. The people are still gathered. They remembered yesterday, the water flagon ceremony, but now the feast is over. The Word of God is being read, and Jesus stands up and says, “You’ve had the ceremony. You’ve seen the water, but the time of fulfillment is at hand. If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.”

So that, just as in various ways in John’s gospel, Jesus presents himself as the fulfillment of Passover. He himself is the Lamb who is slain. So he fulfills other feasts and other rites. He fulfills elsewhere Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when the blood of bull and goat was taken by the high priest behind the curtain to the Most Holy Place to be offered up before God, both for the sins of the priest and for the sins of the people.

Jesus is the one who sheds his blood to open up the veil into the very presence of God for all of God’s people to approach him. Just as Jesus fulfills Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, so also he fulfills this feast and promises life-giving water, the gift of the Spirit. There are many Old Testament texts that connect water and life, water and Holy Spirit. Let me just give you a small sampling.

Zechariah 14 ties the Feast of Tabernacles at harvest with good rainfall. Zechariah 14 was read in the early Jewish liturgies on the first day of the feast. Isaiah 12: “With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.” You can hear the metaphor running there, seven hundred years before Christ.

In Isaiah 55, shortly after the great passage on the suffering servant, we read: “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good.”

Or Ezekiel 47, a picture of the waters of life coming from the throne of God, picked up again in Revelation. Isaiah 58: “The Lord will guide you always.… You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.” This is the imagery that runs everywhere in the Bible. In a semi-arid state like Israel, it’s not too surprising how often water was connected with life.

Then the Old Testament writers, in anticipation of what was yet to come, made the further connection with the promise of the Spirit. But to get to the Old Testament background more closely we have to make a decision about exactly how to translate this text. I’m sure there are a variety of Bibles here this morning. When I was reading this text some of you were saying, “That’s not quite what my Bible says.”

I’ll tell you why. When the New Testament was written in Greek, they didn’t use punctuation marks, or very few of them. You’re supposed to put them in. In fact, they usually didn’t even use spaces. So they didn’t put spaces between their words and they didn’t use punctuation marks. Usually that’s not a problem. You just read it anyway. But every once in a while, you have to think, “Do I put a period here or do I put a period there?”

This is one of those rare places. It turns out that it makes a difference in how you read it. If you’re following along in the text, I’m reading from the NIV, and the NIV footnote has it another way, I don’t really care which version you’re reading. Let me try to explain the two. Then you’ll see what’s going on.

Both represent truth taught in Scripture incidentally, but I’ll tell you why I think one is right. “On the last and greatest day of the feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice,” Here’s one way of reading it. “ ‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.’ ”

In this case, the streams of living water are flowing from within the believer. If you’re looking for an Old Testament Scripture that actually describes this, you must find some sort of Scripture that talks about water and life rushing up from within the believer’s life. Right? But there’s another way of punctuating it. “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me. And let him drink, whoever believes in me. As the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.”

Now it could refer to Christ, because you can have a full period before “as the Scripture has said.” Let me read it again. “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me. And let him drink, whoever believes in me. As the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him. [That is, within the one who provides all of this water … me.]”

That’s sometimes called the christological interpretation. In that case, you are looking for an Old Testament passage that promises that the Messiah will bring forth water. Now in one sense, this passage really is saying that it is the Messiah that brings forth this water since Jesus has just finished saying, “Come to me and drink.” So clearly it does come from within him.

Yet I still think that the first interpretation is right. It has an enormous bearing on us, as we’ll see in a moment. The reason is several fold, but above all because this little expression “whoever believes in me” is found 41 times in John. Everywhere else, without exception, without debate, “whoever believes in me” begins the sentence.

I think it is very unlikely that we should be rendering this, “If anyone is thirsty let him come to me. And let him drink whoever believes in me.” Because “whoever believes in me” is not beginning the sentence. Now if that’s the case then, we have to read it this way. “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.”

This is focusing on how this life-giving Spirit wells up within the believer and spills out to do good elsewhere. Moreover, this theme has already been treated by Christ in John 4 in the passage that was effectively sung about in the duet where the woman at the well receives water of life from Christ. We read John 4:13–14. “Everyone who drinks from this water …” That is the water in the well. “… will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up unto eternal life.”

It’s the spring of water now welling up in him. It comes from Christ. It’s what Christ provides, but now it wells up within the individual, thus transforming the individual, providing water, life, vitality. One remembers, for example, Psalm 1. The unrighteous person is the one who follows the counsel of the ungodly and develops the habits of sinners, but the righteous by contrast are those of whom it is said, “His delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law he meditates day and night.”

Then metaphorically, “He shall be like a tree planted by streams of water whose leaf does not wither and who bears fruit in season.” The vitality, the life, the water is within the believer transforming them and making them spiritually vital people. In that sense, “as Scripture says” refers to the preceding. That is, it refers to individuals who have been transformed by this water.

Now there is one Old Testament text that brings all of these allusions together. It’s the one that Pastor Daryle Worley read to you. Nehemiah, chapter 8 and 9. In that context, the people of God have returned from exile. They are discouraged and broken and beaten, but now under Nehemiah’s leadership, the wall has been rebuilt. They are beginning to feel secure.

He leads them in a Bible conference. It’s described in the verses immediately before the ones that Daryle Worley read. Ezra, the scribe, comes and he begins to teach the people. We read in Nehemiah, chapter 8, that he trained a whole lot of the Levites to help them in the exposition. We are told that, “They read from the Book of the Law …” Nehemiah 8:8, “… making it clear.” That means translating it, because the Bible was written in Hebrew and the people at this point spoke Aramaic.

“They read from the Book of the Law, then they translated it, giving it meaning so that the people could understand what was being read.” They had a whole Bible conference. Then most people went home and the fathers and the leaders stayed for an extra day. They were taught all about the Feast of Tabernacles, because that was coming up on the calendar.

The fathers and the leaders received some extra training about the significance of the Feast of Tabernacles. They had two weeks to prepare, and they led the whole nation in gathering these twigs and branches to make their little shanties. They had the whole feast of seven days of a Bible conference and on the last day, this great prayer of confession and a renewing of the covenant before God.

In this prayer of confession, these are the themes that circle around. It’s the Feast of Tabernacles, a whole seven-day conference. There’s reference to manna, the bread of heaven (which is also picked up in John, chapter 6), to water from the rock, the promise of the good Spirit who comes to us and transforms us, answering our thirst. All of those themes are there.

Now Jesus says, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. This is the end of your exile. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said …” That is, as it has already taken place in time past when God met you by his Spirit coming out of the wilderness, coming out of exile. “… as the Scripture has said, now streams of living water will flow up from within him. By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive.”

Here’s the Old Testament background, and for those who were steeped in it, as Jesus’ hearers were, the overtones, the promises were rich and evocative, giving them lots to think about and turn over in their minds as they wondered how this applied to them.

Secondly, far more briefly, we should remember the context of this passage in John’s gospel, for John’s gospel says a lot of things about the Holy Spirit. I will mention only two or three. Already in John, chapter 1, verse 33, a theme that is picked up in all four gospels, we’re told that although John the Baptist baptized in water, Jesus would come and baptize in Holy Spirit.

In John 3, we’re told about a new birth that comes in water and Spirit. This is picking up a passage from Ezekiel. The water signifies purity, cleanliness, cleaning. The Spirit signifies transformation, power to change direction and be renewed, like starting life over. It’s a brand-new birth, a new origin as God plants his Spirit within you.

In John 14–16, Jesus, on the very eve of his death, speaks of the promise of the Spirit, the Spirit of truth, the comforter who is coming who will be with the believers and will be in them. He will convict them of sin, he will teach them righteousness, and he will remind them of all of Jesus’ words.

God, the triune God, Father and Son will make their presence known in the believer’s life through the promised Spirit who was about to be given, poured out in the wake of Jesus’ death and resurrection. In other words, we’re to read this passage in John 7 in the light of the full theme of the promise of the Holy Spirit who comes to us because of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Now then, finally, let us follow the argument of the passage in its immediate flow. The claim is made in verses 37 and 38. Jesus is the ultimate Feast of Tabernacles. If we are to find our needs met: our need for God, our need for forgiveness, our need for relationship with him.… If we are thirsty in our own souls, then Jesus says, “Come to me. And whoever believes in me, as the Scripture itself has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.”

Then the explanation is given. Verse 39: “By this he meant the Spirit …” That is, he refers to water, but this was a metaphor for the Spirit, “… whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.” Now here it is important to say two crucial things.

First, this does not mean that there is no sense in which the Spirit is poured out in the Old Testament. Transparently, that’s not the case. After all, we just finished reading Nehemiah 8 and 9, when the people look back on the time when the Spirit had led them in the wilderness and helped them in a variety of ways.

Yet again and again in the New Testament you read these sorts of words about how the Spirit wasn’t really given until you came to Christ and to what flowed from the cross and resurrection. Do you recall the new things that come out of Christ? In the New Testament we read that we are in a new age, that we belong to a new creation. We are under a new covenant. We have new life. We have experienced a new exodus. We enjoy a new birth. New, new, new, new, new, new.

That’s what’s going on here. You haven’t had the Spirit like this before. There is a ratcheting up of God’s good gifts as you move through the Bible. Let me give you an example and you will see right away what’s going on. In the Old Testament at the time of Moses, God promises in the book of Leviticus, “I will be their God and they will be my people and I will dwell with them.”

What does that mean? Well in the context of the time, God enters into a covenantal relationship with his people, that’s correct, but when he says, “I will be with them,” the mode in which he is with them, displays himself with them, is in the tabernacle. That proto-temple when God manifested himself in glory in the Most Holy Place, and only the high priest could enter into the very presence of God only once a year, and even then only with the blood of bull and goats.

The people’s access to God was thus mediated by the priests. Glory came down on the tabernacle. Yes, yes, yes. Then you were to fear approaching too closely. Then, once in a while, the glory would lift up and move off. Then it was just a tent. The Levites could wrap it all up, put it on their shoulders, carry it, and they would follow the glory to the next place in the wilderness wanderings.

God would designate a place and they would unpack the tent underneath the glory. The glory would descend and then back off. You approach this God only on his terms, by the blood that is mandated only once a year through the person that’s mandated, the high priest. Anyone else who dares approach this God, dies.

Thus God said, “I will be their God. They will be my people. I will dwell with them.” He dwelt with them in this peculiar manifestation, bound up with a proto-temple, with this tabernacle. Eventually, they enter into this Promised Land and eventually under Solomon the temple is built. The glory descends on that first dedication day, so powerful that the various priests and Levites just scatter and leave it alone for God in his glory.

God says, “I will be their God. They will be my people. I shall dwell among them.” Then by the time you get to Jeremiah and Ezekiel, God is saying the same thing but meaning something different. Sixth century BC, now he’s promising to come in a new covenant, and when he comes in a new covenant, again he says, “I will be their God. They will be my people. I will dwell among them.”

Yet under the terms of this new covenant, which would arrive six centuries later with the coming of Jesus himself, there’s no tabernacle. There’s no glory falling on a tent. In what sense does God dwell among us? He dwells among us in the terms of the new covenant.

He comes upon us in the wake of the incarnation and death and resurrection of Jesus. He comes upon us by his Spirit, and we are called the temple of God. Jesus is the temple of God in one sense. He’s the meeting place between God and his people. In another sense, we the church, the people of God, are his temple and the Spirit of God comes upon us.

In this sense, the Spirit had not fallen on the people of the Old Testament. God had manifested himself somewhat differently. There in the Old Testament when he said, “I will dwell among them” he meant something just a bit different from what he means under the terms of the new covenant. Then you turn to the end of the Bible, to Revelation 21 and 22.

There God anticipates the consummation, the dawning of the new heaven and the new earth. There again God says, “I will be their God and they will be my people. I will dwell among them.” There, it is so intense that there is no more sin and no more decay and no more death, “for the old order of things …” we’re told, “… has passed away.”

“Look,” God says, “I make everything new!” We’re even told that in the New Jerusalem, in the city of God where all of God’s people dwell, “There is no more temple,” John says, “I saw no temple in that city for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.” That is, all of God’s people are always, forever, in the presence of God.

In other words, the intensity of this experience of God, of God dwelling with us, has been ratcheted up to the perfection of the consummation. So also in many, many categories as you work through the Old Testament, God, in fulfilling his plan of redemption, ratchets things up, ratchets things up, ratchets things up until finally we anticipate the new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteousness.

So in Jesus’ day, what you find here is a huge ratcheting up from the experiences of the old covenant to what is experienced now as the Spirit is poured out upon God’s people in intimacy, on all of God’s people, not just prophet and priest and king. Not in temporary glory, but he takes up his dwelling within believers in this new degree, this new way. One begins to stumble for words to find an adequate way of describing it.

Here Jesus is anticipating those Old Testament anticipations. “By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive.” So following on Jesus’ death and resurrection, there is Pentecost and the pouring out of the Spirit, all following on Christ’s death and resurrection.

That brings us to the second thing we must observe about verse 39. “Up to this time,” we’re told, “the Spirit had not been given in this new way, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.” In John’s gospel, Jesus’ glorification takes place when he is lifted up first on the cross, then out of the death of the tomb, and finally to the right hand of the majesty on high. He returns to the glory that he had with the Father before the world began. That’s what is meant by his glorification.

His glorification in John’s gospel is a huge construct. He returns home to glory. How? By the bitterness of the cross. Through the blackness of death. And resurrection, until he returns to the right hand of the majesty on high. There, according to his own teaching laid out again and again in John, chapter 14–16, “If I return to the Father, I will send my Spirit, I will send the comforter. In the wake of my glorification, the Father will send the comforter.”

This becomes a powerful way of saying that all that we experience of God by his Spirit throughout all of this age is achieved by Christ’s death, resurrection, and glorification. All of it. It is profoundly mistaken, even dangerous, somehow to abstract what Jesus did from the gift of the Spirit, as if what Jesus did was sort of give us an escape ticket out of hell.

We get our sins forgiven and then the real experience with God starts after that. Pursue the Holy Spirit. It’s a huge mistake. Rather, everything that we know of sin’s forgiveness was achieved by Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension. He bore our sins in his own body on the tree. He died our death.

He rose to newness of life. He sits on the right hand of the Father as our advocate, the one who speaks to the Father in our defense. It’s all achieved by Christ and his death. Then he pours out the Spirit upon us, the Spirit who comes to us and mediates God’s presence to us. All this achieved because of what Christ did on the cross.

Ultimately, if we have hope of a new heaven and a new earth, of resurrection bodies, of a morally transformed universe in which there is no more sickness or decay or anything else, all of it has been achieved because of what Christ did on the cross. Now Jesus says, “Come to me.” He knows he is heading to the cross.

What he achieves there will mean the pouring out of the Spirit of God upon his people, so, “Come to me and drink.” You come to Christ even in these days, even before the Spirit is poured out. The Spirit has not yet been given, not in this sense, but you come to Jesus and you hang on to him, for now you are approaching the cross and the resurrection and the ascension and the gift of the Spirit, Pentecost itself, and all that flows from it.

Biblically faithful Christianity teaches a lot of truth. That’s correct. It teaches a lot of morality. That’s correct. But it also provides experience of God by the Holy Spirit, who in the wake of what Jesus has done, comes to us and convicts us of sin, makes us ashamed of things we say and do that we ought not to say and do. The Spirit makes us ashamed of what we don’t say and do that we ought to do. The Spirit gives us glimpses of how wonderful holiness is. He convicts us of sin.

He shows us the emptiness of our own righteousness, but then he also comes to us in renewal and gives us new birth. We begin to experience in our own lives, individually and corporately as the people of God, what it means to say that the Father and the Son come and take up their dwelling in us by the Spirit. That’s part of the language of John 14–16.

The Spirit manifests himself in believers who forgive one another and love one another because they know they have been so loved and so forgiven themselves. The Spirit is described by Paul as the kind of down payment of all of the glory that is yet to come, the glory of transformed existence when there will no longer be any contesting of Christ’s reign, when there will no longer be any tearing apart in our lives between the old nature that still wants to hang onto sin and this new glorious transformed nature that hungers after holiness and godliness.

One day, there will only be utter satisfaction in God and his holiness. Already we taste that. Converted people know what that means. Sin is.… God help us, it still has its attractions to our dark side, to our old nature. Yet because of the transformation within, it also seems repulsive and ugly and at best mediocre and profoundly distasteful. It’s evil. It fights against God. Suddenly now we want things we never wanted before. We want holiness. We want God and his Word.

We want to learn to love the brothers and sisters in Christ. We want to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength and our neighbors as ourselves because the Holy Spirit has been poured out since Jesus has been glorified. That’s why the gospel must never, ever be thought of as something that sort of gives us clearance from hell and then after that you start with your discipleship and your experience of the Spirit and sorting out your gifts in some sort of mechanistic two-part syndrome.

You begin with Jesus. You get that part done. That’s done. Now you get on to the Spirit. No, no, not once, not ever. The gospel is the comprehensive glory. It is the good news. Christ has secured it all by his death and resurrection and glorification. Now the Spirit is poured out upon us. So Jesus does not say, “Okay, after you’ve come to me, then that’s done. Now part two, go to the Spirit.” That’s not what he says.

He says, “If you’re thirsty, come to me. For I am the one, because of my death and burial and resurrection, because of my glorification to the right hand of the Father on high, I am the one who pours out the blessed Holy Spirit. Come to me and drink and be satisfied.” I do not know you, but I am sure that there are some here today who have never closed with Christ, who don’t really know experientially what I’m talking about.

I beg of you, where you sit, now lift your heart heavenward and say, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner. Christ Jesus, I do come to you. Pour out your Spirit upon me and give me this new birth.” For all of us, even those of us who’ve walked with Christ a long time, we must come back to Christ again and again and again and discover that he is the one who even now pours out his Spirit upon us, individually and corporately in the life of the church. We discover afresh, when we have him, we do not thirst. Let us pray.

Forgive us, Lord, when our understanding of spirituality is so mechanical we think it reduces to technique. O Lord God, remind us that it is not so and return us to Christ and all that he has secured on our behalf. Because your dear Son has died and borne our guilt, because he has been accepted by you in the resurrection, because he ever lives to intercede for us, because he has poured out his Spirit upon us, O Lord God, fill us afresh with this self-same Spirit that we may keep in step with the Spirit in anticipation of the glory yet to come, world without end. In Jesus’ name, amen.