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January 22, 2012
I want to begin this morning by taking you on a quick tour of three locations in the mountains of Upstate South Carolina.
Our first stop is the iconic Table Rock. It’s picturesque in every season from almost any angle. But my interest this morning is not the mountain. It’s Table Rock Lake at the foot of the mountain. Table Rock Lake is a man-made lake. It was completed in 1930 to provide drinking water for the city of Greenville. As reservoirs go, it’s relatively small by today’s standards, covering 36 acres and holding an estimated 9.25 billion gallons of water. East of Table Rock, the newer and larger North Saluda Reservoir was completed in 1961 and stores approximately 25 billion gallons. Larger still, to the west in Oconee and Pickens Counties is Lake Keowee, which began to fill in 1970 and covers more than 18,000 acres with some 300 miles of shoreline.
One of the seldom-told stories about the growth of Greenville over the last 50 years is the role of these three reservoirs. Without them, its expansion in population and business and industry and quality of life would have been impossible. Now, the point of this quick tour is not to promote Greenville. After all, self-promotion is one of Greenville’s favorite pastimes. And besides, these days I’m wearing City of Orangeburg cufflinks; and I love walking along the North Fork of the Edisto River, the longest free-flowing blackwater river in North America; and every chance I get, I stop to smell the magnificent roses right here in Orangeburg.
The point of the quick tour through the mountains of the Upstate is to get us thinking about reservoirs. “Reservoir” is a French word for “storehouse,” a place where what you need is stored up, reserved for when you need it. Let me show you a set of reservoirs from the time of Jesus. Out in the Judean wilderness, down near the southernmost tip of the Dead Sea, there is a massive, rocky outcropping called Masada. It rises over 1,400 feet above the Dead Sea. On top of Masada, Herod the Great of biblical fame built a luxurious three-level palace and a nearly impregnable fortress.
One of the most impressive parts of Herod’s Masada was its water-storage system. Masada is located 20 miles from the nearest source of fresh water, so Herod’s engineers designed and excavated twelve huge cisterns—underground reservoirs—carved out of solid rock and plastered from top to bottom to keep them from leaking. They were fed by rainwater and could hold some 40,000 cubic meters of water. That’s more than 10.5 million gallons, enough to provide Masada with drinking water for an entire year and to fill Herod’s several swimming pools and Roman-style bathhouses and to provide irrigation for small-scale agriculture.
I call your attention to Herod’s cisterns at Masada to remind you that in addition to external reservoirs—lakes laid out on land—there are also internal reservoirs, cisterns carved out on the inside. Do you have an internal reservoir? Do you have a spiritual cistern? Do you have a place where you are able to store up, to reserve, what you need to sustain your relationship with God, even in the dry seasons of your life? Do you have a place where “the Spirit of God dwells in you”?
In last Sunday’s sermon, I encouraged you to “Receive the Holy Spirit,” as Jesus says in the gospel of John (20:22), to embrace the constant, continuing, empowering, and purifying presence of God in your life. Next Sunday, I will begin a series of series on what the apostle Paul calls “the fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22). Jesus says, “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.” (John 15:5). In Romans 7:4, the apostle Paul says that we are to “bear fruit for God.” This morning, I want you to consider what it is going to take for you to “bear fruit for God,” as Paul says, and “to bear much fruit,” as Jesus puts it.
One of the distinctive things about the cultivation of fruit is that fruit-bearing shrubs and trees don’t spring up quickly like the grasses and flowers of the field. Fruit-bearing plants grow and bear slowly over a long period of time, and they require reliable and sustained sources of water to bear fruit. Do you have a reservoir, a spiritual cistern within you, so that you can provide reliable and sustained irrigation to your life to bear fruit, as Jesus and Paul say? Especially in the dry seasons of our lives, we need spiritual reservoirs, deep cisterns within us for the Spirit of God to dwell in us.
Sometimes we think of the Spirit of God as a force or power that comes to us from far away, like the rain-bearing storms that sweep across the United States from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic, or the ones that flow up from the south out of the Gulf of Mexico or from the Gulfstream of the Atlantic. In that way of thinking, the Spirit of comes to us intermittently, unpredictably, from somewhere far away. Other times, we think of the Spirit of God as located somewhere not so far away where we can gain access to it more consistently than just waiting for it to rain down on us from above. For example, we keep a goodly pool of the Holy Spirit right here at 1240 Russell Street on The Square in Orangeburg. This room, this congregation, is a reservoir for the Holy Spirit. Whenever we need a little or a lot, we can come here to get it, right? Those are common ways of thinking about the Spirit of God, and both of them reflect something true and authentic and entirely biblical about the way we experience the Holy Spirit.
But in this morning’s New Testament lesson, the apostle Paul offers a third way of thinking about the Spirit when he says in Romans 8:9, “the Spirit of God dwells in you.” “The Spirit of God dwells in you.” Paul says that the Spirit of God does not come to us intermittently or unpredictably from someplace far away. Paul says that the Spirit of God is not in some location where we must go to experience it there. Paul says the Spirit of God is in you. “For those who are in Christ Jesus,” Paul says in Romans 8:9, “the Spirit of God dwells in you.”
Now, Paul didn’t invent that idea. He got it from his Bible, the Jewish Scriptures, what we Christians now call the “Old Testament.” In Ezekiel 36:7, in this morning’s Old Testament lesson, God promises, “I will put my spirit within you”; and so in 1 Corinthians 3:16, the apostle Paul asks, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple, and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” Not far away. Not just in this place. In you.
How about you? This morning I want you to think about how much room there is in you for the Holy Spirit. Is there room for the Holy Spirit in you? Or are you so busy, crowded cluttered and distracted on the inside that the only room for the Holy Spirit in your life is on your outside? Or maybe in your case, it’s not busy-ness or clutter or distraction, but you are simply impervious to the Spirit. You are one of those folks who doesn’t let anything inside you. Your insides are like the rock of Masada before Herod’s engineers went to work carving out the cisterns. Is there room for the Holy Spirit in you?
The great 16-century Spanish pastor and reformer and mystic, John of the Cross, spoke of “deep caverns of the soul” (Living Flame, 3.18). He said, “The capacity of these caverns is deep, because that which they can hold is deep and infinite; and that is God” (Living Flame, 3.22). God becomes present “wherever [God] finds space,” John said (Living Flame, 1.15).
According to John of the Cross, most people who struggle to “find God” present and active in their lives just haven’t made room for God. They haven’t cleared the space in their lives and in their souls for God who always becomes present “wherever [God] finds space.” John writes sadly of people who come to God but then “leave God just as they came.” They “leave God just as they came because their hands were already full, and they could not take what God was giving” (Letter dated 11/18/1586).
If we want to experience God’s presence and activity in our lives—not intermittently and unpredictably, not somewhere we must go to find go, but with us and in us day and night, day-by-day and hour-by-hour—then we must create space for God in our lives. We must carve out or expand our internal reservoirs, our spiritual cisterns, for the Holy Spirit of God to “dwell in us” to irrigate our lives so that we may “bear fruit,” as Jesus says, even in the dry seasons and the droughts that come our way in life.
Creating space for God, making room for God to dwell in us, takes three things. First, it takes vision. Vision. Vision is the capacity to see an alternative future. Some people never make room for God in their lives because they cannot see beyond the conditions and the circumstances of the present. Whether the conditions of the present are desperate and degrading or comfortable and convenient, some people cannot imagine, see, envision, a life with God and in God and God in them any different than the life they are living. It takes vision to motivate us to take the necessary steps to dedicate precious time and energy and resources and interior space to prepare for bearing fruit, fruit that will last, in our lives. Some people never develop interior reservoirs, spiritual cisterns, because they never see the need.
The truth is, interior space may not be necessary to sustain physical existence at some level or another. Human beings can survive without it, as some of us here this morning are living testimony. But there is a huge difference between surviving and thriving. When Jesus said that we are capable of bearing much fruit, he was not using an image of subsistence farming, of merely scratching out an existence from the land. In a dry and rocky region of the world, the Palestinian landscape of Jesus’ day, “fruit” is an image of opulence, luxury, the abundant blessing of God.
In Ezekiel 36, God says, “I will summon the grain and make it abundant. . . . I will make the fruit of the tree and the produce of the field abundant, so that you may never again suffer.” In gospel of John, Jesus does not say, “I came that they may have life and barely survive at it.” No. Jesus said, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). Bearing fruit is a sign and symbol of that quality of life that Jesus calls “abundant.” Vision is the capacity to see or imagine a new quality of life that God offers us in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit in us in order to motivate us to move toward a better future with God and in God and God in us.
In addition to vision, creating space for God, making room for God to dwell in us, takes will. Will. It takes an act of extraordinary will to build a reservoir. Because Orangeburg takes its water from the free-flowing North Fork of the Edisto, you may not have experienced the battles of will among civic and business leaders and the general citizenry that are necessary to set land aside for submersion. Bev and I were living in the Research Triangle of North Carolina when the B. Everett Jordan Dam was built to create Jordan Lake in Chatham County and when the Cane Creek Reservoir was under development in Orange County. It’s not a pretty sight when a municipality or a county determines that it is necessary to take a Carolinian’s land away to put it under water.
“They’re stealin’ my granddaddy’s farm!” we heard, and they were. “Our gubbermint’s finishin’ what Sherman started! He burned it, and they’re drownin’ it.” And they were. Whether we are talking about literal reservoirs or spiritual reservoirs, it takes an act of extraordinary will to create them. The parts of your life that need to be claimed and cleared—cut down and bulldozed—to make room for the Holy Spirit in you will fight back, I promise you. Nature abhors a vacuum. The laws of physics favor inertia. The status quo always resists change. It takes an act of extraordinary will to create internal reservoirs, spiritual cisterns, for the Holy Spirit. You have to decide—and decide again and again and again against the resistance you will experience—that making room for God in your life is worth the effort.
And that brings us to Work. Vision, Will, and Work. In addition to an act of extraordinary will, it takes an enormous amount of work to make room for God in your life. The reservoirs that we know as Cane Creek and Jordan Lake and Keowee and North Saluda and Table Rock didn’t happen on their own, any more than those enormous cisterns in the rocky outcropping of Masada did. There are spiritual analogies to acquiring the land and clearing it, building the dams, reinforcing the shoreline, or cutting the rock and lining the cisterns with plaster. It takes years and years and years of work to build adequate reservoirs, to cut sufficient cisterns to provide water for the dry seasons and the droughts.
Some people start out with the best of intentions. They try some worship; they try some Bible study; they try some quiet-time devotions; they try some prayer. They try for a while, and then they abandon the enterprise because they didn’t get filled up quick enough to satisfy them. “It just didn’t happen for me,” they say. “I went a few times, but I didn’t really feel anything happening.” Of course you didn’t. The hard truth is it takes years.
You have to acquire the interior ground; you have to clear it of obstructions; you have to reinforce the shoreline and dam up the outflow. And even then, after years of work, when the reservoir is ready, it takes more than a single rainy season to fill a reservoir or cistern large enough to carry you through the dry season and the droughts. It takes years and years of dedicated and determined effort in faith and in works, in worship and in Bible study, in fellowship and in prayer, in repentance and in confession, in forgiveness and in reconciliation, to create space for God, to make room for the Spirit to dwell in us so that when the dry season arrives or when the drought sets in, we are steadfast in our faith; we are tenacious in our hope; and we are unfailing in our love. Nothing less will do if you want do what Jesus says: “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22), and “Bear much fruit” (John 15:5).
Engage your Vision, your Will, and your Work to make room for the Spirit to dwell in you. Start today: acquiring and clearing the land, building the dam, reinforcing the shoreline, carving out the rock and lining it with plaster, to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Start today.
Copyrighted © 2012 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.
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