There I was, talking to a sink.
You may have found yourself in a similar situation before. Standing at a sink, hands lathered with soap, ready to be scrubbed and rinsed off with water as you stand before a sink with a motion-sensor faucet.
What happens next is often a mystery. You move your hands just where you think they need to be to turn on the water and…nothing. So you move them more vigorously, more expressively to no avail.
Then, in my case, just when I was about to give up and I find myself talking to a faucet, something amazing happens as the most obvious solution dawned on me. “Just start rinsing your hands,” I said to myself, “and trust the sensor to work.” It did! And I had clean hands.
My problem – and maybe yours has been too – was that I was moving my hands in such a way as to get the faucet to do what I wanted rather than just doing what I needed to do and trusting it to work. We often do this in our relationship with God.
The Bible describes God as three persons in one God – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They’re equal, distinct, and yet, one. Jesus is the only doorway to the Father (John 14:6) and the Holy Spirit is the bond of fellowship between the Son (Jesus) and the Father (John 14:17).
Now here’s the connection. We often treat God as the one dispensing water, which in our analogy could be blessings of many kinds – peace from fear, friendship, salvation, financial stability, a job, safety for our children, etc. We waive our hands in front of the analogical small piece of glass covering the sensor and expect God to dispense what we need, when in fact we simply need to “wash our hands.”
In this analogy, washing our hands is akin to abiding in Christ. Since the Father is the giver of all good gifts (James. 1:17), and these gifts come through the Holy Spirit (they are called the Fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:16-26), abiding in Christ is the only way to access these gifts and the eye of the Spirit (the sensor, if you will) is looking very specifically at the position or attitude of our heart.
If we are found to be abiding in Christ through faith, we are able to activate the gifts of the Spirit and will experience joy in our relationship with God the Father, both on earth and in God’s eternal heavenly presence.
If we are not abiding in Christ, we will not receive the blessings God intends for his children, here or in eternity. We will be cut off and thrown into the fire.
Heavenly blessings are here at your disposal today if you will simply abide in Christ through His Word (the Bible) and in prayer (talking with God). So just wash your hands and enjoy rich fellowship with God.
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