.
.The Holy
Spirit as the Water of Life.
by Steve Clark
Introduction
The first two chapters of
Charismatic Spirituality: The Work of the
Holy Spirit in Scripture and Practice,
laid a foundation for understanding what the
Holy Spirit does in Christians.
The first chapter looked at the grace of
Pentecost, the “new thing” (Isaiah 32) that is
the basis of the new covenant. God’s purpose was
to bring into being a people in covenant
relationship with him, a people in his image and
likeness who loved him and loved one another. As
a result of the death and resurrection of
Christ, he put his Spirit inside those who
believed so that they could fulfill his purpose
for the human race.
The second chapter looked at what the gift of
the Spirit was supposed to do for us — to make
us spiritual or spiritualized people. The gift
of the Spirit, viewed corporately or
individually, has been given to bring us to what
God intended us to be.
How
the Holy Spirit works inside of us
We are now going
to consider how the Holy Spirit works inside of
us. There are two main ways he operates. We
might call them “life-mode” and “action-mode”.
He gives us life, making us able to live a truly
spiritual life, and he works through us to
accomplish certain kinds of results. In this
chapter we will consider the way he gives us
life and in the next chapter we will look at the
way he works through us.
This third chapter will allow us to look at the
interaction between the Holy Spirit working in
us and our humanity — our capacities and
efforts. Devout or pious people, in their desire
to emphasize what God does, often denigrate what
we do after the Lord has renewed us in him. This
can easily lead to the mistaken approach that
some have called “hyper-spiritualism” or
“super-spiritualism”. In fact, the Holy Spirit
works in and through us. He transforms us and
our ability to act. He does not annihilate us or
replace (part of) us or bypass us. We are not
supposed to be just passive spectators of our
own life in the Spirit, but spiritualized people
equipped to live for the Lord and serve him by
the gift of the Spirit within us.
The
Holy Spirit as the Water of Life
The book of Revelation ends with a vision, often
referred to as the vision of the New Jerusalem.
It is the vision of what the Lord is aiming at
in human history, what he is seeking to bring us
to. In explaining the vision, the book says,
Then
he showed me the river of the water of life,
bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of
God and of the Lamb through the middle of the
street of the city; also, on either side of
the river, the tree of life with its twelve
kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month;
and the leaves of the tree were for the
healing of the nations. (Revelation 22:1-2)
Central to this
vision is the river of the water of life,
which flows into and through the new Jerusalem.
The water of life comes from the throne of
God and of the Lamb. On the throne we see
the glory of God shining from the Lamb
who is its lamp (Revelation 21:23). In
other words, those who live in the city can see
God’s throne in their midst and on that throne
is the Lamb of God, our Lord Jesus Christ,
filled with divine glory, sharing in his
Father’s reign over all of creation. The water
of life, then, flows from the king of the
universe who has died for the redemption of the
human race.
The water gives life to the city, the holy
city Jerusalem (21:10). We get heavenly
life by being “built into” (Ephesians 5:22) a
city, a community of those redeemed by the Lord.
The water makes that city into a paradise, a
place where the tree of life grows. The
water, in other words, restores the Garden of
Eden or, better, makes the new Jerusalem into a
new Eden, a place where God’s original purpose
for the human race is fully accomplished.
This is a picture of the end, of what will be.
But in a certain way the end is already present
now. We are living “in the last days”, as the
scripture says, and we are already be-ginning to
experience the “first installment” (Ephesians 1:
14; 2 Corinthians 5:5) of what is to be given in
its fullness after the Lord Jesus comes again.
The vision in Revelation, then, reveals to us
what will come to pass, but also reveals to us
something of what we can experience even now.
But what is the water of life?
We can find out what the water of life is by
looking at a passage in the seventh chapter of
the Gospel of John. It is a description of
something that happened at the feast of
Tabernacles or Booths in the last year of Jesus’
life. During that feast each year there was a
ceremony in which water from the pool of Siloam,
at the foot of the mountain spur on which the
original Jerusalem was built, was carried in
procession to the temple and there poured out to
symbolize the redemption that the Lord gives his
people. In verses 37-39 we read about what Jesus
said, probably right after this ceremony:
On
the last day of the feast, the great day,
Jesus stood up and proclaimed, “If anyone
thirst, let him come to me, and let him who
believes in me drink. As the scripture has
said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of
living water.’” Now this he said about the
Spirit, which those who believed in him were
to receive; for as yet the Spirit had not been
given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.
“His” in this
passage probably refers to Christ. If that is
so, his heart refers to the heart of
Christ. The rivers of living water,
then, flow out of the heart of Christ. This
passage tells us that it is the Holy
Spirit who is the water of life. The Holy
Spirit was not given during Jesus’ lifetime, but
was given when Jesus was glorified, that
is, after he died, rose, and ascended to the
throne of God in heaven. In other words, the
water of life was poured out at Pentecost after
the glorification of Jesus. It was given by him
once he sat on the throne of God sharing his
reign. The picture we get here corresponds
closely to the one in Revelation 22, although
the personal connection between the Lord Jesus
and the Spirit is presented more strongly. He
gives us of the Spirit that flows from him
personally.
But why water? Where does water as an
image of the Holy Spirit come from?
That image goes back to the prophets, especially
the prophet Isaiah. We can see it in a prophecy
in Isaiah 44. The prophecy concerns a future
renewal of the people of Israel, and in verse 3
it says,
For
I will pour water on the thirsty land,
and streams
on the dry ground.
I will pour
my Spirit upon your descendants,
and my
blessing on your offspring.
Since this is
Hebrew poetry, the lines are in parallelism, in
this case restating in the second half of each
verse what was said in the first half. The Lord
is saying that he will pour out water or
streams in a desert area. Those streams
will be the blessing of his Spirit,
which he will give to the people of Israel at a
future time of restoration.
The image here is of water in a desert, probably
at the time of the spring rains. The prophecy is
not speaking about a sand desert like the Sahara
— the picture that seems to come to mind for
most people who do not live in a desert area.
The prophecy is referring to a normal arid
desert as is found in Judea on the eastern and
southern part of the country.
I had an experience once that allowed me to see
vividly what this meant. I was driving in the
southern part of Arizona. We were going through
normal arid desert sparsely covered with some
cactus and other small desert plants, when all
of a sudden we drove over a hill and there was a
completely different scene. The desert was
filled with plants of many kinds all in bloom.
It was a glorious sight, even more so because of
the contrast with the earlier desert.
We found out later that shortly before we
arrived it had rained in the desert, as it does
occasionally. In other words, water had been poured
on the thirsty ground. The result was that
the desert came to life. Seeds had been waiting
in the ground for the water and once it came
they grew rapidly into plants to take advantage
of the moisture. It was the water that brought
the dry land to life.
The water, however, did not bring dirt to life.
If I had dug in that land before, all I would
have seen was dirt and pebbles. But some of
those pebbles were seeds. They looked dead and
in a certain way they were, because they were
inert, without life. But they had the potential
to be brought to life by the water, and that is
what happened. The water came down, and they
came to life.
Equally striking was the variety of life. Had I
thought about it before that experience, I would
almost certainly have thought that there were
only a few plants that might have lived in the
desert, but it turned out that there was an
abundance of different kinds. Their seeds
probably would have looked fairly similar, but
the water brought each one to life in accord
with the nature it had. If the water touches a
hibiscus seed, a hibiscus will grow from that
seed, not a cactus.
This is the image we see in Isaiah. The
outpouring of the Spirit is like the water that
brought that desert to life. The Spirit makes
the desert bloom, brings the dead to life. This
is one of the prophecies that Jesus was probably
referring to when he spoke of the Holy Spirit as
the water of life. To say that the Spirit is the
water of life is to say that he brings the
blessing of life to human beings when poured out
upon them.
Now we have to consider what it means to say
that the Holy Spirit produces life in us.
The
Spirit Gives Life
The last part of the Book of Ephesians (chapters
4–6) is an extended exhortation about how to
live the Christian life, based on the truths
presented in the first three chapters. The
fourth chapter begins with an exhortation to
live a life worthy of the Christian call, talks
about how the Lord builds up the Christian
community, and then talks about the new way of
life that should result from redemption in
Christ, encouraging the recipients of the letter
to live it. In the course of this chapter, we
come across the following exhortation in verses
17-20:
Look carefully then how you walk, not as
unwise men but as wise, making the most of the
time, because the days are evil. Therefore do
not be foolish, but understand what the will
of the Lord is. And do not get drunk with
wine, for that is debauchery; but be filled
with the Spirit, addressing one another in
psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing
and making melody to the Lord with all your
heart, always and for everything giving thanks
in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God
the Father.
This passage
seems to be a simple exhortation to live well.
As we read it, however, we come across an
exhortation not to get drunk with wine.
If we are paying attention, we might ask
ourselves why all of a sudden Paul is concerned
with the question of drunkenness. Is he planning
on signing up the Ephesians for a temperance
movement, perhaps?
In fact, he is not especially concerned with
drunkenness, but rather he is making a
comparison between drinking wine and being
filled with the Spirit. Although the words are a
little different than the ones we would use, we
would speak in a similar way. We talk about
people being “tanked”. We also talk about them
as “under the influence”. When someone is tanked
or “filled with wine”, the wine does not just go
into them and sit there, as in a bottle. Rather,
it enters into the blood stream and “influences”
them. They talk differently, walk differently,
act differently. We can tell that they have
drunk a great deal by just watching them or
listening to them.
Something similar happens when someone is filled
with the Spirit. The Biblical word filled
commonly is used to speak about a change in
behavior. Some who is very angry is “filled with
anger”. The anger determines how they act. In a
similar way, when we are filled with the
Spirit, the Holy Spirit affects our
behavior. He does not just go into us and sit
there as in a temple so we can worship him.
Rather he “enters into our bloodstream”. He
influences the way we live and act. People
should be able to tell that this has happened to
us by looking at us or listening to us.
The passage goes on to speak about what happens
when the Holy Spirit fills us. We worship the
Lord, praising and thanking him. Worship is, in
fact, a special sign of the presence of the Holy
Spirit in us, as we will see. But the truth has
a broader application. The Holy Spirit produces
holy living in us, daily life holiness. The
teaching here is similar to that in the passage
about the fruit of the Spirit. Both make clear
that the Holy Spirit produces a new way of
“walking” or living, a new kind of behavior. And
he does it by working inside of us to make
something possible that was not possible before.
Does this mean that when the Holy Spirit fills
us we become like drunks or robots or automata?
Or that we become like possessed people? Do we
lose our ability to think clearly or our
capacity to choose what to do? Do we become
sub-human, less human? The answer most of us
would intuitively and quickly make to these
questions is no. The Lord does not make us less
human but in a certain way more human. He brings
us to life ac-cording to our nature. When we are
filled with the Spirit we are made more able to
under-stand what is good and to choose it. The
Spirit does not make us into automata,
deter-mined by God to act in certain ways
whether we want to or not, but enables us to act
spiritually and so more freely.
We can see something of the way this works by
looking at the passage in John chapter 15 where
the Lord teaches the parable of the vine. In the
first half of that chapter it says,
I
am the true vine, and my Father is the
vinedresser…
Abide
in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear
fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine,
neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am
the vine, you are the branches. He who abides
in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much
fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.
If a man does not abide in me, he is cast
forth as a branch and withers; and the
branches are gathered, thrown into the fire
and burned…
As the
Father has loved me, so have I loved you;
abide in my love. If you keep my commandments,
you will abide in my love, just as I have kept
my Father’s commandments and abide in his
love. These things I have spoken to you, that
my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be
full.
“This is my
commandment, that you love one another as I
have loved you. Greater love has no man than
this, that a man lay down his life for his
friends. …This I command you, to love one
another.
This passage
concerns Christ and the way he dwells in human
beings, but it refers to the same reality as the
Holy Spirit dwelling or abiding in us.
When Christ dwells in us, he dwells in us by the
Holy Spirit. Jesus is here comparing himself to
a vine and his disciples to the branches of that
vine. Together they make up one plant, similar
to the way the various members, arms, legs,
etc., make up one body when they are joined with
the head.
A vine
produces fruit. But we could ask, whose fruit is
it, the vine’s or the branch’s? The answer is
both. This is not an either/or matter. The fruit
is fully the vine’s fruit and fully the branch’s
fruit. It makes no sense to say that the fruit
is not the branch’s fruit or not the vine’s
fruit.
Saying it that way, however, makes it sound like
the vine and branches are equal partners. That,
however, is not true. The vine does not need the
branches. The branches can be cut off and the
vine will do fine. It may even do better without
a given branch or two. That is why we prune
vines. But the branches do need the vine. If
they are cut off, they die, be-cause they need
to vine to stay alive. The vine is the source of
their life and the source of their ability to
bear fruit.
It is worth also noting that there are certain
conditions for the branches, us, to stay alive
and bear fruit. We have to keep his
commandments. We also have to love one
another, the other branches that are part
of the same vine we belong to. We have, in other
words, to live in community or communion with
one another and obey the Lord. All of this could
be summed up by saying that we need to stay
connected or joined with the vine and so abide
in him. To use the language of the first
Pentecost, we need to keep the covenant,
because that enables us to be in a living
relationship with the Lord.
When God lives in us by joining us to Christ and
filling us with his Spirit, he does not make us
automata or even simply passive members. We are
to be fruit-bearing branches and if we do not
bear fruit, we will be pruned. The Spirit does
not bypass us, but he enables us to do something
we could not do before — to bear the fruit of
the Spirit. The two passages in Ephesians 5 and
John 15 together make clear — and even clearer
when we add the fruit of the Spirit passage in
Galatians 5 — that when the Holy Spirit produces
life in us, he produces a new way of living, one
that we could not produce on our own.
Now it is true that sometimes God works for us
or at our request without working in and through
us. When he does so, he gives us special helps.
The main way, however, that he wants to work
with us is by enabling us, through the spiritual
life within, to live effectively as Christians.
We can see the difference between God’s special
help and his ordinary help by considering two
examples: healing and having patience. These
will show us two models of the way God works.
We can begin with prayer for healing. Suppose
that we see someone sick. We might decide that
we should pray for that person to get healed.
Then he or she might get healed right away as
the result of our prayer. This is not the same
thing as what happens when a doctor heals
someone. Doctors go through medical school and
internship. They acquire a great deal of
knowledge and skill by hard work and training.
They then work at getting people healed,
examining them, diagnosing their problems,
prescribing remedies, possibly operating on
them, checking back with them to see how their
remedy has worked, and so on. When they heal
someone, they make use of an acquired ability to
bring about health, and they usually can tell
how they did what they did.
When we pray for someone and they get healed, we
are not relying on an acquired ability. Rather,
we are relying on something outside of
ourselves, namely, the Lord. We are asking him
to do something we ourselves cannot do, and we
are possibly asking him to do something that
would not happen if he did not act, or might not
happen for a long time. We are not completely
irrelevant. If we did not pray, likely the
person would not be healed, at least not now.
But rather than accomplishing the healing
ourselves, we are more acting like a conduit of
something outside ourselves — the healing action
of God. It would be appropriate and accurate to
say God did this, not us.
Now let us consider patience, or courage, both
fruits of the Spirit. Suppose that we are at the
breakfast table, and our young son spills his
milk all over us once again. How do we respond?
Do we hit him because we are irritated? Do we
spank him to discipline him so that he learns
not to do it again? Or do we say he is too young
to do better so I should just have patience and
overlook it? Suppose the latter is the
appropriate response. Then we need to just have
patience.
At such a point, it would be nice if God would
have patience for us or instead of us. It would
be nice if we could “just yield to the Spirit”
and relax, or “let go and let God” as the old
charismatic motto had it. Of course, if we let
go, we would be very likely to hit him whether
that would be the best thing to do or not.
Instead we need to exercise self-control or
patience, sometimes with great effort. And we
probably should be grateful if we have acquired
the ability to do that over the years rather
than constantly relying on praying to God for
special emergency help because we never did grow
in patience.
A number of years ago, I read a newspaper
account of a man who saved a woman from rape in
the subway in New York. To understand the
incident, you should know that the platforms of
the subway stations there are lit up where the
passengers stand to board the trains, but they
extend a ways into the tunnels and there they
are dark. The man described how he was waiting
for a train and then heard a muffled scream. He
looked over and could see two figures in the
shadows, one the woman and the other a very
large looking man who seemed like he had a
weapon. He looked around, hoping to see a
policeman, but there was no one else on the
platform.
He decided then that since he was the only one
who could help, he had to try, even though it
looked to him like he would be getting himself
into some very serious trouble and perhaps
killed. He looked at the scene and fear filled
him. What should he have done? Respond by
“letting go and letting God?” If he let go, he
probably would have run the other way as quick
as he could. He actually said, “I decided I had
to run to help the woman, and God helped me.”
Now this is a story with a happy ending. The
assailant heard him and ran away — “luckily for
me” as the man telling the story said. Despite
his fear, he needed to act with courage, and he
did. He was apparently a Christian, because he
recognized that God was at work in him in the
situation. He did not, however, stand back and
“let God work” or just pray. He acted with
courage — and God also worked.
For many of those involved in the Charismatic
Renewal, the sole model for the action of God is
something like praying for healing. When we pray
or just do nothing and rely on God to act, that
is when God really can act. But that is only one
model of how God acts, the model that emphasizes
human passivity. It leaves out of consideration
the fact that God often acts in and through us
when we act. Sometimes he does that by
strengthening us so that we develop the fruit of
the Spirit, as when we patiently handle a child
causing trouble. Sometimes we just do what we
can, as when the man ran to help the woman, and
God uses what we do to get something to happen.
This second model of how God works, his working
when we are ourselves doing what we can, is the
ordinary one. In God’s plan it is the more
common one, because God wants to make us
spiritual people, capable of handling the
ordinary circumstances of life in a good way. He
needs to give us special help at times. He even
seems to want to give us special help at times
just to show us that he is present or to make
things happen that are beyond our power. But the
ordinary, normal or basic help God gives to
those who belong to his son is to work in them
to act in a better way.
The failure to understand the difference between
special helps and the basic help that God gives
us can cause us to remain spiritually immature.
Hebrews 5:14 tells us how spiritual maturity
comes about:
But solid food is for the mature, for those
who have their faculties trained by practice
to distinguish good from evil.
In this passage
the author is explaining why he is not going to
give basic instruction (something like a Sunday
school or catechism lesson) again, even though
it might seem that his audience needs it. In
fact his audience is mature and not like babies
in their Christian life. Therefore he is saying
that he will not give them teaching that is like
milk for babies. He will give them the teaching
that is like solid food for grown-ups.
To understand the difference between being a
baby and a mature person, we can consider the
example of the human arm. A newborn child has an
arm at birth, and that arm is a gift of God,
something the newborn baby could not have
acquired by any efforts of its own any more than
it could get itself born. However, the newborn
child cannot do much with that arm. If we say,
for instance, that human beings can use their
arms to throw balls, that would be a true
statement, but it would not apply to the baby.
The newborn child needs to use his arm over the
years before he can throw balls. Even more, he
has to train his arm if he is going to become
good at throwing balls. For his arm to become
the arm of an adult, even more the arm of an
athlete, he needs training by practice
over years.
Hebrews 5:14 gives us a criterion for what it is
to be mature as a Christian. The result of
Christian maturity is the ability to distinguish
good from bad. In other words, those who
are mature can differentiate (judge) between
what is good to do and what is bad to do. We can
see from the context that the passage is not
just speaking about the ability to know the
difference between good and bad theoretically,
that is, the ability to know that patience is
good and impatience bad, or perhaps the ability
to give a definition of patience. Rather, he is
speaking about the ability to know how to act in
a good way rather than a bad way in the various
situations in life that we confront (like the
one his audience is confronting), an ability
that we might describe as good judgment. Someone
who is mature as a parent should be able to tell
when to discipline a child and when to let
something go and be patient because the child
cannot do any better — for the most part at
least.
We gain this ability by practice.
Maturity in Christian living, mature Christian
character, develops through practice, and
“practiced” character allows us to respond to
each situation in such a way that we know the
difference, more or less instinctively, between
what is good and bad. As a result of experience
and practice, we are trained in
responding well, developing good judgment as
well as skill in acting well. The word trained
here comes from athletics. We need to train like
an athlete through much practice to have
Christian maturity, not just learn about it in a
book. Growth in maturity, then, involves hard
work based upon a capacity God gives but that
needs development.
Christian discipleship training, then, needs to
follow on spiritual birth if we are going to
become mature Christians, Christians who can
handle the various situations in life the way
they should. Failure to understand this leads to
Christian immaturity. Sometimes that failure is
rooted in having only one model of how God acts,
the way he acts when he gives us special help,
and consequently failing to acquire a formation
that allows us to develop in the fruit of the
Spirit, which works on a different model.
We sometimes use the word “hyperspiritualism” or
“superspiritualism”. Hyperspiritualism is the
problem of looking to God to bypass the human
rather than transform it, and so to expect
things to happen by power of the Spirit without
human cooperation more often than is good.
People who are suffering from hyperspiritualism
miss the fact that we are supposed to be
transformed by the presence of the Spirit in us
and so live in a spiritualized way. We are
supposed to live like human beings — think,
decide, act, work and persevere — but to have
our human faculties or actions formed so that
they express the character of God. We should be
able to handle more and more situations “like
the Lord would” rather than constantly looking
to God to bypass us, to handle difficult
situations without us or instead of us.
Hyperspiritualism is not just a matter of
overemphasis. It is a depreciation, sometimes
conscious, sometimes de facto, of an aspect of
the way the Spirit works. We can, in principle,
maximize both the spiritual and the good human
at the same time. It is not true that if
something is spiritual, it does not come from
human effort, anymore than it is true that if
the fruit comes from the vine, it does not come
from the branches. Both can work together. It is
the unredeemed human, not everything human, that
is incompatible with the spiritual.
There are limits to this, of course. When we
want to see someone healed, we can pray and God
may act without human effort. Sometimes that is
the only way, or the best way, to get something
to happen. Nonetheless, if that is our only
model for the way God acts and we want to be
spiritual people who rely upon God, we will fall
into hyperspiritualism and likely become less
effective as Christians. The main way God wants
to work is by spiritualizing us, transforming
us, so that we become the kind of people who can
live and act in a spiritual way.
“Bucket
Faith” and “Spring Faith”
The gospel of
John gives us a picture of the kind of faith
that is a response to the new life the Holy
Spirit gives us — spring faith. We can read
about it in the fourth chapter, verses 1-14,
where Jesus has a discussion with the Samaritan
woman at Jacob’s well in the land of Samaria:
Interchange
1
There came a
woman of Samaria to draw water. Jesus said
to her,
Give me a drink.
For his
disciples had gone away into the city to buy
food.
The Samaritan woman said to him,
How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of
me, a woman of Samaria?
For Jews have
no dealings with Samaritans.
Jesus answered her,
If you knew the
gift of God, and who it is that is saying to
you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked
him, and he would have given you living
water.
Interchange
2
The woman
said to him,
Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and
the well is deep; where do you get that
living water? Are you greater than our
father Jacob, who gave us the well, and
drank from it himself, and his sons, and
his cattle?
Jesus said to her,
Every one who drinks of this water will
thirst again, but whoever drinks of the
water that I shall give him will never
thirst; the water that I shall give him
will become in him a spring of water
welling up to eternal life.
The passage itself gives
us background. It tells us that Jesus’
disciples had gone into the nearby city to
buy food, and while he was waiting for them
at the well, a Samaritan woman came to draw
water. The passage also tells us that Jews
have no dealings with Samaritans.
That, however, is not the best translation,
as we can see from the fact that the
disciples had gone into the nearby Samaritan
city to buy food, certainly some kind of a
“dealing” with Samaritans. A better
translation is Jews do not use vessels
with Samaritans. Jews thought the
Samaritans did not observe purity laws
properly, and as a result a drinking vessel
handled by a Samaritan woman was likely to
be unclean and so should be avoided.
The issue, then, concerned maintaining
ceremonial purity and was not a matter of
simply avoiding Samaritans completely. Nor
was it a matter of not speaking to women, as
some authors assert to try to make the point
that Jesus was more liberal than other Jews
were in terms of dealing with women. It was
a matter of not using a vessel that could
have been made ritually impure by a
Samaritan woman. Nonetheless, Jesus asked
the Samaritan woman for a drink from her
bucket.
The woman responded in an unfriendly manner.
She wanted to know why he was doing
something he is not supposed to do. Rather
than give her an answer that she could
under-stand as a response to her question,
Jesus said, if you knew the gift of God,
and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give
me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and
he would have given you living water.
Living water is the literal
translation of the phrase used. Flowing
water is an alternate translation,
since, in contrast to the water in a well or
cistern, flowing water was described as
living water because it moved. Probably the
Samaritan woman understood Jesus to be
speaking about flowing water, because she
replied that the only water in the area was
well water, water from Jacob’s well.
Moreover, he could not even get that water,
because he had nothing to draw with, no
bucket, and the well was deep.
In using the phrase living water, of
course, Jesus was making a play on words.
The water Jesus had to give was flowing but
also alive. It was, moreover, be the
gift of God.
The woman’s reply to Jesus’ claim to have
flowing (living) water to give was even more
sarcastic than her first response. She was
in effect saying, “How come you talk so big,
when you cannot get yourself a drink of
water”. She also recognized that he was
implicitly making a claim that he had better
water than Jacob’s well contained, and
added, “The well was good enough for Jacob,
how come it is not good enough for you. Are
you such an important person?”
Jesus then responded to her, “I do not just
give drinks of water. I give water that
stays inside and will be a spring of water
inside of people. Moreover that spring will
make it possible for them to have eternal
life.” As we can see from what he said later
on in his discussion with the Samaritan
woman, this spring of water refers
to the presence of the Holy Spirit in those
who receive him from the Lord. He is
speaking about the gift of God, the
promise of the Father (Acts 1:4). This
presence of the Holy Spirit is intended by
God to be an ongoing presence in us giving
us spiritual life until it brings us to
where we should be — to heaven, to eternal
life.
Using the image in this passage, we can
distinguish between “bucket faith” and
“spring faith”. Bucket faith is the kind
that looks for divine faith outside of us.
At times we need to look for help from God
we do not have, to “get a bucket” and go
after it. Spring faith relies on something
we do have. It relies on the gift inside
that does not go away.
To be sure, the life the Lord gives us needs
to be fed at times. We need “word and
sacrament” or “liturgy of the word and
liturgy of the Eucharist” to use the
theological phrases. We also need to have
the channel cleaned out at time. We need to
repent and seek forgiveness. Nonetheless,
the life and strength that comes to us when
we are joined to Christ is already inside of
us and remains there unless something goes
radically wrong.
This is where spring faith comes in. Spring
faith relies on the spring of living water
inside. It lives and acts in the confidence
that the Holy Spirit is inside of us and is
there to enlighten us and strengthen us so
that we can handle the various circumstances
of our life in a good Christian way.
If we are, for instance, raising a family,
there are many times when we will want to
get out our bucket and go for help. We may
have been financially responsible, but we
now need more money than we did. We may have
acquired much good Christian teaching and
help so that we mainly know what we need to
do, but now we do not have a clue how to
handle something that happened to one of our
children, or cannot explain a sudden turn
for the worse in their life that they will
not talk about. Going to the Lord for
special help may be needed.
But our family life will go much better (and
probably will have less special needs) if we
learn to rely upon the fact that the Lord is
in us. We can handle difficulties and learn
how to be a parent, if we have confidence
that we can rely on the Lord at work inside
of us. We are his sons and daughters, filled
with his Spirit, holding a privileged
position. If we live and act with that
confidence, with spring faith in the gift of
the Lord in us, we will see a better life
and better results. Spring faith does not
guarantee that everything will go well, but
it makes a significant difference.
Spring faith does not always work best by
“claiming God’s help in faith” whenever we
need it. We do not need to claim something
we already have. We need to do that when we
use bucket faith to get special help. Spring
faith is rather an ongoing confidence in the
Lord, one that is nourished day in and day
out by remembering who we are, who God is,
and what our relationship with God is like —
what he has already given us. Sometimes it
works best when it is instinctive, when we
simply act with the confidence of who we are
in the Lord.
This gives us our third conclusion. Our
charismatic spirituality is based upon
confidence that the Holy Spirit is in us and
transforms, enlightens, and strengthens us
so that we can be spiritual(ized) people.
This
article is adapted from the book Charismatic
Spirituality:
The Work of the Holy Spirit in Scripture
and Practice, copyright © 2004 by
Stephen B. Clark and published by Servant
Books, a division of Saint Anthony
Messenger Press. Used with permission.
Steve Clark
is past president of
the Sword
of the Spirit
and founder of The
Servants
of the Word.
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image credit: photo (c) Volrab Vaclav at
Bigstock.com.Waterfall in the National
Park Tercino valley in the mountains
Novohradske-Czech Republic
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