Do You Have a Drinking Problem?
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There is an old story about a young minister who is about to preach his first sermon. He was so nervous he didn’t know what to do, so he asked an older pastor what he did when he got really nervous. The older minister said, “Well, when I get really nervous I take a glass of clear liquor into the pulpit with me and I sip it.” Now this must have been a Presbyterian, so…. And sure enough, as the young minister started going, he drank the whole thing at once; and when it was done he asked the older minister how he did. The older minister said, “Well, the service was supposed to be over at noon, not at one-thirty, and David killed Goliath. He didn’t stomp the heck out of him.”
Now, I guess it wasn’t as funny as I thought it might be.
Well today I am going to talk a little bit about another kind of drink that Jesus talks about in the passage today that we are dealing with. As you know, I have been preaching through the book of John and we have come to the end of Chapter 7. This is the end of when Jesus attends the Feast of Tabernacles. Now in those days they would have many feasts during the year, celebrations, and this was an eight day celebration of God’s blessing of the children of Israel in the desert. Jesus taught every day in the temple. During those times, on every day, there where lots of ceremonies; and on the last day the priests would walk in procession and everyone would follow them out of the city to the Pool of Siloam; and, with a golden cup, they would dip it into the pool and take it back to the Temple. Everybody would march out and march back in, the symbol of water in the desert; and Jesus uses this time to cry out in the Temple, “If you want living water, come to me.”
I am going to focus on that today, but as you read the passage today, we will read the whole passage, also notice what happens, the divisions that Jesus causes, the arguments that people have about him. Some people thought he was a prophet. Other people thought he was something else. From John, the end of Chapter 7: (John 7:37-52)
37On the last and greatest day of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. 38Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” 39By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.
40On hearing his words, some of the people said, “Surely this man is the Prophet.”
41Others said, “He is the Christ.”
Still others asked, “How can the Christ come from Galilee? 42Does not the Scripture say that the Christ will come from David’s family and from Bethlehem, the town where David lived?” 43Thus the people were divided because of Jesus. 44Some wanted to seize him, but no one laid a hand on him.
45Finally the temple guards went back to the chief priests and Pharisees, who asked them, “Why didn’t you bring him in?”
46“No one ever spoke the way this man does,” the guards declared.
47“You mean he has deceived you also?” the Pharisees retorted. 48“Has any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed in him? 49No! But this mob that knows nothing of the law—there is a curse on them.”
50Nicodemus, who had gone to Jesus earlier and who was one of their own number, asked, 51“Does our law condemn anyone without first hearing him to find out what he is doing?”
52They replied, “Are you from Galilee, too? Look into it, and you will find that a prophet does not come out of Galilee.”
Would you pray with me?
Lord God, thank you again for John’s words— so many things in his words that come from no where else. Thank you for the insight that we have about Jesus and who he is and who he is for us. Speak to us Lord in our hearts and minds things that we need to hear today. Be with the one who peaches and forgive him of his many sins for they are indeed many. Be with us now Lord with that same Spirit that Jesus mentions, for we pray in his name. Amen.
As we go through this passage as I have often done, I have an initial observation about the passage as a whole. As you go through this passage and study it, take note of the divisions that Jesus causes. You know, we tend to think that Jesus always brings peace, that he always smoothes over the waters, that he is the Prince of Peace; and certainly, he is. But if you read the gospels, we find that Jesus sometimes is just a plain trouble maker. It is like he throws a grenade in the crowd and he says things, that, “What?” Or he does things that upset people. Now he may not being doing that on purpose but these things happen, these divisions happen, because of who he is. Now we don’t know all the reasons that it happens, but certainly as we look at these passages, we see that Jesus causes these divisions for lots of different reasons, among them because he said that they would happen.
Listen to what he says. He says in Luke 12, and actually it is repeated in Matthew, “Do you think that I have come to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. From now on in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law. And even in his own house, a man will find enemies.” Jesus said it would happen. Well why would it happen? Another reason is this idea of truth. You know, I have found in life that if you say things in a categorical manner, that is, something is always true; someone will always dispute with you. “Well it may not be always true…” It almost always happens, doesn’t it? And that’s O.K., but sometimes Jesus says things; in fact, many times he says it in a categorical manner. He says things, “I am the truth. I am the way. No one comes to the Father except by me” and on and on it goes. We have seen some of those things. We will see them again. And that’s difficult.
These days there is almost no truth that is considered always true for all time, especially religious truth. If you even suggest that something might be true for everyone, particularly in religion, the labels come out with a vengeance. “You’re bigoted, unloving, unwelcoming, not to mention, probably not too smart.”
Another reason is that Jesus asks for total commitment. Listen to what he says. He says, “We must love him more than our work, our political party, our possessions, our family and even our lives.” He says, “If you don’t hate your life, you can’t be my disciple.” He says” if you follow me it may mean the loss of your friendship, possessions, your physical life.” He says that “we must believe that he is the truth above all others and then speak the truth to the world, no matter what others think of us.” Wow! That’s tough stuff. That’s tough stuff, but Jesus says it. He says, you must have the courage of your convictions and stand out in the world, not as someone who draws fire to yourself on purpose. We are to speak the truth in love; but it will come and we must be ready for it.
Now to the passage at hand. There was so much in this passage, again, and I have decided to focus on the very well known verse at the beginning when Jesus cries out in the temple and says, “If you want to drink living water, come to me.” Then he says.. John has a little explanation; he talks about Jesus’ talking about the Holy Spirit. What’s going on here?
Jesus simply wants people who listen to him to drink. He wants us to drink from him. He wants the world to drink of him. But the problem is, to coin a phrase, I guess, or to copy one, is that most of us have a drinking problem. In other words, we reliably, almost always, and again maybe that’s categorical, but, we almost always seek to quench our thirst in other ways. God wants us to drink of him. Now, of course, he is talking about spiritual drink. The fact is that you and I are thirsty people. You and I are hungry people and I am not talking about simply physically. We hunger for something else. Yet, we continually seek to fill that hunger—we might call that an eating disorder, spiritually— and we continue to try to drink from other wells. So God, in my view, actually it is a view of a professor I had and I have never forgot what he said, he said, “God has rigged the world not to work.” God has rigged the world not to work, and isn’t it true that nothing truly satisfies. Even the best of things in this world are not quite enough after a while. We get bored with them easily, even the best of relationships, even the best of things that we have. Everything gets rusty. What my professor friend was actually, theologically, talking about if you look back at the beginning of Genesis, God says to Adam after Adam has sinned, “Cursed be the ground because of you.” What does that mean? It means that work is not going to be much fun because things are going to go wrong.
One of you, I won’t mention your name, was mentioning a sermon I preached a while back when I said “When we get to heaven we are going to work.” That person said, “What! I was hoping we wouldn’t have to do that.” Well I believe we will, except, when we get to heaven, it will be fun. It will be fulfilling. But you know, if you plow the ground and plant the seeds, guess what you are going to get? Half corn and half weeds. Isn’t it true when you grow a garden, if you don’t keep it up, you get the weeds. Isn’t it true that what we do, sooner or later grows tiresome; and the car that we bought yesterday gets a dent today and rusts tomorrow. God has rigged the world not to work.
Now we may look at that and go, well that is kind of mean, you know particularly when we look at things like Haiti. You know the inevitable questions come out about that: Why the Haitians? Why earthquakes? Why now? And frankly, we don’t have the answer to those questions. Some people try to give them, like Pat Robertson, you know, the one trying to say that a couple hundred years ago somebody made a deal with the devil, and that kind of thing. I wouldn’t know. Who knows? Obviously in human life there are consequences to human choices and certainly those people, like everyone else, are sinners; but they were certainly sinned against for two hundred years with people robbing them, then they built houses which collapsed on one another. I don’t know why. But these things happen. The Bible says they will happen. And we ought to do something about it. We should rush to aid but we also should see the bigger picture. And what is the bigger picture of hurricanes and earthquakes? This world is not your home, and yet, we reliably try to make it so. That is one of the biggest lessons in the Christian life—that this world is not our home, and we need to live like pilgrims and strangers because we have another home. That doesn’t mean we don’t live well, or we don’t enjoy life. We should. But this world is not our home. And yet, ninety-nine percent of our focus is right here. We have a drinking problem, because we don’t drink from the well that God has given us. We try to dig our own.
Now if you are following the outline, you’ll notice that number 2 and 3 are switched. As I was looking at it, it seemed like that flowed a little bit better. What I mean by this is that Jesus says that we have an inheritance as Christians, and it is none other than the Holy Spirit. You know when people think about an inheritance they are usually thinking about someone dying. Now, I won’t ask anybody to raise their hands, but if you have ever had someone in your family that you thought you might get an inheritance from, you know, sometimes we think, how long is it going to be? Now I am only kidding, well,,,, Don’t look over your shoulder. Or at least the mystery writers at least help people along to get the inheritance. In other words, you have to die to get an inheritance; and it is true for Christians, to some degree. We are going to heaven. We are going to get an inheritance because we are children of God and we don’t even know how great it is going to be. We can’t imagine it. But do you know what? We get the inheritance now, in the form of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus says, “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him” and that is none other than the Holy Spirit.
For those of you who are biblical scholars, before Christ, the Holy Spirit was certainly in the lives of the Israelites but mostly like an umbrella, if you will, overseeing them and influencing them. Very few people had the Holy Spirit within them. David did. Some prophets did. A few people did. But when Jesus came, things changed. The Holy Spirit has been given to all of us who believe. Paul says, “The Holy Spirit is a deposit guaranteeing the inheritance;” you know, like when you put a deposit down for a house, its earnest money. So literally, the Holy Spirit lives within you and me. But you know, again, we sort of quench the Spirit in our lives. I think some people, some Christians are sort of afraid of this idea of the Holy Spirit, thinking, well that is kind of spooky. Or, we are just sort of saying, “O.K. Lord, I am going to keep you in the living room while I have the run of my own house.” But again, we have a drinking problem. The Holy Spirit is meant to not only be in our lives, but we should be in a relationship with him all the time. And water is just what water is. We have to drink all the time in order to quench our thirst. It is not a one-shot deal. Yet again, reliably, we are off try to fulfill ourselves in some other way.
I have a friend who has a dog and he began to feed the dog all the table scraps. It wasn’t very long before the dog wouldn’t eat the dog food. It began to gain a little weight. So he took the dog to the vet and said, “Doc, I have this problem. My dog won’t eat dog food any more.” And he told him the story. The vet said, “Put the bowl of dog food on the floor; don’t feed him anything else and he will eat.” The man said, “You don’t understand. My dog is a connoisseur now. My dog is a connoisseur. He won’t dog food.” And the vet said, “If you don’t feed him anything else, sooner or later he will eat.” Sooner or later he will eat.
That is what God does with us, sometimes. I talked about that with the airplane, how God sometimes has hard things in our lives; sometimes God rigs things not to work, so that we will eat from him. He does it because he loves us, not because he hates us or he is mean to us, but because of our natures we tend to go in the wrong directions. You don’t have to die to get that inheritance.
Thirdly, if God gives it, you have to share it or it will grow stale. If God gives it, you have to share it or it will grow stale. Most of us have heard the illustration of the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is dead because all the water goes in and doesn’t go out. We know what it is like when we stop up something and the water just sits there. In other words, our water has to flow. It is kind of like a muscle. You know back a long time ago I was pastor of a small church and I was chief cook and bottle washer, did everything in the church, including the youth group. We were having a lock-in and so we were all spending the night, all night in the church. I invented this game. I called it balloon volley ball but it was not really just a balloon; it was, you know, one of those rubber balls that you blow up and it is about this big around and it bounces like that. You know what is cool about that? You could hit it as hard as you want and get hit by it and no one gets hurt. So this was sort of a violent volleyball game. I put a table out in the middle and we wham like that and then wham back. It didn’t matter….everybody was laughing. But I thought that you could not get hurt in it, but little did I know: I could get hurt in it. Well I swung one time to hit this thing, missed, and hit some kids palm and dislocated this finger. I do this stuff to myself all the time, but… anyway, they put it back together; but I had a young doctor and he didn’t tell me what I needed to know, that I needed to do therapy. What I found out three months later, this finger wouldn’t move any more. I began to do therapy on it but it still doesn’t move like it should if I had moved it.
If we don’t use things they get stiff. Muscles grow atrophied and our faith can die. Any relationship you have must be maintained and used and shared or it dies. Steve Brown tells a story of a youth person who came into his office and said, “My faith is dying, Pastor Brown, I don’t know what to do. God seems so far away.” And Steve, basically being who Steve is, basically said, “It is because you are not sharing your faith. You haven’t shared it and therefore it is dying.” The youth got mad at him and left, but came back a couple days later and said, “You know, Steve, you’re right. I shared my faith today and the Father is alive again.”
If we don’t share our faith, it is no wonder God seems far away. If we don’t give it away, and the Holy Spirit is meant to give away, that is the remarkable thing in what Jesus says, he says that “if we have the Holy Spirit it will flow through us to other people.” Isn’t that remarkable, that we become channels of the Holy Spirit?
Last but not least, you just saw it: Don’t forget to eat the dessert. This phrase comes from a story I heard about a woman, could be a man, could be anybody, really, but they went to eat somewhere and the waitress came up and asked if they would like dessert. The woman said, no, politely, thinking she would have to pay for it. But as she was walking out, she overheard the waitress say, “Well the dessert was included.” She fussed and she fumed over that, that she didn’t get her dessert. I think Christians do the same thing.
You know, often, the stereotype for Christians is that you have to be always serious and always kind of glum. Kind of like that picture of me in my uniform, I look very serious. I call it the Army smile. But you know Christians are supposed to be alive. Yes, life is serious. Life hurts. But we have the Holy Spirit and we have Jesus. We have the Lord. And we are supposed to give it away. As we give it away, we have more joy; we have more of the Lord. It works that way; but if we keep it to ourselves, we die. We forget that we are supposed to have joy. Jesus says that “the Spirit had not been given until later because the Lord had not been glorified.” When John uses the term glory, he is talking about Jesus’ death on the cross. Most of the time when we think of Jesus’ death on the cross is that he died to save us from hell. That’s true; but even more, he died to get the hell out of us. In other words, our lives are to begin now, not later. Dessert is first, if you will; and we are to have a life that is different than any.
So as we close today, I would ask you to ask God to make it different for you. If you have a Christian life that isn’t that real, ask him to give you the Spirit, or put you in touch with the Spirit already in you, and ask him to make it real. Ask him to make your Christian life different. And he will.
Let’s pray together.
Lord God thank you for the words we have through Jesus Christ. Thank you that you have given us you, the Holy Spirit, in our lives. Make him real to us and give us the joy that comes through him and may that joy and that message and that power flow from us to those around us. Through Jesus Christ we pray. Amen.