Drink Until You Are Thirsty
In the physical realm, water quenches a person's thirst. In the spiritual realm, however, your thirst actually increases once you begin to drink God's "living water." In fact, your thirst for fellowship with God is directly connected to how much living water you drink on a daily basis.
The more you drink, the more you find yourself continuously talking to God. Frequent prayer flows freely within any soul that is being filled daily with God's living water. And this supernatural experience is incredibly refreshing.
Prayer was never meant to be a chore. Instead, it was designed by our Father in heaven to provide ongoing communion and heartfelt conversations with His children. God speaks to us through His Word, and we speak to Him through prayer. A well-known hymn reminds us: "What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer."
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Jesus said, "If a man is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him." (John 7:37)
Trusting Christ as your Savior is what initially brings God's living water into your soul. And once the streams begin to flow within you, your thirst for God actually increases. If you currently have no spiritual thirst, the solution to your problem is simple: Drink until you are thirsty.
It seems counterintuitive that such an approach would actually work, but it does. Drinking God's living water always makes a person thirsty for God, and thirsty for prayer.
Jude wrote to believers: "Dear friends, build yourselves up in your most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit." (Jude 20)
This is the key to true prayer! Praying in the Spirit is praying in the power and the flow of the Holy Spirit.
Without the Holy Spirit, true prayer would be impossible. We would be left with nothing but prayer "in the flesh," rather than prayer "in the Spirit." Prayer in the flesh has no power and little if any faith. And the reason it lacks joy is because it is performed merely in man's strength and effort.
Prayer in the flesh feels forced and awkward. Prayer in the Spirit, on the other hand, flows like a river. This is the way God designed our spiritual lives to operate. Only the Lord can give us an ongoing thirst for a close relationship with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. If left to ourselves, we would have absolutely no thirst whatsoever for God's living water. And our souls would perish from spiritual dehydration.
Your soul is not only eternal, but it is also "the real you." It includes your mind, your emotions, your thoughts, your hopes and dreams, and your intelligence. The real you is who you want to be. If you are a follower of Christ, then the Lord who lives within you is motivating you to want to live for Him. God produces these holy desires through the miracle of living water in our soul.
When a child enters the world, a woman's water breaks before the birth of the baby. When we are spiritually reborn, God's streams of living water begin to flow within us, but only after we are "born again" through faith in Christ. (John 3:1-8)
Jesus said, "Whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." (John 4:14)
The wellspring of God is what gives a Christian an ongoing thirst for God. Believers in Christ know they can trust the Lord. And they know that no matter what they go through in this life, the Lord will never leave them or forsake them. (Hebrews 13:5)
If Jesus had not died for our sins on the cross, we would have no access to the Father. Christ opened the way for us through His death and resurrection. We can now approach God with confidence knowing the Lord invites us to bring all of our sins and concerns directly to Him.
"Oh what peace we often forfeit, O what needless pain we bear, All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer." What a friend we have in Jesus!
If you find yourself today with little or no thirst for prayer, you are not alone. We can all relate to that experience. But there is hope! The way to develop this thirst is not complicated, as we confess our sins to God, trust Christ to forgive us, and then drink until we are thirsty.
That is, begin praying and keep on praying until the power of the Holy Spirit floods your soul with supernatural motivation, strength, insight, and an ongoing thirst for God's living water. A huge reason that we sometimes find ourselves with no power for prayer is because we have not been drinking enough from God's eternal river. We have neglected prayer, and we have neglected God's Word.
If we will return to the waterfall of God's living water, we will discover that these heavenly streams never run out. Thankfully, this water is constantly flowing from the throne of heaven. You see, the problem is never with God's supply, but rather, it is due to our own shortcomings and to a lack of prayer. Once we "get back in the flow," we experience a supernatural thirst that only God can give us.
So are you thirsty today for God and for prayer? If not, the solution to this problem is simple: Drink until you are thirsty.
