The Holy Spirit, Living Water

Below, you'll find online worship for yesterday, Pentecost Sunday, from Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. Below that, is the text for the message presented during the service. Have a good week. God bless you!



John 7:37-39
When I woke up a few mornings ago, my mouth was so dry I felt my lips were cemented together. I couldn’t wait to get a drink of water! I screwed open a bottle of Ice Mountain and practically poured it down. It tasted so good! It was exactly what I needed.

When Jesus, truly God, but also truly human, lived on the earth, He did so in an arid land. Among His last words from the cross, hanging beneath the harsh Judean sun, were, “I thirst.” Jesus knows what it is to thirst, to crave the life that water gives.

That’s part of what gives such power to what He told the Samaritan woman at the well. She was tired of going to the village water source under the midday sun. Jesus tells her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” (John 4:10)  

And in John 6:35, Jesus tells the crowds He has fed with a bit of bread and a few fish, “Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” 

In passages like these, Jesus uses the need we all have for water for life to talk about something we need even more desperately than mere water, now and in eternity.

Our short Gospel lesson for this Pentecost Sunday finds Jesus in Jerusalem on the last day of the Festival of Tabernacles or the Festival of Booths. It was one of the three great festivals of the Jewish year. It lasted, as it even does today among modern Jews, seven or eight days. In ancient times, it celebrated several things: the just-completed harvest, God’s provision for His people during the forty years in the wilderness, and the giving of God’s Law, the ten commandments, at Mount Sinai. 

The Mishnah, a collection of Jewish rabbinic oral traditions about the Old Testament, tells us that one of the most important temple rituals each morning of the Feast of Tabernacles was “the celebration of water libation.” Priests would circle the altar in the temple, carrying freshly drawn water from the pool of Siloam. This was done with prayers that God would provide the water needed for a good harvest the next season.

This helps to explain why Jesus expresses Himself as He does in today’s lesson. Take a look at it now: “On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.’ By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.”

When Jesus cites Scripture here, He seems to be referring to a number of different passages of the Old Testament that refer to life-giving water, life-giving wisdom, and even the life-giving Spirit. 

One place is Isaiah 43:19-20 in which the prophet quotes the Savior Who would come hundreds of years later in Jesus as saying, “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. The wild animals honor me, the jackals and the owls, because I provide water in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland, to give drink to my people, my chosen…” God promises refreshment and renewal--living water--to people born dead in sin, like you and me. 

And in Jeremiah 2:13, God tells ancient Israel: “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” In other words, God’s people had gone to their idols of choice rather than drawing life--living water--from its only true source, the God now revealed to all in Jesis.

In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus tells us that it’s God the Holy Spirit Who quenches our greatest thirst. It’s a thirst that every human being has...

• a thirst for hope and peace amid the suffering and uncertainty of our world, 
• a thirst for life where death seems to have the final say, 
• a thirst for forgiveness for the sin with which, we know--deep down--we’ve broken God’s heart and harmed ourselves and others, 
• a thirst for the meaning that every busy day seems sometimes to drag right out of us. 

In a clip from the classic movie, Key Largo, that I shared with our weeknight Facebook Bible study this past week, Edward G. Robinson plays a murderous thug named Johnny Rocco. When asked by another character what he wanted, he admitted that he wanted, “More! Yeah, that’s it. I want more!” 


This desire for more that we all have has its roots in two human desires, one legitimate and one illegitimate. 

On the illegitimate side of the ledger is the desire, like Adam and Eve, to “be like God.” We think that if we take on more experiences, more money, more financial security, more health, that we’ll be gods unto ourselves: independent, strong, self-sufficient. If we don’t learn the futility of this fantasy when we’re young, growing older has a way of forcing the lesson down our throats. Yet we're born with this desire to be like God.

But the legitimate side of our desire for more lies in the fact that it makes us realize that there’s something missing in our souls, a yawning need, that persists no matter how much money, security, health, acceptance, or strength we have, no matter how many amazing experiences or friendships we attain in life. Saint Augustine expressed our common human yearning for more in this way: “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds rest in You.”

It is God the Holy Spirit Who fills the holes in our souls. 

The Holy Spirit quenches the thirst we all have, the emptiness that can only be filled by the God Who made us and Who saves all who trust in God the Son Jesus from the sin, death, and futility that marks the lives of those Who don’t trust in Jesus. 

It was the Holy Spirit Who emboldened the praying, but still frightened, first disciples of Jesus to speak the Gospel Word that all who repent and believe in Jesus have everlasting life with God on the first Christian Pentecost. 

It’s this same Holy Spirit Who enables us to believe, despite the horrors of a world dying in sin displays each day, that God is with us and will have us with Him for all eternity. 

It’s the Holy Spirit Who gives us God’s Word in the Bible and Who creates and sustains faith in Christ through the humble witness of loving parents, children, friends, co-workers, and even inadequate, ineloquent preachers. 

The Holy Spirit is living water for souls dying of thirst for Jesus, even for the souls of those who already know Jesus and realize with special clarity just how desperately and constantly we need Him!

In 1 Corinthians 12:3, the apostle Paul tells us, “...no one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit.” 

If you can confess that Jesus is your Lord, even on the days when you’re not feeling it, then you know that the Holy Spirit is filling you with the Living Water, with life with God through Christ. 

And if that’s so, you also know that each day, whatever your circumstances, whatever you’re feeling, you can turn to the Father in Jesus’ name and be filled again and again with the Holy Spirit Who brings you all that we confess the Spirit brings in our Creeds and Confessions: 

• the Word of God, 
• the life of God, 
• the Baptism by which God claims us as His own, 
• the Communion by which we abide in God and His people and they in us, 
• the assurance that Jesus, God the Son, is with you always, the resurrection of the dead from God, and
• the life everlasting with God. 

Each day, bring your thirsty soul to God in the name of Jesus and the Spirit will fill you again with Living Water! Amen

Holy Communion (Back to Basics: Revisiting the Catechism, Part 5)

Here's the video of tonight's midweek Lenten worship and the full prepared text of the message.

Matthew 26:26-29

Tonight, we come to the final installment of our Lenten series, Back to the Basics: Revisiting the Catechism. 

With it, we consider The Small Catechism’s discussion of the second of the two Sacraments, Holy Communion. 

A Sacrament is usually defined by Lutherans according to three criteria: 

• (1) It was instituted by Christ; 
• (2) It involves a physical element;
• (3) It brings the forgiveness of sins through Jesus to those who receive it. 

Holy Baptism and Holy Communion meet these criteria. 

But what exactly is Holy Communion? 

What promises does Jesus make to those who receive it? 

How does Holy Communion work? 

And who is worthy of this Sacrament? 

Martin Luther set out to answer these four basic questions simply in The Small Catechism.

Holy Communion is not the invention of the Church. Jesus Himself presided over the Sacrament for the first time at what we call the Last Supper. 

Three gospel writers as well as the apostle Paul in one of his New Testament letters, tell us how Jesus, on the night of His betrayal and arrest, shared Holy Communion with the twelve. 

Matthew says: “While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, ‘Take and eat; this is my body.’ Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.’” (Matthew 26:26-28)

Notice, Jesus did not say, “This represents My body.” 

Nor did He say, “This represents or symbolizes my blood of the covenant.” 

Had Jesus wanted to say those things, He could have done so. 

But He said, “This bread IS My body...This wine IS My blood of the covenant.” 

As I’ve said before, Jesus knows what the meaning of IS is. 

And this has tremendous significance! 

“I am the bread of life,” Jesus says in John 6:35. 

He also says, “Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him.” (John 6:54-56) 

A chemical analysis of the elements used by Jesus in Holy Communion will show that they are bread and wine. But Jesus says that they are also His life-giving body and blood. 

This is why, in The Small Catechism, Luther says that “Communion is the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ under the bread and the wine, given to us Christians to eat and drink, as it was instituted by Christ Himself.”

Luther then asks what benefit eating and drinking the Sacrament can bring. To answer, he points back to Jesus’ words. The Sacrament brings us “the forgiveness of sins.” 

You see, Jesus, like the spotless lambs once offered on the annual Jewish “Day of Atonement,” Yom Kippur, has offered Himself as the perfect, sinless, once-and-for-all sacrifice for our sins. Unlike Yom Kippur, which only brought Jews forgiveness of the previous year’s sins, Jesus has offered Himself as the definitive sacrifice for all our sin. 

“Look,” John the Baptist told others when he saw Jesus approaching him at the Jordan River, “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29) 

When we receive Christ’s body and blood, He is physically filling us and covering us once more with the benefits of what He has accomplished for us on the cross. 

This is why the apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 10:16: “Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ?” 

We need to regularly participate in this Sacrament--Luther assumed the Church would offer it to believers daily--because, as long as we remain in this world, our old selves remain, and we are prone to sin, in need of forgiveness. 

Holy Baptism, of course, is the means by which God gives us rebirth. Holy Communion though is bread for our journey, sustaining us in the grace of God given in Jesus, along life’s way, a holy hedge against the devil, the world, and our sinful selves.

But how, unbelievers and even Christians who don’t take Jesus’ Sacrament seriously ask, “can bodily eating and drinking bring such great benefits?” 

We ask questions like these because we think that forgiveness of sin depends on us, on our right attitudes or thoughts. 

Thoughts like these spring from our human ego. Which is why Luther points us back to Who it is that acts when we receive Holy Communion. “It is not the eating and drinking alone,” Luther writes, “but also the words that accompany it, ‘Given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.’ These words, together with the eating and drinking, are the chief thing in the Sacrament, and those who believe them have what they say and declare, namely, the forgiveness of sin.”

If a friend works all day long to prepare a four-course dinner, invites you to their house, then spreads it on the table and serves you, unless you’re stupid or an ingrate, you won’t later say, “I got some dinner tonight.” Your host is the one who did everything necessary for you to have that dinner. All you had to do was, like a pig at the trough, show up where your host directed you to go. 

Just so, with Holy Communion, everything depends on Jesus. It’s He Who died and rose, He Who offers up His body and blood, He Who gives you the forgiveness of sin as you eat and drink, He Who invites you to the table. 

And how does He do this? Through the power of His Word, “Given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sin.” 

All that’s left to you is to receive it with helplessness, gratitude, and faith. “I can’t see how this works, Lord, but You say that this IS Your body and this IS Your blood and I trust Your words.” 

It is Christ’s Word that makes Holy Communion Holy Communion. 

It is Christ’s Word that imparts Christ’s forgiveness of your sin physically to you in this sacrament.

Well, who, Luther asks in the fourth section of The Small Catechism’s explanation of Holy Communion, is worthy of such a great gift? Luther says that some may fast or do other outward things to prepare for receiving the Sacrament, but “people are truly worthy and well prepared who believe these words, ‘Given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.’” “But,” Luther writes, “those who do not believe these words or who doubt them are unworthy and unprepared, for the words ‘for you’ require truly believing hearts.”

We may wonder sometimes when we receive Christ’s body and blood whether we really do believe those words, whether Christ really forgives us. 

Doubts like these are normal and assail even the greatest saints who love Jesus. Until we see Jesus face to face, we will always have doubts. 

When doubts about Christ and His Word come to me, I’m inspired by the example of the man who approached Jesus for healing for his son. Jesus told the man to believe in Him, to trust in Him, that He would heal the boy. “I do believe,” the man replied, “help me overcome my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24) 

Jesus honored that man’s small faith, a faith that, despite its smallness, knew enough to turn to Jesus. 

Baptized believers in Jesus, if you know enough to respond to Jesus’ call to, “Come, drink my blood and eat my body for the forgiveness of your sins,” it’s enough. 

He will supply not only the forgiveness; He will also help you to believe that you share both His death to sin and resurrection to life with you again as you receive the bread and the wine and hear the words, “The body of Christ, given for you,” “The blood of Christ, shed for you.” 

For you. 

God bless you, friends. 

Amen