Streams of Living Water

The importance, necessity and sustaining qualities of water for life can never be overstated.  We all need it … depend upon it … use it … rejoice in it … welcome it … drink it … wash in it … die without it. Through their picturesque images, art galleries, tourist brochures, photograph albums and photographic exhibitions all demonstrate and celebrate the beauty and wonder of God’s glorious and providential creation for our good.  

I take great pleasure in visiting, in observing and in taking photographs of wonderful water in all its different forms. I took this photo of the Bakthang Falls in full flood, a few miles outside Gangtok in Sikkim ~ beautiful.

Biblical and secular literature throughout the ages have often depicted fresh, verdant, life giving streams as bountiful blessings and arid, desolate deserts as disaster and judgement. The parched traveller rejoices when stumbling across a flourishing oasis in the middle of the sun-scorched, dry, dust-laden atmosphere and desolate emptiness of the barren desert.

Sometimes, during our short life-span, we experience both of these conditions. Our lives appear to veer uncontrollably and maybe, unaccountably, from fruitful, family focussed loving and caring relationships together with joyful, fulfilling and peaceful experiences to wilderness wanderings with accompanying dryness, barrenness, loneliness, isolation, uncertainty, anxiety, difficulties and even possibility of death.

In God’s Word, written to all people worldwide, we read about His care and plans for His special people, the Jewish nation, who were exiled into Babylon because of their idolatrous disobedience to His laws.

They were living in a dry wasteland, anxious about their future ~ maybe you in are a similar place?

Remember, we can take great comfort and encouragement from God’s Word, which assures us:

“The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love.

The Lord is good to all; He has compassion on all He has made”

For God’s people in Babylon, as for us today, the desperate, wilderness situation in which we may find ourselves, does not have to remain. For Almighty God is at hand to help and to bring His salvation to us.

“Surely God is my salvation; I will trust and not be afraid.
The Lord, the Lord Himself, is my strength and my defence;
    He has become my salvation.
With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation”

“The Lord says, ‘I am making a way in the wilderness; I provide water in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland’”

“The poor and needy search for water, but there is none; their tongues are parched with thirst.
But I the LORD will answer them; I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.
I will make rivers flow on barren heights, and springs within the valleys.
I will turn the desert into pools of water, and the parched ground into springs”

It is such a wonderful truth, that the Lord God Almighty, KNOWS our situation, CARES about our troubles, and HAS THE ANSWER to all our needs. The Lord Jesus, our Saviour, one day was talking to a Samaritan woman who was isolated in a barren, lonely place, an outcast in society. He said to her:

“Everyone who drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life”

On another occasion, Jesus said: “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. Whoever believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him”

Have you come to Jesus?     Are you drinking from the life-giving streams of living water?

Ron Brickman

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