The Santa Fe river flows with life and beauty. Its waters course through the land, fed by springs that well up from underground. Far beneath the Santa Fe flows a mother river called the Florida Aquifer. She supplies the Santa Fe with a never ending supply of cool, clear water. In some places, you can see her swells breaching the Santa Fe’s tea colored surfaces right in the middle of the river. But most often, you see those swells just off to the side of the river, bubbling clear, crisp, and cold from the mouths of underwater caves with names like Ginnie, and Poe, and Rum.
The river’s Spanish name means “Holy Faith” in English. It’s an appropriate name for a river that depends on an aquifer hidden from view. Even when the rains are parched, the river flows — perhaps in trickles — but it flows, because the aquifer is always rising to the surface somewhere along the river’s route.
Christians who depend on God with a holy faith, and are excited by his work in our lives are like that. The Spirit of God roils in our flesh, and moves us to do good, to change the world, and to influence what is around us to glorify God. Even when times are less than plentiful, the life supplied by God trickles out of us, and touches the world wherever we touch it.
Those who love Jesus demonstrate a Holy Faith. We band together into assemblies, and when God’s aquifer flows out of us collectively, we all together form a river of beauty and life. Together, we become the true life coursing through our local communities. People who don’t even know God can see our waters, and are attracted to their life-giving and refreshing movement.
Jesus told us that if we drink the kind of water that is in the springs of the Santa Fe, that our thirst will be quenched for a moment, but that if we drink from the kind of spiritual water that he gives us, then we will have a never ending spring of life that flows out of us and we’ll never be thirsty again (John 4:13-14)! Are you willing to drink from that kind of spring? Are you ready to be a spring of life yourself, and to be a source of never ending water for others who are thirsty?
Comments