Jesus analogized the Holy Spirit to water. John 7:37-39 , John 4:10-14, Acts 1:5. Scripture contains many similar analogies. See Psalm 1:1-3, Psalm 36:8-9, Psalm 42:1-2, Psalm 46:4, Psalm 63:1, Psalm 65:9-10, Psalm 143:6, Sirach 24:23-34, Isaiah 32:15, Isaiah 33:21, Isaiah 35:6-7, Isaiah 41:17-18, Isaiah 43:19-20, Isaiah 44:1-5, Isaiah 48:21, Isaiah 55:1, Isaiah 58:11, Jeremiah 2:13, Jeremiah 17:7-8, Jeremiah 31:12, Ezekiel 19:10, Ezekiel 36:25, Ezekiel 47:1-12, Joel 2:28, Joel 3:18, Zechariah 13:1, Zechariah 14:8, Matthew 3:11, Mark 1:8, Luke 3:16, John 1:33, Acts 2:17-18, Revelation 7:17, Revelation 21:6, Revelation 22:1-2, Revelation 22:17. Cf Psalm 107:33-34, Jeremiah 17:5-6, Jeremiah 17:13. Other, far less impressive, writers have explored those analogies. See Responding to God's Grace: What We Can Learn From Water, God's Grace as Water: Jumping, and Staying, In, and God's Grace as Water: It's Everywhere.
So what do we do with those analogies, how do we respond to them?
One way is to let them guide our prayers. Think of water’s attributes and let them flow through your prayers:
1. Water irrigates and hydrates us.
Holy Spirit, please irrigate us, supply us with yourself where and when we need you.
Holy Spirit, please help us take you in, absorb you into, every aspect of our lives, every cell of our beings.
2. Water refreshes, revives, awakens us.
Holy Spirit, please wake us from spiritual slumber/torpor.
Holy Spirit, please revive us like a cool beverage revives us when we are hot and parched.
3. Water cleanses us.
Holy Spirit, please remove, cleanse us of, sin and dysfunction.
Holy Spirit, please wash away all things that obscure the Jesus you have grown/planted in us.
Holy Spirit, please wash/wipe away sin/dysfunction while it is still fresh, like mud on a gardener’s hand.
Holy Spirit, please remove the stains, lingering effects of sin/dysfunction
4. Water stays in, coats, and preserves life in the soil at a microbial level, allowing/supporting life at higher levels.
Holy Spirit please stay in us and coat us, especially in otherwise dry circumstances.
Holy Spirit, help us to enable those around us to live, thrive, and produce what they were created for.
5. Water makes fruit possible.
Holy Spirit, please connect us to you, help us to take you in and produce your fruit. See John 15:4-8 and Galatians 5:22-23.
6. Water flows downhill.
Holy Spirit, please help me to humble myself so I can be down to where you flow.
Holy Spirit, please help me to recognize when my arrogance, perceptions of self sufficiency or superiority, place me in a position outside of your flow.
Holy Spirit, please flow to, flood, the lowest, most base, parts of my life and raise them through divine accretion.
Holy Spirit, please direct me to apply the things I’ve been given to those who, by the world’s standards, are “beneath me.”
7. We drink water in.
Holy Spirit, help us drink you in.
8. Water flows
Holy Spirit, please help me to get into, swim with, your current.
9. Water overflows
Holy Spirit, fill us to overflowing, so that your goodness spills from us.
No comments:
Post a Comment