The Messiah Comes to Bring Living Water Joshua Cotter March 4, 2012 Good morning. Welcome to Lovin’ Life! Happy Sunday! Happy first Sunday in March! Today is March 4th. Are you ready to march forth? You look so good today. Turn to your neighbor and say, “I love you! Welcome to Lovin’ Life! God loves you.” Everybody, I guess you’ve got to take your seats. Good morning. I love our senior pastor. Do you love her? I love her for many reasons, but one in particular is because she made Lovin’ Life a music ministry. Amen? A music ministry, that’s like music to my soul. In fact, it is! It’s music to my soul. So when the music stops, I feel like we should keep going. How about you? It’s great to see Sister Gloria here, and Minister Wright. We had such an incredible time in the Lord at the Original Substance of Divine Principle (OSDP) workshops last fall and winter in Atlantic City and Las Vegas. The best part of it for me was of course the word, but the music, amen! I just want to thank the Wrights. Stand up right now. They’re part of our music ministry. Incredible. And Bishop Jesse Edwards, Rev. Levy Daugherty, Brother Keith Williams out in Los Angeles, and Brother Tim Daugherty right here in New York. God’s family came together and sang such beautiful music, which opened people’s hearts to receive the word, amen? That’s what Lovin’ Life is all about. Water Is Life Today I want to talk about living water. It’s amazing because Joe picked a Holy Song called “The Spring of Life” today. The chorus talks about the living waters, “going to the land where living waters flow.” That’s what this sermon is all about. That’s the great thing about gospel songs: They’re based on the word. In fact, I want to teach you a gospel song today. This is the little blonde guitar that we use in OSDP. I bet you didn’t know I could play this thing. Now let’s give a hand to the Lovin’ Life choir. They’re going to help you out with this song, and the words are up there. We’re in the house of the Lord, so why don’t you just stand to your feet and make a joyful noise! This song is called “River of Life.” (Singing a song) I’ve got a river of life flowing out of me, Makes the lame to walk and the blind to see, Opens prison doors, sets the captive free. I’ve got a river of life flowing out of me. Spring up, oh Well, inside my soul. Spring up, oh Well, and make me whole. Spring up, oh Well, and give to me That life abundantly. Spring up, oh Well, inside my soul. Spring up, oh Well, and make me whole. Spring up, oh Well, and give to me, That life abundantly. That life abundantly. That life abundantly. That’s what I’m talking about. Thank you, choir. Thank you, brothers and sisters. Give yourselves a big hand. Gospel songs are great because they’re based on the word of God. There are so many references in the Gospel to water, isn’t it true? Water is life. There are so many sermons about water. Today I want to talk about the living water that comes from God through the messiah. You might want to write some of these Scriptures down. I’m going to go through them quickly. John 7:38. Jesus was at the end of the Feast of Tabernacles, on the eighth day, when the Israelites were not supposed to drink. We read in John 7:38 that Jesus stepped forth at that time and he said this: “If anyone thirsts, let him come unto me and drink. He who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” Isn’t that beautiful? John 4:13–15 is another story about Jesus. In this story, he meets a woman at the well. Have you heard this story? She happens to be a Samaritan, and it wasn’t cool for Jews to speak and have discourse or conversation with Samaritans. This was a Samaritan woman who was standing at the well of Jacob, and Jesus was thirsty. He stopped by the well and asked if she would give him a drink. And she said, “You’re not supposed to be talking to people like me. What’s going on here?” Then Jesus talked about a different kind of water that he could offer her, water that would quench her thirst for eternity. She said, “What are you talking about? This is the water of our ancestor Jacob. How could your water be any better than Jacob’s?” But Jesus said, “Everyone who drinks this water from the well will be thirsty again. But whoever drinks the water that I give them will never thirst.” Amen. Indeed, Jesus said, “The water that I give them will become in them a spring of water, welling up to eternal life.” That’s what this song is talking about: “Spring up, oh Well, inside my soul.” So not only does God want to let us drink from the living water, he wants us then to become a fountain of living water, a well that never dries up. Can you say that? “A well that never dries up.” And the song says that I want life after all this, more abundantly. And that’s from the Scripture, John 10:10: “I have

• published: 05 Mar 2012
• views: 4474

Priority One Give Love Away #4 • Sunridge • 9.28.08 © by Greg Sidders I was sitting at the dinner table on Thursday night, after spending the whole day studying what the Bible teaches about love, and I asked my family what I thought was a profound question: “Who should we love more than anybody else?” And without hesitation, my 9-year-old son Brian answered nonchalantly, “God.” He said it with the same tone that he uses when we are doing speed tests with flash cards. He knows the answer by heart. The only question is, how fast can he say it? It was such a no-brainer to him that it made me re-think today’s whole sermon— because I was operating on the assumption that if I were to ask you, “Who does God want us to give love away to more than anybody else?” many of you would not automatically think of Him. It seems to me that we live in a time when giving love away is a popular thing to do, not just for Christians but for all Americans. Never in my lifetime have there been so many charity campaigns, whether it’s to help hurricane victims or AIDS patients or war refugees or cancer sufferers—the opportunities to give love away are almost overwhelming. And I thought that, with all this emphasis we put on loving other people, we might have forgotten that the most important commandment is to love the Lord our God. But you haven’t forgotten that, have you? It might get eclipsed at times by our focus on compassion ministries, but if I asked the question this way—“What did Jesus say when He was asked, What is the most important commandment?” —every person here who is familiar with the teachings of Jesus would be able to answer that question as quickly as my 9-year-old did. It’s a flash card question. You know by heart the answer that Jesus gave in the Gospel of Mark: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” Duh! But what if I asked you this follow-up question: “How do you know whether you really love God like that?” That’s what I asked my family after Brian answered the gimmee question. And this time there were no quick, memorized answers. But it’s a critical question, isn’t it? If the most important commandment in the Bible—if what matters to God more than anything else—is that we love Him with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, how do we know whether or not we’re doing it? How do you measure love for God? It was to find answers to that question that I spent some time this week studying the passage that Jesus quoted in Mark 12. It’s from Deuteronomy 6, and when I studied that passage in its original context I discovered that it is not just prescriptive, but also diagnostic. That is, it doesn’t just tell us what to do; it tells us how to know whether or not we’re doing it. This passage is like a LOVE DETECTOR TEST. It helps us to measure our love for God from three different dimensions. They’re not precise enough to plot on a graph, but they are sufficiently specific to help us get a pretty good feel for how much we really do love God. The first thing we need to gauge, if we want to measure our love for God, is the level of our AFFECTION for Him. Deuteronomy 6, verse 5 says: Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. Just focus in on the word “love.” A couple of weeks ago we learned two Hebrew words for love. One was ’aheb. That’s the word that is translated “love” in this passage. It’s the most emotional Hebrew word for love. It’s the word that is used in Genesis 22 :2, where God says to Abraham, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about.” Can you imagine how excruciating that command must have been for Abraham? Why was it so painful? Because he loved his son. He loved him with the same intensity that you love your children. That depth of affection that exceeds description—that’s ’aheb. It’s the kind of love that a father feels for his son. And ’aheb is the word that is used in Genesis 29 :18, where it says that Jacob was in love with Rachel. Some of you know the story. Jacob was traveling far from home when he stopped at a well. And a beautiful young woman came to that well, and he was smitten. He ended up working for her father, and when her dad asked him how he could pay him, Jacob said, “I’ll work seven years without pay if you’ll let me marry your daughter Rachel.” Her father agreed, and the Bible says that those next seven years seemed like only a few days to Jacob because of his love (his ’aheb) for Rachel. And then her dad pulled a dirty trick. He switched brides. At the end of a wedding feast that must have included an awful lot of wine, Jacob spent his wedding night with Leah, Rachel’s

• published: 15 Mar 2009
• views: 4527