Don't Settle for Less

Jesus promised us an abundant life! A life like a bursting spring, a running river. Is that your experience?

Jesus promised the Holy Spirit to His followers, which would empower them to live like He did. There are many examples in Scripture about this. Picking up where John the Baptist left off, Jesus spoke of the baptism in the Holy Spirit when He said,

If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink.

John 7:37, NKJV

Jesus said “anyone.” Are we thirsty for more today? Do we want more hope? More life? More fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? If anyone thirsts, let him come to Jesus and drink.

“He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” But this He spoke concerning the Spirit, whom those believing in Him would receive; for the Holy Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.

John 7:38-39, NKJV

That river of living water flowing out of me, out of you, is the person of the Holy Spirit. It is the activated life of the Holy Spirit living in and through us.

When I was a kid, my family lived in southern Delaware. My friend Ty lived on a farm just down the road from my house. Behind his house was an enormous forest surrounding a beautiful, spring-fed swimming hole. We would go back there and swim. It was a place that time and modern life had never touched. It was idyllic, something straight out of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.T he pond had springs of water constantly coming up from the bottom of it. A river flowed in from one end, stirred the waters, and ran out the other end. The water was regularly made fresh and pure. In the middle of a blazing hot summer, with something like 99 percent humidity, there was nothing better than going back to Ty’s pond. There was a rope attached to an enormous cypress tree, and we would swing out from a platform to plunge into the refreshing water. Hitting the water was like a jolt of cold energy, an invigorating kind of shock.

Would we describe our Christian life as one that is refreshed, revived, renewed,  invigorating? Does following Jesus feel like an adventure? 

That’s the kind of zoe-life Jesus promised! If Jesus promised us something, He wants to give it to us. He wants us to have it.

Admittedly, I sometimes live with a “less than” mentality. Life gets hard. We struggle. We become complacent and comfortable. But Jesus does not want us to live a bored Christian life, a subsistence-level spirituality. He doesn’t want us to operate in lack. At the end of our life, He doesn’t want us to just barely crawl over the finish line with a groan of exhaustion. He promised that out of us would come this river of living water. 

This promise is found in picture form in Ezekiel 47, which talks about a river that flows out from the temple of God:

Then he brought me back to the door of the temple; and there was water, flowing from under the threshold of the temple toward the east… Along the bank of the river, on this side and that, will grow all kinds of trees used for food; their leaves will not wither, and their fruit will not fail. They will bear fruit every month, because their water flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for medicine. 

Ezekiel 47:1, 12, NKJV

Who is the temple now? We are! God meant for this “river life” to ripple out of us through the Holy Spirit. To further understand this, look at the picture of abundance Ezekiel was told about in verse 9:

And it shall be that every living thing that moves, wherever the rivers go, will live. There will be a very great multitude of fish, because these waters go there; for they will be healed, and everything will live wherever the river goes.

This is what Jesus was talking about in John 7. As Christians, too many of us have accepted that we’re supposed to just go to church, feel guilty for what we’ve done, resolve to try to do better, then die and go to heaven. God wants so much more for us than that! He wants us to live in freedom and power.

The people to whom Jesus made this promise were bound up in the rituals of the Law. The religious leaders laid heavy burdens on their minds and lives by adding about 600 extra laws to observe that weren’t even in the Old Testament. Jesus came along and said, “It’s not supposed to be like that. It’s not supposed to be a life of performance-based religion. It’s about a relationship brimming with possibility and hope and power.” 

If the power of God is not characteristic of our lives, we have to understand that Jesus has more for us. He’s not mad. We’re not condemned if we’ve been living in lack, or with incomplete understanding. Today there’s an open invitation to receive His promise and His lavish outpouring.