As I was praying the other day, I had this picture in my head. I saw seeds planted in dry, brittle ground. In every direction, as far as I could see, there were seeds without water. After I wrapped up my prayer time, I kept thinking about those seeds that lay dormant. The Farmer exerted a tremendous effort in planting those seeds. He anticipates a great harvest from His effort. Yet, it was evident that seeds without water would never produce a crop.
The metaphor
I scratched my head a bit and filed this picture in my “don’t know” basket. Still, that image nagged at me. I wrote three posts about seeds without water. Two of them I rejected. My third attempt resulted in the post, “Good Soil”. Still, I didn’t feel that I had satisfied the picture of those seeds.
Jesus used seeds as a picture of God’s Word (Matthew 13:23), and that metaphor seemed to fit the picture in my head. Then today, as I began writing these words as a journal entry, the fog began clearing.
Jesus said to the Samaritan woman at the well, “…Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” – John 4:13-14
Perhaps, many Christians have clogged “springs of living water.” They are believers, and they have hidden God’s word in their hearts (Psalm 119:11), but the Holy Spirit is dribbling out of them, touching few people in their “field.”
Desire rivers
By the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the apostle Paul taught us, “Do not quench the Spirit.” (1 Thessalonians 5:19) In this context, the word “quench” means “extinguish.” The verse is saying, “don’t extinguish the Holy Spirit in your life.” And Jesus said:
Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified. – John 7:38-39
These rivers of living water are intended to benefit people in close proximity to believers. Those seeds planted in parched earth are parched because the living water is only dribbling out of Christ’s believers. God has planted His word in multitudes of people, but those seeds are dormant or stunted. Why? Because Christians are holding back the Holy Spirit, the living water that God’s seeds need.
Good News
We find in Scripture, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” (Ephesians 2:10) God prepared us, before we were ever born, to be springs of living water. We have a problem if are just a dribble. Just like a shower head that no longer showers because it’s all full of lime, things in our lives may be blocking the Holy Spirit from pouring out copious amounts of water for the sown crop of souls around us.
As I gaze across God’s fields, sown with the seeds of the living Word, scads of fields have no fruit. Seeds in those fields haven’t germinated. They linger, buried in the fertile ground, thirsty for living water, water to enable them to burst forth and grow mightily, producing a full measure of their fruit.
God planted crops in our fields. Let’s clean out any worldly lime that may be built up. Then we can ask the Holy Spirit to flow from us and water the seeds of God’s Word. His Word needs living water, for seeds without water never produce a crop.
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