The other day I was driving down the road, drinking Diet
Coke from my extra large, hot pink, Breast Cancer Foundation tumbler. The drink had sat in my car long enough
that the ice began to melt and mix with the soda. It is bad enough to drink watered down Diet Coke, but when I
took a drink, it had a very poor, almost plastic-like taste that was
considerably less than desirable.
It was at that point that I remembered I had been meaning to change out
the water filter in our refrigerator for over a month now.
Let’s be clear.
I think we have really good water in our neck of the woods. It is clean and tastes well. You can hold up a glass straight out of
the faucet and it looks clear. I
have no problem drinking water from any faucet in the house. On the other hand, there is nothing
better than ice-cold, filtered water, so if the refrigerator has a built in
filter for the ice and water dispenser (which it does), then I will choose that
over the faucet every time. The
problem with filtered water is, well, that you have to keep the filter
clean. It has an expiration date. The filter in my fridge was long past
its expiration.
When I pulled the filter from the refrigerator, I was pretty
much disgusted. The filter was as
black as night (see pic). No wonder
the melted ice tasted so nasty.
Although the faucet water seems to be clean and tastes pretty well
unfiltered, there are still a number of impurities in it. Perhaps they don’t seem apparent when
drinking one glass of water; but over time, having been passed through the
filter, these impurities had built up to the point that they could be seen for
what they truly are – a collection of deep, black, nasty sludge. The filter could no longer remove these
impurities from the water used to make ice and, in fact, the sludge collected
in the filter was actually contaminating the water such that it was dirtier
coming out of the filter than it was going into the filter. Absolutely gross, man.
Our lives are a lot like the water in my town. We often seem to be very clean in the
way we act, and for the most part we behave ourselves, and we may even be a
pleasant sort of folk. In fact,
there are times when there is much “good” that is done by us. Why should anyone complain about
us? Clearly any impurities that may
exist are small, irrelevant, and shouldn’t too negatively impact us. Unfortunately, the problem is that
those impurities do exist. Jesus
says in Matthew 15:19-20 that “out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder,
adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what
defile a person.” The impurities
inside that we hide and keep secret from those around us still defile us – we
just don’t notice it so much. We
are not as pure a people as we may think and ultimately what is on the inside must
eventually come to the outside. And
just like my filter when it has past its expiration date, those impurities can
collect and become a much bigger problem.
That is when we see the dark sludge of our humanity all to clearly. We might try to hide the impurities,
but they are there and they are polluting us even when we don’t realize it.
Fortunately, there is filter within us – the Holy
Spirit. In John 4, Jesus told the
woman at the well that he would give her water that would be a well springing
up within her, leading to eternal life.
John goes on to say that Jesus was speaking of the Holy Spirit. Later, at the Feast of Tabernacles in
John 7, Jesus said this river of water springing up from their heart would be
“living” water. The fact that it
would be living water was significant to the Jews. Many of their religious rituals required cleansing with water
from a living, flowing source such as a river or stream – not a stagnant source
such as a pond. Living water
cleansed and purified because it was alive and flowing and clean. It was symbolic of the fact that the
process of purifying ourselves was continual and required constant
renewal. In addition, the Jews
understood from the practice of Judaism what “living water” meant as it related
to the Feast of Tabernacles.
This feast was a time in which they celebrated living water. The Feast of Tabernacles commemorated
the time when Israel wandered in the desert, being protected by and provided
for miraculously by God. This
included the miraculous provision of life-giving water. To celebrate this, every day during
this 7 day feast, the priests would march from the temple down to the Pool of Siloam,
collect “living water” from that pool, carry it back up to the temple, and pour
it out as a “libation” offering.
When we accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, he gives
us the Holy Spirit to live within us.
The Holy Spirit becomes our living water, flowing from our heart,
keeping us clean and filtered like a fresh water filter that never goes bad. We still have these impurities within
us all the time and need a constant renewing, but the Holy Spirit continually
filters and cleanses us so that we remain clean and fresh as water straight
from the refrigerator.
And to beat it all, we don’t have to worry about the Holy
Spirit getting all yucky because he is clogged up from filtering out our
impurities. Best. Filter. Ever.
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