Sunday, January 9, 2011

Water

What is water…to you? How important is it…to you? What do you do with water? Would you be able to survive without it?


Now, let me change those questions, just a little bit, by substituting one word. What is Jesus…to you? How important is He…to you? What do you do with Jesus? Are you able to survive without Him?

Nobody can answer these questions for us. We are the only ones who know how we would answer. Just one more question. Would God be pleased with our answers?

Let’s go back to the easier questions concerning water. What is it to us? Isn’t water one of the most important elements in our lives? It’s so necessary to our existence that we don’t think about it until we don’t have it or aren’t able to get it because the well has run dry or the electricity is off. Then we begin to worry. How many of us can say that we’ve gone a day without anything to drink? I don’t think I ever have. In fact I can’t imagine what it would be like to even have just one drink in a day. How many times do you drink in a day, five fingers or ten or more?

Okay, next question. How important is water to us? Can we live without water? How long can we survive without it? I think water is one of the most important elements right after air. We need both to survive. Without them we’re dead.

I think we’ll all concede that water’s pretty much a necessity. So what do we do with it? My day pretty much begins with me using water right away, washing hands & face, brushing my teeth, making coffee, hot oatmeal, flushing, washing dishes, filling the humidifier, and the list goes on and on.

It looks and sounds as if water is pretty important and we wouldn’t be able to survive without it.

What about Jesus? Can we survive without Him? I can’t. Without him I’m dead. When I don’t take time for Jesus, when I ignore him because I think I’m too busy, I’m dead.

How important is Jesus to you? Remember he gave his life for you and me. Remember he took time to teach his disciples and made some to be apostles so that you and I would get to hear the story. So we could make the decision to ask him into our lives. So we could be filled with his refreshing presence.

Friends, God loves us so much that he sent his Son to teach us, to heal our brokenness, to cleanse us from our sinfulness, to offer us redemption in his life and death. And he leaves it all up to us to decide what we will do with Jesus.

Thanks be to God for his gift of grace in his Son, Jesus. Amen.