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Fill Up Your Sponge

To me, water is the best description of who God is and how He is. My brain can’t even come close to comprehending the immense power and love of God, but when I think about water, I have always felt like God gives me a glimpse into who He is. Water is soft, yet strong enough to carve through rock.  Water is always desiring to go from the higher ground to the lowest point. My favorite description of water though is how water literally will wrap fully around someone. Compared to light, which you can block with an object, water bends around the walls, can put pressure on the walls, and will fill every single crevice and crack within an object!  Being from Florida we see this often with hurricanes. No matter how hard you try, no matter the walls you put up or the bags of sand you set to protect yourself, if the water comes up to it, it will find the crack and pressure the weak parts until the area is fully immersed.  This is how God is. He is the “Living Waters!”  Let’s dive in now on three points as to why you shouldn’t try and block His water, but be a sponge and fully immerse yourself in Him!

1.  Subtle Strength of Water

Water is soft yet it is strong enough to carve canyons!  When I was younger I went to the Grand Canyon and it is truly unimaginable how a river carved that massive landscape!  Our God is not a soft God.  There are sometimes when God will be soft and subtle to nudge you where He wants you to be,  and there are other times when God uses His strength to move you. I have found that when I am pursuing God, living in obedience, and putting Him before me, the intervention of God is soft and caring. When you are living in obedience, your eyes are fully open to everything God wants for you. However, when you’re not living In obedience it is much harder for God to communicate with you!

2.  Water Seeks the Low Ground

I’m sure it has something to do with lack of friction and gravity and other scientific terms, but it is true that water always seeks the lowest point. I am so thankful for the fact that the Living Waters flowed to me at my lowest points. When the Living Waters of Christ fill your holes, the playing field is level, but God doesn’t stop there!  When you pursue Him, He will overflow you with so much joy, so much water, that it overflows and touches those all around you. This is why I love the analogy of being a sponge!  Last night my younger sister and I went to see Shane and Shane and it was truly amazing! On our way home I was telling her about my blog topic for this week and how I like the analogy of being a sponge. We need to fill ourselves with the Word of God and fill ourselves with the pursuit of Godliness in order to be immersed in the joys of Christ, but also overflow into others!  There is only so much a sponge can keep in before it is full!  To take it a step deeper I told my sister how it’s always so much fun to see when a person is filled with the Living Waters of Christ, when they are “squeezed” in their circumstances, like a sponge, the waters that filled them come out and you see what has truly filled up that person. My sister took it even deeper by asking, well what happens if you don’t fill yourself with anything? Then you are a dry sponge that will crumble with ease! This is why it is so important for you to feed yourself with the pursuit of Godliness and immerse yourself in the uncompromising Word of God! I’ve always said that the “Luke-warm Christian” is the most dangerous Christian because if you’re filling yourself with a few verses on Sunday and living in disobedience for the other six days, then the perception of those looking at you is warped because you’re not able to practice what you preach. I’m guilty of this. I know when I’m not pursuing the Word of God I can get impatient and judge others. What I should be judging instead is my prayer life and what I am filling myself with.  We are all below the One who is MOST HIGH! By default, His waters will always pursue us!

3.  Walls Mean Nothing to Water

With the recent landfall of Hurricane Florence in my old stomping grounds near Coastal Carolina, we are reminded with the images that it doesn’t matter what type of structure you build, or the walls you put up to redirect water....Water will break your wall down. It might not happen overnight, but the slow pressure and persistence of water will find any crack and fill it until it takes the structure down. Here is a helpful hint: We all have cracks!  There is nothing that I can do on my own because I am not solid, however I can be solid when I let God fill my cracks with His love and mercy. Christ fills up our cracks!  When Jesus broke the bread at the Lord’s Supper, I always have thought in my head that He broke His body into pieces to fill my cracks. God wants to build you up on Him! God wants to fully restore you into the person who He created!  Don’t put a wall up that you know will come down. It might not come down tomorrow, or twenty years from now, but rest assured, if you put a wall up between you and God, the consistent pursuance of you by Him will start subtle and will only grow stronger and stronger until you either bow your head and get on your knees in joy or you are forced to your knees by His power.

In John 4:14, Jesus says: “But whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never thirst; but the water I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.”

We have eternal life in Jesus. We can be filled with the Living Waters of Jesus. We can all be who we are supposed to be, and ultimately who you want to be when you focus your life on Jesus and pursue His desires for your life. Let the waters of Christ fill your sponge, and I pray that your sponge will overflow into those in your life and share the amazing joy that obedience to the Word of God brings!

My prayer for you this week is that you let God fill up the nooks and cracks within your sponge. You are made whole through Jesus!

Song of the week: Oh Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go

This is by far one of my favorite songs. “Rejoice my heart, you’ve been made whole, by a love that will not let me go!”




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