Drinking From the ROCK

 

Tuesday, March 14, 2023

I don’t want you to forget, dear brothers and sisters, about our ancestors in the wilderness long ago.  All of them were guided by a cloud that moved ahead of them, and all of them walked through the sea on dry ground.  In the cloud and in the sea, all of them were baptized as followers of Moses.  All of them ate the same spiritual food, and all of them drank the same spiritual water.  For they drank from the spiritual rock that traveled with them, and that rock was Christ.  

1 Corinthians 10:1-3

In Exodus[1] we read the story of God’s children out in the dessert, thirsty and with no water in sight.  Their complaints were against Moses, but reached God in Heaven, and the Lord instructed Moses to strike a rock.  In answer to Moses’ stick hitting the rock, God provided a gushing fountain in the middle of a wasteland.

That moment was a harbinger of things to come…a symbol of God’s providence, miracle after miracle, until His promises all unfolded two thousand years later, at a cross on the town garbage dump, and a borrowed, but barely-used tomb. 

I have a memory (and a photo buried somewhere in thousands of old pictures) of a visit my family made to The Dessert of Maine in the 1950’s.  One would not expect to find a slice of the Sahara in New England; the Tuttle family didn’t either.  They bought that small farm in 1821, and the family abandoned it in 1890[2] because, lacking understanding of sustainable farming depleted the soil, and the underlying sand basically rose-up to cover whatever was left of their orchard.  The treetops are covered by the sand to this day.  The photo was of me, ten-years-old, lying on that sand, tongue hanging-out, watching my handful of sand fall through my fingers.  It was (and remains) my mind’s image of what it’s like to die of thirst.

There are many things necessary to human life, but food, water, and breathing are the most critical.  Wastelands are places where life has lost its way.  And the metaphor of a dessert as choosing a sinful, rebellious lifestyle is a precise descriptive of what Israel chose in the wilderness…dying of thirst for spiritual life.  They were angry at Moses, angry at God, and unable to see how parched their souls had become. 

It was going to be a long 40 years in that dessert!

For You Today 

Providing an unending water source, more than the former slaves could drink, bathe-in, or irrigate a thousand generations of corn fields, was just the beginning of seeing the gracious hand of God give all humanity the greatest of gifts, the salvation of souls.  Those Israelites drank from the rock, and He’s still giving living water today.

So, are you thirsty?

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

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There are about 2,500 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper explore some of these:  Following the Truth  or  The Rock of Our Salvation       

Title Image: via Pixabay.com    Images without citation are in public domain.

Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©  

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[1] Exodus 17:1-5

[2] Read about the Dessert of Maine

Rivers of Living Water

Wednesday, March 25, 2020

On the last day, the climax of the festival, Jesus stood and shouted to the crowds, “Anyone who is thirsty may come to me!  Anyone who believes in me may come and drink!  For the Scriptures declare, ‘Rivers of living water will flow from his heart.’”  (When he said “living water,” he was speaking of the Spirit, who would be given to everyone believing in him.  But the Spirit had not yet been given, because Jesus had not yet entered into his glory.)          John 7:37-39

Our dear friends, John and Anne live in Waynesville, North Carolina, a place close to the hearts of many North Carolina Methodists, right next to Lake Junaluska’s campgrounds.  Anne writes about their life in the mountains.  This past week they were (once again) on the Blue Ridge Parkway enjoying the falls:

[Grandson] David and I enjoyed Sunburst Falls. I said we had silent worship there with the falling water. I always think of living water welling up to eternal life and paused to thank God for what He does for us.[1]

Elizabeth and I have travelled some of the Pisgah National Forrest’s trail of waterfalls, and I’ve stood near them many times.  Somehow the idea of silent worship (as Anne called it) never entered my mind.  But so it is. 

Sometimes the silence invoked by the overpowering noise water makes crushing against ageless stone overwhelms a soul.  Anne’s timely piece on how life can be tossed upside down in a week – her word picture is Viral Pan-Panic – is a stark reminder that our days are looming, threatening any sense of normalcy. 

In such a world it’s easier to wander into fear, loathing the darkness.  It’s totally counter-intuitive to stop and thank God amidst the news media’s onslaught of disaster piled on calamity concerning the Covid-19 virus.  We are so conditioned lately to what the next morning’s game changing event will bring, you almost hate to turn on the TV.  One Facebook friend, whom I’ve known since kindergarten, posted that her husband is currently in the hospital with a bacterial infection, in isolation.  She was very quick to point out he did NOT have the Corona Virus.  A month ago none of us would have leaped to that conclusion of pandemic in a high school buddy.  Now, everything’s changed!

And that is the point for the church, and every follower of Jesus Christ; everything has changed.  No longer is there an inviolability of same ol’ – same ol’; no footsteps are heard in the Sanctuary on Sunday mornings at 11am.  It isn’t business as usual, and the waters are highly uncharted as to what that means for the future. 

And, if this pandemic viral bug can toss everything on it’s ear, grabbing the whole world’s attention and economic stability in two news cycles, think what the antidote of living water can accomplish for eternity if we who believe and follow Jesus Christ see that opportunity before us to interpret to 21^st century culture that whatever it is that kills the body is to be feared much less than He who holds our souls in his power.

“Don’t be afraid of those who want to kill your body; they cannot touch your soul. Fear only God, who can destroy both soul and body in hell.  Matthew 10:28

For You Today

The current crisis may or may not be a judgment of God, or simply a genetic evil cooked up in a petri dish.  But it certainly should help us focus on the only real center for disease control!  Two thousand years ago it was set up on a hill that looks like a skull.  And it was set up to battle the virus of sin – the ultimate pandemic crisis for humanity’s eternity. 

And Christ beat the stuffing out of the Lucifer virus!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

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Title Image:  Anne Mehrling original work, used with permission             Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©

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[1] You can catch-up with Anne at Mehrling Muse – Life in the Mountains