“And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Comforter (Counsellor, Helper, Intercessor, Advocate, Strengthener, and Standby), that He may remain with you forever” John14:16 (Amp)
Lorraine and I try to take one day a week to ourselves. We potter about for a couple of hours then we head to our favourite place, El Medano. There is a little beach on the left hand side of the town that over the last few weeks has been more or less deserted except for US. There we sit and watch and listen to the sea and it’s ever rolling tides, have a wee sandwich for lunch and relax in the beautiful sunshine..There is just one other thing about this place I forgot to mention, it is very windy, all the time..I mean very windy!! You have a real battle on your hands getting everything tied set up and then weighed down before the relaxing begins But when you do it’s worth it all and the wind becomes you friend keeping you cool in the blistering heat.
These last couple of weeks the beach has become busier with ‘windsurfers’ who obviously need plenty of wind and here has to be the perfect place for these guys. ‘If Lorraine and I were just a little younger’, we muse, we just might have given that a go BUT we’ll content ourselves to watch the
Watching these guys had me enthralled. They make the thing look so easy, yet I know that it's probably not BUT, no matter how good any of them were, and at times in some of the higher waves there were more than a few of them doing somersaults and all sorts of stunts BUT as some point EVERY ONE OF THEM, fell off and fell in! What I saw then has become the thread for my blog this week. To get back up onto their board and onto the waves again, I watched the windsurfers push their sail upwards to catch the wind again
So simple, yet so profound as I thought about that.........
Windsurfers need the wind. Without the wind, they cannot do anything! The wind determines their direction, their speed, their ability to do their sport.. Most of us don’t think much of the wind, for them it is vital!!
When Jesus spoke to Nicodemus in John Chapter 3 He used the wind as an analogy of being born of the Spirit, “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” That analogy comes for the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel where in Chapter 37 the Lord brought Ezekiel to the Valley of Dry bones and he witnessed life being breathed into the dead bones, “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live…….and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army.” V9-10
Life, God life, came and comes from the Holy Spirit and the coming of the Holy Spirit is described metaphorically as the coming of the Wind. Jesus also said that we must abide in Him or we can do nothing (John 15) but He was going back to heaven so how do we continue doing that? Well the Holy Spirit would come and He would by our Helper (Chapter 15 then 16) and so in v7 of Chapter 16 Jesus says this, “ I am telling you nothing but the truth when I say it is profitable (good, expedient, advantageous) for you that I go away. Because if I do not go away, the Comforter (Counsellor, Helper, Advocate, Intercessor, Strengthener, Standby) will not come to you [into close fellowship with you]; but if I go away, I will send Him to you [to be in close fellowship with you].
Oh yes! Like those surfers for whom the wind is so vital, so too we Christians the coming and indwelling and working and power and guiding of the Holy Spirit is so vital to us, for it is as Zechariah says, “Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,’ Says the Lord” 4:6. We are utterly dependent upon HIM! WE CANNOT DO THIS ON OUR OWN..NEVER! BUT listen to this TODAY! God has put this on my heart to write TODAY for someone reading this BLOG YOU NEED TO HEAR THIS. No matter how long we have been walking the Christian life. No matter the amount of experience and knowledge and wisdom we have accumulated, at some point ALL of us will ‘come off’. That is, all of us will fail or fall or have a time in our lives when we wonder to ourselves ‘How can I go on’, ‘Is there a way back’? AND this is what I found so profound in that simple picture of those surfers!!!!
When they fell off, they pushed their sails up. The wind caught their sail and with its power the sail lifted them out of the water, back on their board and back on their journey..
Hurting, broken, discouraged, despairing Christian, lift your ‘sail’ let the wind of the Holy Spirit catch it and lift YOU up put you back on your feet, heal your broken heart, comfort your troubled soul, take that failure and make it a lesson you have learned, the disaster an opportunity to bring Glory to God and set you off on course again with renewed faith, strength and joy..
GO ON CATCH THE WIND, LET THE HOLY SPIRIT LIFT YOU OUT OF YOUR TROUBLED WATERS PUT YOU BACK ON YOUR FEET AND BREATHE NEW LIFE INTO YOUR SOUL!
I watched those surfers get back up time and time again and ride those waves. They never gave up and as they came off the water the look on their faces said it all. The waves might have been high, the sea might have been rough but with the wind in their sails they conquered, they overcame and they had one great time doing it…
I finish with this quote from Francis Chan from his Book on the Holy Spirit ‘The Forgotten God’ (worth a read!) “I want to live so that I am truly submitted to the Spirit's leading on a daily basis. Christ said its better for us that the Spirit came and I want to live like that is true. I don't want to keep crawling when I have the ability to fly.”
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