Thought for the Day – Saturday 30th May
‘On the last day of the festival,
the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, “Let anyone who is
thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture
has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” Now
he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive; for as
yet there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified.’ (John 7:
37-39)
How is your patience and by that I don’t mean the card game with which
you may have been passing some of your time during ‘Lockdown’? Rather how
patient are you – how good are you at waiting for something to happen? I know some
of us it seems are gifted with a lot of patience and others perhaps not quite so
much!
Generally, I have to say I tend to be a very patient person but I do
wonder how patient I would have been if, as an enthusiastic believer in Jesus,
on that last day of the Festival of Booths that I was being told by Jesus
himself that I had to wait for this wonderful thing I would receive – this
living water which when it came would overflow from my heart – this living
water being Jesus’ way of talking about the Holy Spirit and its coming. I
wonder if I would indeed have been able to contain myself, would have been
willing to wait for it thinking it such a wonderful thing or would I have been
impatient and desperate for it to come as quickly as possible. We all know how desperate we are for a cooling
drink on warm days such as we are having at the moment – sometimes we are very
impatient when it comes to quenching our thirst!
Jesus here is promising his Spirit to all who believe in him but the
time is not yet, that Spirit will not come until the day of Pentecost and so
the believers just have to wait for their wonderful gift, wait to be filled by
that Spirit, wait for their hearts to overflow with that Spirit. They have to
be patient until the time is right!
I suppose here in this story there is an analogy for all of us with our
situation here in ‘Lockdown’.
As believers we are perhaps not waiting for the Holy Spirit to come
into our lives because we believe we have already received the gift of the
Spirit when we turned to Jesus and were baptised. However, we are in a time of
waiting, waiting to be released from ‘Lockdown’, waiting to see our loved ones
and embrace them once more, waiting for the time when we can meet together as a
fellowship, waiting to return to a sense of freedom where we can go out to shop
freely, go to work, engage in leisure activities, engage with our communities,
return to our ‘new normal’. However, the time is not quite yet – so we have to
be patient – the time will come and in the meantime we have to nurture our
patience and just wait.
‘The hardest test in life is
having the patience to wait for the right moment.’
So:
‘Be patient good times will come.’
And:
‘When you are tempted to lose
patience with someone, think how patient God has been with you – all the time.’
Prayer
Loving Lord,
We may be feeling drained by this time of ‘Lockdown’, parched as in a
desert, thirsty and in need of refreshment but we patiently wait for the right
time and we pray that you would be present with us in our waiting, saturating
us with your Spirit and bathing us in streams of living water that refresh and
restore our very being. May your word speak to our thirst, your good news
comfort us that our hearts may be filled to overflowing with love – love which
we can then share. Lord hear our prayer, as we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment