Ever been so thirsty you think you're going to die. And then – then you have a deep drink of fresh, cool, clear, living water. Awesome. In fact Jesus talked a lot about water.

I remember when I was training to be an officer in the Army we used to go out on exercises for weeks at a time, war games and we'd be fighting this imaginary army and learning, I guess, how to fight battles. Back in those days the Army was heavily into water rationing, two water bottles per man, per day, perhaps. That was for shaving, washing, cleaning your teeth, cooking and drinking.

In those hot summers with all the heavy physical work that a battle entails it was never enough, many a time we'd finish an attack up a steep hill in the middle of the noon day sun or be digging a trench and all I wanted was to guzzle down a whole bottle full of water. Of course you couldn't do that, then I'd close my eyes and imagine that I'd be swimming in a nice cool river with stacks and stacks of water. When you're that thirsty, what you really want is water in abundance, you want to be filled to overflowing.

This week on the program we're looking at what it means to be filled by God to overflowing. Not just half full, not just full to the brim, filled so that we overflow all His goodness and His blessing. When we're really thirsty and we have a deep long drink, it is such a satisfying thing isn't it? I mean our need for water is one of the most basic of all needs. 70% of our body is water and after oxygen, water is our most important physical need. You can't go for very long without water. The body starts closing down some of it's functions and depending on the conditions, we can be dead within a couple of days. Or if you're stuck in a hot car without water, you can be dead in a few minutes in extreme heat.

It's interesting that when Jesus was talking about His plan for our lives, He uses 'thirst' and "water" to explain what He means. I think it's because it's something we really can relate to. He meets a woman, a Samaritan woman, at a well and He says to her:

Everyone who drinks out of this water will be thirsty again but those who drink the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them, a spring of water gushing up into eternal life.

Life gets thirsty and this week on the program we've been looking at what it means to be filled to overflowing because that's Jesus' plan, no ifs, not buts, "oh well, that's not my experience." Maybe not but it's Jesus' promise:

Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give them will become in them, a spring of water gushing up into eternal life.

I wonder sometimes whether in life we don't make things just a bit too complicated. For me, faith is a simple thing, I read what Jesus said, I hear what God has to say and then you say, "well okay, if that's from God, that's what I'm going to believe even if my circumstances are screaming at me saying, that's never going to be possible, you're never going to have a fountain of spring water gushing up in you."

And every time my feelings or the things that are going around me scream at me, "God's a liar," I'm just going to pick that book up again and read what Jesus said again. I'm just going to believe Him and not them. Now you might say to me, "but Berni, that is unrealistic, I've been trying to have a life of peace and of joy and abundance, it seems like forever and it's just not happening for me."

Look at His promise again, John chapter 7, verse 37,

"If anyone is thirsty let them come to me and drink. Whoever believes in Me, rivers of living water will flow from them. By this He meant the Spirit whom those who believed in Jesus were later to receive."

There are 3 parts to that promise. The first one is "if you're thirsty - get a drink". When life is dry and parched and empty, if ANYONE is thirsty (anyone means anyone) come to Jesus and He will fill us full of His water, a water that when we drink it, a living water, we'll never be thirsty again. And the second thing is He says, "whoever believes in Me", you see, it's a faith thing. When He says "whoever believes IN Me", that word "in" means literally 'into', so it says, 'whoever believes into Me'. You may have heard me say this before, I can look at a chair at a distant and believe that it will hold me and I'm believing in 'it' but if I want to believe "into" the chair, I walk over and I sit down and I say, "you see, the chair can hold me. I put my faith "into", my trust "into" the chair."

And so Jesus says, "whoever believes in Me, whoever believes what I say, whoever reads what I said and says, 'you know something, like a little child I'm going to accept that from Jesus.' Whoever believes in Me, from their belly rivers of living water, not a trickle, not a stream, not a river, river's plural. Get the picture, an abundance, a flood tide of blessing of the Holy Spirit, "whoever believes in me, from their belly rivers of living water will flow out from them."'

The last couple of days we've looked at some of the things that can stop that from happening, the blockages, our own rejection of God, the compromises, the sin, the devil in the spiritual realm robbing us of what God wants us to have and you might say, "Berni, I think you're being unrealistic. Well, I have problems and stresses and strains in my life." Absolutely, Jesus promises those too. Look at how He trained His disciples. He promised them all those things and He never promised them that He would somehow lift us out of those and exempt us from suffering.

He promised the opposite, He said, "In this world you will have tribulation" but in the middle of all of that He promised that He would fill us to overflowing in this thirsty, parched, dry land. He would let us experience the incredible satisfaction of a deep drink of His spiritual water, of Him himself. Now we might be spiritually or emotionally thirsty or parched or dry and Jesus says, "Come to me and I will give you the Holy Spirit, I will fill you to overflowing."

We're all different; we're all close to God in different ways. Some people do it by singing, other people like me get up early in the morning and pray, other people love to read, other people find Jesus just most in the middle of life and there are combinations and permutations of those. But the consistent message of Gods word is, when we draw close to Him; He draws close to us and that's a special thing and there is an incredible satisfaction in being filled full of Him and being filled full to overflowing with the Holy Spirit. He fills us in ways that nobody else can.

The problem is so many people have been living so dry for so long they've accepted that as being normal. I meet so many spiritually dry people. We think everybody else is like that, we can't imagine how God could ever fill us with His spirit, how He could ever make a fountain of living water bubbling up but that's what He wants to do, that's the normative of Christian life.

Don't accept anything less; don't settle for anything less than the fullness of God in your life, the very presence of Jesus through His spirit in us. Thirst, then wait to be filled by Him and just don't accept anything less