Pleasing God by means of ministry is not bound up in doing great things for God, but what more clearly pleases Him is when it is done in union with Him. To accomplish this requires more than willingness; it requires availability to Jesus as His bride, instrument, and vessel. Anyone can do things FOR GOD, including sinners, but God is not just after the doing of deeds but that they be carried out in a certain spirit. In order to accomplish this, Jesus made us one with Himself.
One with Him in Pouring Out
The reason why God joined us to Christ was to make us One. In that way we have His nature through being married to the Lamb. His intention in making us One with Him is to obtain one after His kind. We must realize Jesus’ purpose for oneness: so He can keep pouring out. We are His body so that HE CAN CONTINUE TO be given.
He wants to dwell in you. To dwell in you means that He feels at home in you. He does not feel at home if you are always seeking Him to fix you. He feels at home in you when He can be Himself at home. This One who pours out is who is to live in you and feel at home with doing so. He sees you as the means by which He can be free to express His nature. That is His heart and desire.
Let me say it another way: this Jesus who lives to pour out for others decided to form a people and call them His body, so that He could keep doing the same thing that He has always done over and over. This Jesus just wanted to keep doing it and wanted to do it on a wider scale. And so He married a bride and His Body was formed with one purpose. It was not done so that we can be the object of all affection and dealing. Union is so that He can pour Himself, not us, out to everyone else.
Christ without a Bucket
It is Jesus’ spirit to pour out, but He is looking for vessels through which He might work. Making this discovery, that our purpose is to be the vehicle of His nature, can be a real eye-opener. We find an example of this in John 4:7-30.
In this account Jesus felt compelled to go through Samaria, where He met the Samaritan woman at the well. The conversation begins with Jesus’ request for a drink of water from the well. Jesus’ response was that if she knew who He was, she would be asking Him for a drink of living water. You can see that His first emphasis is to supply her need and satisfy her thirst. Once that is established, THEN His purpose is that she become His vehicle for distribution to others. Upon first encounter with Christ, we usually recognize OUR NEED, but never continue on until we recognize HIS NEED and desire for vessels.
It is at this point that she recognizes that He Himself has a need, as seen in her words that state, "Sir, the well is deep and you have no bucket; where will you get this living water? Her words show that she has grasped an incredible reality: that Christ is without a bucket! He is in need of a vehicle to disseminate His Living water.
He is seeking in her to find if she will be a means and container for Him. Jesus may have all the Living water that the world could ever need, but if He does not have willing vessels, it is all in vain. From her response we might conclude that she may be just now awakening to the thought that He is considering her as His vessel. Jesus has chosen that His treasure will be delivered through the means of earthen, wooden buckets.
He does not just deliver water to US that we might be satisfied; He imparts LIVING water that lives in us. It is not just about finding personal satisfaction by water but satisfying His desire to pour out to others. That living water springs up and becomes a well for others.
We Want to Be Poured Upon by Him
Once she had her personal thirst for living water quenched she then became Jesus’ living well by which others might find satisfaction. The woman at the well got up and started pouring out to people. What I am describing here is a spiritual principle. This Jesus wants to pour out. Because of His life in you, a dying process begins to happen in you. But the dying that you will experience will not even be your own. It will not be laying down your life but bearing about the dying of the Lord Jesus (II Cor. 4:10). You will notice the movements of His self-giving nature in you. You will discover that if Christ is to live in you, this is the way He will live. He just cannot live any other way. There is no glory to us, for we would not lay down our lives in such a manner. But Jesus gives and He wants to do so through us all.
The Church is meant to be the bucket by which He pours Himself out. The problem is, the Church has become the vessel upon which He is to pour out. We are supposed to be a channel of His giving nature but have made ourselves the object of it. We have been given His same spirit. Jesus put rivers in us so we would pour out to others in the same manner that He does. But much of the Church is trying to get Jesus to “pour in.”
And example of this is seen in how we approach church services. So much of the time we want to enter in to the presence of the Lord and have the Spirit poured out on ME. We always want to be the object of what is poured upon, lavished upon. Too many attend church in order to feel the incoming tides of the Spirit and experience its joy. But God wants us to be the vessel of His flow over others with little return to ourselves. We love to hear the stories of missionaries who have poured out all that they possessed for Jesus, but the point in reciting the old stories is so that we also might make that same pilgrimage.
It is sad that much of the church has not realized the plan of God. The church ought to be pouring out to the world, but we go to the church building to get poured out on. And we all gather as needy around His feet, instead of being His feet and going out to others. Instead of being full, we are dry, thirsty, and needy. We are needy and wanting of Him, but He is here in His Body to meet the needs of the world. Our mentality is that we are still waiting for Him to come and help us when He wants to come in us. He did not give us rivers to be in this condition but to pour out.
Are there situations of need around you at this time? Then your situation is no different than Esther’s in the Old Testament. Personally, she was comfortable and protected, for God had blessed her and she had become queen. But she saw the pitiful state of her people and risked all her comfort and her very life for her people’s sake. She took the blessing of being made queen and poured it out. It was Mordecai who helped her to see the difference between a blessing and a drink offering. He said to her that maybe she had come into the kingdom just for such a time as this.
Why did you come to the kingdom at this particular time in history? The answer – for such a time as this. Like Paul, you must recognize that, because of the life of Christ within, you have been made a drink offering. The need is great, therefore it is time to risk all and lay your life on the line for the purpose of God and others. Your motive in doing so is not because they deserve it, for even in Esther’s time most refused to go back to Jerusalem and live for God. But your greatest motivation is not based on the need nor on the positive response by those for whom you are poured out. Your motivation is based on the poured out nature of the Son of God that lives within you. As the Church, we are the Body of Christ. Jesus said that the bread of communion represented His Body, which is broken and distributed. Jesus’ body is broken bread so it can be given, not pampered.
It is easy to let the “ministers” do all the pouring out and we justify their hard work as following their calling. If we live as unconnected to Jesus then we will gladly let someone else do all the giving because it is so easy for our flesh to do so. It feels better to our flesh to be poured upon then to be poured out.
Jesus said to the woman at the well, “Give Me to drink” (Jn. 4:7). How many of us are expecting Jesus to quench our thirst when we should be satisfying Him! We should be satisfying Him wherever we are or whatever we are doing. We should pour out our lives completely for Him and be His vessel of distribution to others. We should be investing our total being, not drawing on Him to satisfy us, but letting Him be a well in us to satisfy others.
Moving from Drinking In to Being a Well
In John 7 we have a picture of Jesus’ desire for all that belong to Him to become a drink offering. He not only wants us to come and drink but to achieve the end result that we become one with Him in pouring out as rivers. The setting in which Jesus spoke these words was the feast of tabernacles. The Bible says, “Now the Jews’ feast of tabernacles was at hand” (Jn. 7:2). This was the feast of the ingathering. Jesus Himself went up to that feast. This feast represented a time when all Israel came together as one. The purpose was to hear the Word of the Lord. This feast represents not the scattering or the dividing but the ingathering. And it is in that place, the last day, the great day of the feast, that Jesus spoke His desire for what His people should be like.
But when Jesus arrived at the feast, He saw nothing going on of what God had originally intended for that feast. Notice that the scriptures call it the “Jew’s feast.” It was while Jesus was in attendance at their feast and while watching their religious ways that caused Him to stand up and cry out saying, “If any man thirst, let him come unto Me, and drink. He who believeth on Me, as the scripture hath said, out of His belly shall flow rivers of living water” (Jn. 7:37-38).
I can just see Jesus standing up in the midst of religion and crying out. What does He cry out? He says, “If any man thirsts, let him come unto Me.” But that is only the first step. As in the case with the Samaritan woman, His first goal is to satisfy our thirst and fill us up. But that is not the end of it. Jesus quenches our thirst, but then He wants to use us for others. In the very next sentence Jesus explains this by saying, “He that believeth on me as the scripture hath said, out of his heart or his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water.” The ultimate goal is to be a channel of His Life and not just find blessings from Him. If we have tasted and been satisfied with this Living water, then we should pass it on.
The problem is that we have not made ourselves available as His channel. We have left Christ without a bucket. The answer is not just to drink of that well and be satisfied but to be so full that, as David said, “My cup runs over” (Ps. 23:5).
It is not enough to talk about pouring out. This is not meant to be a subject we talk about but a lifestyle by which we live. But you will have nothing to pour unless you are filled up. Jesus is not seeking satisfied buckets but full ones. Most of us function more as buckets that are carrying about burdens rather than refreshing others with Living Water.
Many are baptized in the Holy Spirit but “rivers of living water” are not flowing out of them. Most know the promise of Jesus that everyone who believed in Him will have rivers of living water flowing out of their life and that they would never be dry. “Everyone who believes in me, out of his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.” But even though they know the Word, they are often dry. Their life and service to the Lord are more like trickles of water than rivers.
If you really drink of this water, you will never really thirst again. You are not going to be thirsty and needy all of the time. Of course there is always a hunger for the Lord, but you have found your satisfaction. And if you have drunk of this, and I do not mean one time experientially, than you are going to pour Him out.
Old Testament Example of Rivers
An example of rivers of water flowing to the people of God is found in Exodus 17:1-6 in the story of the water that flowed from the smitten Rock that Moses struck in the wilderness. In this story we see what it takes to become a river that pours out so that others may be refreshed. Our example is always Christ, so both the Rock and the Water represent Christ, as noted in I Corinthians 10:4. The source of the drink offering to the children of Israel in the wilderness was the smitten Rock. Only as we are one with Jesus in being poured out and losing will we be partakers with Him in sharing life with others.
Israel in the wilderness acted more like dry needy desert than like a land that flowed with milk and honey. God did not just want to quench their thirst in the wilderness but reveal that He wanted, as a nation, to make them one with His flow in order to reach the world. What is the purpose of being a river of life and pouring out? The purpose is to supply the parched earth with water. Others may be parched and dry, but those who have entered into union with Christ are not. Not only are they not dry, but they refresh, awaken, invigorate, and satisfy those who live separated from His eternal flow of Life.
Based on believing the Word of God, we know that we will “never thirst again” (see I Cor. 12:13, Jn. 4:14). We literally “drink into His Spirit” (I Cor. 12:13). But the result is that we ourselves become wells and rivers. We become the means by which Jesus is able to pour Himself out on others.
Too many have fallen short of these promises. The main reason is because they have spent too much time trying to drink from the wells of religion. Just like the woman at the well, these man-made wells will always cause us to “thirst again” (John 4:13).
Christ has given Himself to us to be our well and rivers of water. As long as we are self-centered in our approach, we will only seek Jesus to sustain us and keep us from being dry. But when we quit receiving things from Jesus and start receiving Him as our portion, we will discover the secret of endless supply. ***
