Stay Thirsty, My Friends

There’s a series of beer commercials here in the United States that are well put together.  Don’t send me critical emails because I’m not a Baptist pastor endorsing the product but I am a man with a decent sense of humor applauding the marketing team that conjured up the “Most Interesting Man In The World” for the Dos Equis commercials.  Each commercial shows this extremely suave man in his late sixties engaging in awe-inspiring activities with such a mystique that all others around him in the commercial are fascinated with him.  Then at the very end he informs the viewer in his uber sleek voice that he’s not necessarily a beer connoisseur but, when he does partake, he chooses Dos Equis as his personal favorite.  Then he hits us with that ultra-cool nugget of advice when he says, “Stay thirsty, my friends.” I’m going to risk it and lift a phrase from a beer commercial and exhort you in your journeys with Jesus Christ.  That’s right, I’m telling you to stay thirsty today.

“For I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground…” – Isaiah 44:3 {KJV}

Is the dustiness of life clogging your spirit?  Some reading today are consciously aware that their personal valley of dry bones has extended much too far.  The fruit of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control – have long withered and all it seems that is left is the desert of duty.  It is one thing for the body to languish but who can bear another day of a parched spirit that has lost its vitality?  Relationships sag, prayers diminish, God’s voice seems either silent or muffled behind the thick curtain of troubles that exist between you and Him.  You sense no personal usefulness in God’s Kingdom and are unsure how much longer you can go through the motions for the sake of assuaging your guilt.  Longing for the bed at night, you survive another day while no longer looking for the breakthrough that you feel is long overdue.  Simply put, the tank is empty, the well is dry, the spirit is listing.

Stay thirsty, my friend.  Stay thirsty.

God speaks through Isaiah in the verse above and promises that there is coming a refreshing to His child who retains his or her thirst.  You have the promise which you need and it must be fulfilled or God cannot be God.  If one single promise of His, rightly understood as He gives it, fails to materialize then the character of the Almighty would be corrupted and He could not be your God.  I loathe to even write such a hypothetical thought because it is an impossibility that God might fail to do as He has promised.  Your outpouring must come… but only the continually thirsty remained positioned to receive it.  God is the God of divine reversals.  He delights in taking what is broken and making it whole.  The spiritually dead are made eternally alive.  The soul that is hollow is filled and overflowing through the grace given in Jesus Christ.  The troubled and uncertain become those whom Scripture calls triumphant and overcoming.  And, yes, the thirsty will receive their quenching.  Charles Spurgeon once wrote to believers who were in that dry and barren parcel of life, “Whatever good quality there is in divine grace, you shall enjoy it to the full. All the riches of divine grace you shall receive in plenty; you shall be as it were drenched with it: and as sometimes the meadows become flooded by the bursting rivers, and the fields are turned into pools, so shall you be—the thirsty land shall be springs of water.”

May I seek a moment of connection with you?  I have known that dusty place in my spiritual journey more often than anyone can know.  It is a powerful indicator of God’s favor upon you when you deeply long to drink of His fullness.  A worse thing than being dry and longing for refreshment would be to live in dryness and be unaware of it, having no sense of desire for God’s best at all.  Some people will die in their spiritual desert and never sense for a moment that anything was missing. The very sense of your lacking is evidence that Heaven has been placed in your heart.  The deeper your longings for the climax of your faith – to see Christ in His glory – the more parched this temporary place will feel.  So stay thirsty.  Do not despair of what is lacking down here.  Call out to the One who gives the rains of promise to the thirsty of soul.  There have been times when I sensed such dearth in my heart that I did not feel there was sufficient moisture to allow for the gears of faith to be lubricated enough for me to believe things would ever change.  In those moments I was thirsting to death. God then sent me rain when I least expected it.  Keep looking for yours to come.  He will not fail you…He cannot come up short on your behalf… He has promised you.