Where’s Your Appetite?

John 4:8
(His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

Where’s Your Appetite?

The Lord dropped this scripture into my heart today, because He is asking you and me, where is your appetite? What are you foremost concerned about feeding and taking care of, your natural or your spiritual man? Hunger is a good motivator; it will motivate us to go and do what is necessary to get fed. It is what motivates us to work and pursue the things that meet our natural needs. Now that isn’t a bad thing, but as kingdom people Father is wanting our appetites to change. He wants to put in us the appetite of doing the will of the Father and to focus on what is feeding and nourishing the inner man, not just the outer.
John 4 deals with Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well. He begins telling her about a water where she will never thirst again. He reveals to her that He is the source of that living water. The natural water she can drink, but she will continue to thirst, but the living water is a perpetual life stream that can be a continual well spring inside of us of truth and life.
The disciples return as Jesus is finishing His conversation with this Samaritan woman. Verse 27-38 explains the scene. ” Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?”
28Then, leaving her water jar (Her container for the natural water) , the woman went back to the town and said to the people, 29“Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?” 30They came out of the town and made their way toward him.
31Meanwhile his disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.”
32But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.”
33Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?”
34“My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. 35Do you not say, ‘Four months more and then the harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. 36Even now the reaper draws his wages, even now he harvests the crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together. 37Thus the saying ‘One sows and another reaps’ is true. 38I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor.”
The Lord is moving us into a time where our appetite and our food will be like that of Jesus. Food and natural sustenance will be secondary to our heart to do Fathers will and impart life bread and water to those who are perishing. Matthew 5:6 says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” Father wants to put in us a new hunger and new passion that even overrides our physical needs.
The apostle Paul shared in that kind of hunger and appetite. He often paid the price in his body for what he gave out for others. In 2 Corinthians 11:23-31 he shares a little discourse of some of what he suffered for the causes of Christ. ” Are they servants of Christ? (I am out of my mind to talk like this.) I am more. I have worked much harder, been in prison more frequently, been flogged more severely, and been exposed to death again and again. 24Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. 25Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, 26I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my own countrymen, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false brothers. 27I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked. 28Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches. 29Who is weak, and I do not feel weak? Who is led into sin, and I do not inwardly burn?
30If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness. 31The God and Father of the Lord Jesus, who is to be praised forever, knows that I am not lying.”
Discipleship comes with a price and we have our time of growing up, but then we must do what 1 John 2:5-6 tells us, “But if anyone obeys his word, God’s love is truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are in him: 6Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did.” So the Holy Spirit is asking us today, “Where’s your appetite?”

Blessing,
#kent

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Leaking Cisterns

Leaking Cisterns

Jeremiah 2:13
For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, [and] hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.

A cistern is a well, pit or a storing place usually of water for any who may not be familiar with what a cistern is.
Jeremiah is unveiling the state of Israel as the Lord sees them. He would speak to us much the same way in this hour. We are a people that began with a faith in Christ and His righteousness. He was our fountain of living waters. He washed us in His blood and made us whiter than snow. He clothed us with the righteousness of His saints and He was our source of life and the focus of our daily living. We rejoiced in His fellowship and had great joy in our relationship with Him. Unfortunately, little by little our fidelity began to wane. Gradually the Lord ceased from being our all in all as we began to turn our eyes and hearts to other things and desires. Without even realizing it we began to move away from our fellowship as our focus and dependence became more and more on the world around us. Outwardly we would deny that anything was wrong with our spiritual state, but inwardly we knew we were losing the fountain of our fellowship and life.
What do we do to hide this spiritual breech of intimacy and life we had with the Lord? We create substitutes. We hew out our own cisterns of religious and spiritual appearances so that we can maintain a façade of spirituality and holiness to those around us. We don’t openly forsake the Lord, but we create a storefront of spirituality while, we live out our own desires in the backroom. Obviously this façade is our broken cisterns. They are fashioned like the real, but they are created in the flesh and as a result cannot hold the life of God. For those casually looking in everything may seem right and good, but we have become like Jesus’ description of the Pharisees, “whitewashed grave sites, full of dead men’s bones.” In our deception of ourselves we deceive others and lead them down our same path of destruction and ruin. Jeremiah 2: 19 says, “Your wickedness will punish you;
your backsliding will rebuke you. Consider then and realize how evil and bitter it is for you when you and have no awe of me,” declares the Lord, the LORD Almighty.” When we lose that fear, awe and respect for the Lord it takes us into dangerous territory. Many of us may find ourselves there today if we honestly and without guile search and discern our own hearts. The Lord warns us of our state so that we might judge ourselves and turn from our wicked ways, before God Himself has to judge us. This is where we return to those first principles of repentance from dead works. This is where we acknowledge our sinful and deviant ways before the Lord and turn back to Father with a broken and a contrite heart which the Lord says He will not despise. This is where we abandon the cisterns of our own making and turn again to drink from the fountain of living water. There we will find His grace and forgiveness if we will but fear Him and repent.
Father is calling those out who will hear His voice to be separated unto Him. It is not yet a separation unto judgement, but the lines of spiritual separation are being drawn between the sheep and the goats, the wheat and the tares. Let Him who has an ear hear what the Spirit is saying to the church in this hour. “Come out from among them and be ye separate.”

Blessings,
#kent

Spiritual Water

John 4:13-14

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14but whoever 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.” 

 

Spiritual Water

 

The setting here is Jesus sitting at Jacob’s well and speaking to this natural woman of Samaria.  Jesus speaks a parable or metaphor that takes her natural needs and transcends them to a spiritual plane.  Here He is taking the essential need that we all have for water, which is a basic compound of life and showing us through this woman that He has something to give us where we will never thirst again.  This woman, like most of us, being naturally minded is still trying to comprehend this truth with the natural mind.  It becomes obvious that Jesus isn’t speaking about giving her some magical natural fluid where she will never experience natural thirst again, but He wants to give her the spiritual water of His life where she will experience having all that she ever needs and will see that all of her needs are met in Him.  Jesus makes this obvious when He tells her to go and bring her husband.  She responds in John 4:17, “I have no husband,” she replied.”  Jesus then says, “”You are right when you say you have no husband. 18The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.” Like this woman, many of us go through life searching for the thing, that person, that experience or whatever it is that will fulfill us.  We are looking for what will give us our sense of purpose and being.  We can keep drinking from the natural wells of this world, but we will always thirst again.  Jesus is trying to communicate to this woman that I am the water that you need. When you drink of Me you are drinking of the eternal water that flows out of the throne of God.  In Me you can be satisfied and fulfilled. What begins as a drink will become in you a spring of water welling up to eternal life.  

Many of us have found this truth and have drank of this living water.  Some of us neglect and take for granted the dynamic power and life that is in what we have drank.  We become complacent and again turn our attentions to natural things.  This is a time that we want to be drinking deeply of Him.  We are His springs of living water that are coming forth throughout the earth.   We are His wells of life giving water that can refresh others with this living water.  Every day opportunities present themselves to share life.  Are we seizing those moments and offering the living water to those that are thirsting and searching? We are His springs, but we mustn’t allow ourselves to be a spring shut up and a fountain sealed.  With love and compassion let us give those a drink who are thirsting.  Let us share with them the living water, so that they may never thirst again.  

 

Blessings,

kent

Shallow is the Grave, Deep is the Well

Shallow is the Grave, Deep is the Well

John 4:6-10
Now Jacob’s well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied with [his] journey, sat thus on the well: [and] it was about the sixth hour. There cometh a woman of Samaria to draw water: Jesus saith unto her, Give me to drink. (For his disciples were gone away unto the city to buy meat. Then saith the woman of Samaria unto him, How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me, which am a woman of Samaria? for the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans Jesus answered and said unto her, If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water.

The word today is from the account of the woman at the well which many of you are familiar with, but if not take a few minutes to read it. There are many wonderful truths in this short encounter. The truth I feel impressed of the Lord to bring out today concerns areas that He is dealing with in my life and no doubt areas He wants to deal with in yours. In the natural scheme of the life of that day, this encounter with Jesus should have never happened. In the eyes of society and especially the typical Jewish outlook, this woman was way beneath good Jewish men, being considered little more than a dog. You know, in our state of sin we are much on that same level in regards to God and His holiness and greatness. Yet, God’s incomprehensible love humbles itself to come down to where we are in the messiness of our lives, in the squalor of our filth and sin and minister’s life to us. All of our lives we have come to the well and drank the waters of self efforts, our goodness and the accomplishments our own lives. The very best of what it could do or offer always left us thirsting again. Now, here is a man that is offering us living water that we would never thirst again. Wouldn’t that be great to never have to rely on my self-efforts and goodness to satisfy that thirsting of my soul? Here is a man that is offering to allow me to drink from the deep wells of salvation. It is so much more than the well of my religion that my forefathers dug. It is a well of deep relationship that forever satisfies.
As that woman, I would think, “this is wonderful, but who is this guy? Are you greater than what we have had before? Are you greater than our doctrine or religion or the belief system I have grown up with all my life? And where do you get this water seeing you have nothing to draw it with (no degree, pedigrees or theological background)? ”
“Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life (John 4:13-14).”
“Okay Lord, I’m convinced. Yes, give me this living water. This has got to be so much easier and better than the old routine of drawing from the well that I am used too.”
Then Jesus says something that catches her off guard and goes to a place she doesn’t really want to go. He tells her to go and get her husband and come here. She says, “Well, I’m not married.” Jesus sees right into her heart and says, ” You are right, you’re not married. You have had five husbands and the one you are with now is not your husband.” Immediately, though, no doubt taken back by His insight, she says, “Sir, I perceive you are a prophet,” and begins to engage in a religious discussion about where the true place of worship is. When the Holy Spirit addresses the other husbands in our lives, our personal sins and idols. We get pretty squeamish, defensive and want to get out of the light of His conviction by changing the subject.
There is an underlying truth here. Jesus wants to give us the living water, but He also wants to deal with these other husbands who haven’t even been true husbands at all. When we drink of this living water we enter into a relationship where Christ becomes our true husband that is our eternal supply, which is able to meet every need. In order for us to drink the fullness of the deep wells of salvation we have to deal with these other husbands in our life. If we have other husbands in our life we are in adultery and idolatry, because they will be taking the place of our true husband, Christ. The only way for us to be in right relationship with our true husband is for these others to die and be buried.
Easily said, not always easily done. These other husbands can represent strongholds, drives, habits, addictions and affections in our lives we don’t really want to let go of. We still have a love or at least a lust for them. We would rather the Lord not go there, but in order for us to experience the depths of the well of salvation and living water we must experience the death and the shallow grave of our idols and the husbands of affections that have ruled over us. So it comes down to a choice, to exchange, a shallow grave for a deep well or keep a shallow well, wherein we continue to thirst and a deep grave if we continue to hold on to the things that only bring death and destruction. Either way, there has to be a death, death to the spiritual to maintain the natural or death to the natural to experience the depths of the spiritual. In what areas do you have other husbands or lovers? Which well and which grave will you choose?

Blessings,
kent

Living Water (Prophetic Word)

Jeremiah 14:3
The nobles send their servants for water; they go to the cisterns but find no water.
They return with their jars unfilled; dismayed and despairing, they cover their heads.

Living Water

This is what the Lord says in this day and this hour. Out of your bellies shall flow forth streams of living water so that they that are thirsty may drink. My messengers are already upon the road and the cross-roads of life. They are in the intersections of decisions of life and death. I have sent forth the clouds of mercy and grace filled with the rain of my presence in this hour.
Come and fill your jars that you may return with living water. If any man thirst let him come to Me and I will give Him this water to drink that he may never thirst again after the waters that dry up and evaporate. My spring and My well flow continually to them who bath in its rivers and soak in its baths. My Word is the well-spring of life and it is what must saturate your being. If you thirst, it is because you do not drink of its life, for it is the sustenance of life.
Come with your jars and your earthen vessels that you may take it to the noble of this world; those who will receive of you all that I have poured into you. It is only those who reject my living water that will thirst, dry up and become like the cracking ground. They scorned the cup in the day it was offered and now they languish for thirst and yet deny it.
My life and My invitation is to all that will come and drink of My well. Come, drink and live.

Blessings,
kent