Rivers of Living Water

I was studying the other day, and what's interesting now is that I don't remember what, exactly. What I remember is how I felt: stirred, in a good way. Not merely excited or intrigued, but...enlivened. Quickened. In an experience like this there's a sense of making connections, and also a sense of the futuristic, of significance, and, for the Christian, of movement by the indwelling Holy Spirit. Of something ready to flow forth when the time is right. A river sloshing at the level of its banks.

And then I ran into a Scripture passage I wasn't even hunting for. The context is Jesus in Jerusalem, speaking to the crowds on the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles:

"If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink! He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, 'From his innermost being will flow continually rivers of living water.' But He was speaking of the Holy Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive afterward. The Spirit had not yet been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified" (John 7:37b-39 AMP 2015). 

I doubt we think about this often enough: the prerequisite for this state of being--rivers of living water flowing continually out of one, because of the indwelling Holy Spirit--is believing in Jesus. He was speaking here of a future certainty that would characterize His followers: will flow. Continually. My mathematical background loves noticing when continuously and continually are used. Continuous functions have no breaks, whereas something that's continual recurs very frequently with possible short breaks. Sometimes rivers slow to a trickle. Sometimes they're dammed up. But over the life of the river, its flow is continual. So much more often than not, it's flowing without cease. 

Do we who believe in Jesus experience these rivers (Jesus used the plural) flowing, and if they stop, do they start up again? According to what He said, they should characterize our lives. And I think that's what I experienced the other morning. Stirring. Flowing. Current. A flow from within that needed somewhere to go. A river that will give me life first, but then become an outflow of life that others may drink from, and taste and see that the Lord is good. In 2 Corinthians 13:5, Paul exhorts believers to examine themselves to see if they are in the faith. Perhaps looking for evidence of rivers of living water, the teeming life of the Holy Spirit, is to be part of that examination.