Let the rivers flow!

Genesis 26:18-19 And Isaac digged again the wells of water, which they had digged in the days of Abraham his father; for the Philistines had stopped them after the death of Abraham: and he called their names after the names by which his father had called them. And Isaac’s servants digged in the valley, and found there a well of springing water.

There are times in our lives that we are going through a spiritual valley and we want to obtain victory — we want to have answers — we want God’s power to flow through us again.

In this passage, Isaac found springing water after digging up the wells of his father Abraham again. In Hebrew, the phrase springing water is “mayim chayeem”. It literally means “living waters”.

Yeshua (Jesus) made us a promise during the feast of Sukkot (Tabernacles), “He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” – John 7:38

The Lord promises us rivers of living water — not a puddle, not a pond, not a lake — He said rivers! These waters are not meant to be stagnant and not meant to be dammed up! They need to be flowing — unrestricted!

We, who are believers in Messiah, have those living waters within us — but we must clear out the obstacles in our lives that prevent them from flowing! Sins of unforgiveness, resentment, bitterness, and clinging onto pet sins are just a few of the barriers which can damn up the “rivers” of living water! Let’s seek the Lord and ask him to search us deeply and thoroughly that we know how to destroy those obstacles that clog the free movement of His Spirit in our lives!

Let’s seek the Lord this Sukkot — and purpose to re-dig our wells again! And I expect the Lord has a great blessing for us if we do!

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As we discussed last week, the word for “sign” in ancient Hebrew is “oht”. It was used in Genesis to designate God’s covenant sign with Noah, (the rainbow). And we see now the same word again, in Exodus, identified with the deliverance of the Jewish people from the tenth plague, when the angel of death passed through all Egypt to strike the firstborn. Anyone under the “sign” of the blood was spared.

Yesterday we wrote about one of the greatest moves of God … the Moravian Revival. When the community was in complete disarray, Count Zinzendorf focused on how they could live together in love despite their differences. He called all the men together for an intense study of the Scriptures to focus on how Christian life in community was portrayed. These studies combined with intense prayer convinced many of the believers that they were called to live together in love and that their disunity and conflict were contrary to the clear calling of Scripture.

In the late 1800s, an awakening in South Africa led by Andrew Murray was a powerful move of God. Studying that revival yields essential insights concerning the events occurring now throughout the United States. As the spirit of God began to move in Cape Town, Murray compared the SA revival with past experiences of revivals in Europe. He decided that the intense “emotionalism” was a false experience of God and charged in to break up the meeting. Stepping out of the church, he encountered his father standing and weeping. His father rebuked Andrew, “How dare you stop something that I have prayed to happen for 30 years!”

Revivals, that is, genuine Divinely ordained seasons of the activity of God among men, have a universally unusual character. Normal activities and behaviors give way to the tangible influence of God’s Holy Spirit, whose inspiration brings a freedom of expression, emotion, conviction, worship, and other variations from normal experience.

During the Catholic inquisitions, as millions of Christians were being killed by the Jesuit Priests for apostasy, throughout Europe, Christians were fleeing. In Bohemia alone, there were an estimated 4,000,000 Christians before the Jesuit inquisition, and ten years later, only 800,000 people remained in Bohemia – all of whom were Catholic. These terrible events prepared the ground for one of the greatest moves of God that have ever been recorded, the Moravian Revival, which lasted for over 100 years. Gustav Warneck, the German Historian of Protestant Missions, testified, “This small church in twenty years called into being more missions than the whole Evangelical Church has done in two centuries.”

I love to study past revivals and in studying them, there are two recurring themes that stand out:

First, that He has often used obscure and unknown individuals to lead revivals, and that even these men whom He used so powerfully never considered themselves to be “special”, but often wanted to stay out of the limelight.

During the Great Depression, poverty swept across America like a whirling tornado, ripping up dreams and scattering hopes to the wind. One such poverty twister hit a small part of Texas where a man named Yates ran a sheep ranch. Struggling even to keep food on the table, Yates and his wife did all they could to survive. Finally, they had to accept a government subsidy or lose their home and land to the creditors.