Water

Have you ever seen the recovery of someone suffering from dehydration?   

When I was a kid, my family raised thousands of pigs every year and I would travel back to the farm every summer to work.  During that time, I remember the first time I watched my uncle bring an animal back from dehydration.  That day we had discovered a pig that had worked her way out of the gate and trapped herself without water for days.  You could see that she was extremely dehydrated, and so my initial thought was to give her as much water as she wanted.  I almost killed her. 

You see you can’t pour water into a dehydrated person.  Their bodies can’t handle it.  Just a short time after she began to drink, she began to vomit.  I had no idea what was happening and called my uncle.  When he arrived he took her aside and began to give her small doses of water over an extended period of time.  At no point could we just turn her loose.  It was incredible to watch her body recover slowly to the point where much later we could allow her to drink deeply. 

Over the past few days, I’ve been thinking about this idea of drinking deeply.  I’ve been working through our ability to experience God, drinking Hhim in, and our ability to experience Him fueling everything that we do.  I’ve been wondering how we can be sure that our Sunday service is a place where people can drink deeply, and how we can become a well in our community. 

What I’ve realized in the process is that it’s not enough that Sunday is a place flowing with water; a dehydrated individual cannot drink deeply.  Your experience with God on a daily basis is the hydration that will allow you to experience God deeply as you come together in worship.  Your time with him during the week is directly tied to your experience of him on the weekend.  To walk into the service hydrated is to come expecting much.  To walk in dehydrated is to limit what you will experience.  There really is no more important thing in our lives than the time we spend with God each day.  It’s not a learning time, it’s a drinking time. A time to experience Him.  Hydrate yourself today.  I’ve been teaching our church to change their time with God.  To create a time with Him that reflects our service 

Begin with worship. Set your heart in line with the truth of how great God is.  Allow your favorite worship song to bring you in focus.  We enter His gates with thanksgiving (Psalm 100:4). 

Prayer. Begin your time with expressing your heart.  Share what you are excited about today, worried about today, nervous about today, expecting today.  Share the prayer requests that are on your heart or that people have shared with you.  Don’t make it up, just share your heart. 

Listening. Take God’s word in. Read for a minute. Don’t study it like a text book and try to get something from every verse take it in learning what God has to say in the big picture.  Remember this is about a lifelong journey.  You will learn a lot more about who God is by reading it all several times than reading it with a microscope.  And remember this is about spending time with Him, listening to His story, not learning something new. 

End with worship. Go back to celebrating Him. We know that he inhabits the praise of his people.  End with a song that sends you into your day and excites you about living on mission that day. 

Drink. It’s not a new concept, but it is hitting me profoundly how our spiritual hydration mirrors our physical hydration.