Guest Post – Drink the Water!

The following is a guest post from my uncle, Randy Curry, who lives in Stroud, Oklahoma.  Randy has always had a profound spiritual influence on my life, and he daily sends encouragements and exhortations from the Bible to his friends and family via email.  I wanted to share the following email that he sent Friday because of how desperately we Christians (as well as non-Christians!) need to hear this message.

Randy, thanks for your insight, your personal example, and most of all for your love for and devotion to Christ!

John 4:10
Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

1 Thes 5:16-18
Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

Yesterday afternoon as I worked on a project outside, the weather was GREAT. When I am busy, I just keep after it, usually not stopping for much, as I worked along I thought I should get a drink of water, just a twinge of thirst. Many times I ignore that call of thirst and just keep on going, I have found it always gets me into trouble. I have found that I need to drink water even before my body starts calling for water. Your body continually does low grade perspiration, which is a constant pull of the fluid in your body. If you ignore the calls for water your body starts to get weak, going from very mild to serious.

The same is true for our spiritual life, if we are not continually drinking the living water, continually praying, continually giving thanks, and continually ignore the thirst, our spiritual walk becomes weak with all kinds of complications setting in. The things of the world place a constant drain on the body… we have to continually keep drinking.

Continually drink the water, continually pray, continually gives thanks!

Amos 8:11
“The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign LORD, “when I will send a famine through the land- not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD.

How’s your savings?

Saving money is tough. It is tough because even if I am able to save $100 a month, after 3 months I only have $300 saved up. After a year there will be $1,200, but if I’m saving for retirement or a substantial goal in the future, it’s feels like it will take forever to get anything significant built up.

The key to saving money is consistency, however (and wise management). If we invest these savings in a good growth mutual fund that earns 12%, after a year we still only have $1,277. But if we are able to continue saving only $100 a month and add it to our investment, in just over 40 years our meager savings will have grown to be over one million dollars – now that’s a chunk of change. While our hope is not in our savings accounts, we are responsible to God for what He gives us, and imagine the ministry opportunities that would be available if we saved even a small portion of our income. But that is not the point of this post…

Whether it be saving money for the future, preparing for a job by getting an education, or working out to eventually get in shape, we often have to look past what might appear to be minimal short term results in order to reap a bountiful harvest in the future. This is especially true in Bible study and our quiet times – there are many times when we receive immediate benefit, but even when we don’t we still have to maintain a tortoise mentality (as opposed to a hare) and strive to go the distance.

Let me step aside and let you read Mark Dever’s response to a recent interview question (this applies to us all, not just young Christians):

What’s one thing you’ve learned after years of reading the Bible about how to read the Bible well?

That’s it’s more important that I keep doing it than what I get out of it at any particular time.

A lot of young Christians will have an exciting quiet time on Monday and a really exciting one on Tuesday and an awesome one on Wednesday but then something happens on Thursday and they actually don’t even do it and Friday they do it and they feel guilty and it isn’t that good and Saturday they do it but it’s late and they were discouraged…and then they just get discouraged because they’re not always having a super experience. That’s where I would look at them and say, “Just keep going. Aim at obedience in a long direction set in a pattern for decades. If you just keep going you’ll gain so much by consistency and faithfulness that there’s no way you can gain just by sudden experience.”

The full interview is brief and well worth the read.

It is our job to make daily deposits of the Bible into our hearts, but the Holy Spirit controls the interest. If we can earn 1 million dollars by making minimal investments of money over time, how much greater is the reward that we can expect from storing the Bible in our hearts, both in this life and the next!

Isaiah 55 ¹⁰ For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, ¹¹ so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

Are you comfortable with God?

Comfort is good. I like comfort, and summer affords lots of it. A hammock, chairs on the beach, recliner in the cool living room, and maybe even a vacation thrown in somewhere are the comforts that I’m thinking of. There is nothing wrong in being comfortable, and certainly no virtue in being uncomfortable. The problem with my comfort is that it can keep me from doing the things that I really need to do, like chores, house repairs, and yard work. Even though I get a little too physically comfortable sometimes, I am more prone to get spiritually comfortable.

1 Corinthians 9 ²⁴Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. ²⁵Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. ²⁶ So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. ²⁷But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.

Even after we are saved, we never arrive – our work is not complete. It is easy to become complacent in our spiritual lives, to just have our 10 minutes of ‘quiet time’ in the morning and 30 seconds of prayer in order to check the God box off of our checklist for the day.

It is important for us to keep an eye on the spiritual intensity on a week to week basis. If our level of prayer, or worship, or Bible study, or spiritual fervor constantly peaks on Sundays, it may be time to re-examine how we pursue our daily relationship with God. It is easy to get comfortable with our level of understanding of the Bible, with our communion with God in prayer, with our personal examination and meditation, so that we cease growing and being challenged. As in much of life, if we are not growing we are withering, and if we allow there to be a void in our Christian life, our flesh is more than happy to fill it with something else.

Let the river run deep

In the article referenced in a post last week, Dr. Page cites busyness as one of the main enemies of the pastor’s spiritual life. When I ran across the following paragraphs from John Piper’s Brothers, We Are Not Professionals, my thoughts immediately returned to Dr. Page’s article and the impact of the pastor’s spiritual life on the congretation.

Many pastors are not known for expressing deep emotions. This seems to me especially true in relation to the profoundest theological realities. This is not good, because we ought to experience the deepest emotions about the deepest things. And we ought to speak often, and publicly, about what means most to us, in a way that shows its value.

Brothers, we must let the river run deep. This is a plea for passion in the pulpit, passion in prayer, passion in conversation. It is not a plea for thin, whipped-up emotionalism. (“Let’s all stand up and smile!”) It is a plea for deep feelings in worthy forms from God besotted hearts and minds. [p. 149, emphasis mine]

While this discussion continues to mention pastors, the need for a deep spiritual life does not pertain only to them. Pastors are more visible and influence a larger number of people, but we, too, ought to carry a passion in our conversation and daily lives that focuses others on God and His glory.

If our salvation is simply an insurance policy against hell, then we will just check it every Sunday (or less frequently) to make sure that we still feel that we are ‘saved’. But if Christ is truly our bread of life and living water, we will feed on Him constantly and live deeply through Him – our actions, words, and passions will all reflect and honor Him!

Hard truths from the top

The following is an excerpt from a May 6 Associated Baptist Press article with some interesting comments from Frank Page, the current SBC president:

CARY, N.C. (ABP) — The Southern Baptist Convention is rapidly dying, and resistance to change could kill over half of the denomination’s churches by 2030, the outgoing SBC president said May 1.

Unless something is done to reverse the downward trend, Southern Baptist churches could number only 20,000 — down from the current total of more than 44,000 — in fewer than 22 years, South Carolina pastor Frank Page said. His comments came in a conference call with pastors, hosted by the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina.

Page said the problem “resided in the churches” that refuse to change to stop their inevitable demise. He said the SBC downturn is not the denomination’s fault – because of poor programming or lack of emphasis on the denominational level.

“The reality is it’s our fault,” Page told the Pastor’s Disciple-Making Network, an initiative of the North Carolina convention. “People rarely rise above the level of their pastor’s spiritual life, and it is critical that pastors maintain a vibrant walk with Christ.”

Page confessed to the “busyness” which often accompanies life in modern ministry, with committees and administrative responsibilities overwhelming a pastor’s schedule to the point that he has no time for serious study of the Bible, prayer or mediation. “Pastors can easily get distracted, and they must fight against it, because pastors must remain learners of Jesus for as long as they live,” said Page, pastor of First Baptist Church of Taylors, S.C.

The full piece can be read here.

This is an intriguing article, especially since it is the president of the SBC that is making the argument. I do not entirely agree with all of the doomsday prophesies concerning the SBC and denominational life in general, but it is certain that things are going to change, one way or another.

I do believe that the final paragraph included above is very significant, but the buck does not stop with pastors. If you replace pastor with Baptist, it points to one of the major causes in the decline of the SBC. If you replace pastor with Christian, it explains the irrelevance of the Christian witness and presence in much of the world.

What are your thoughts? Do you agree with Dr. Page?