In the spring and summer months of 1993 one of the greatest floods ever recorded in the United States left the Mississippi River Valley forever changed. In early June a deluge of historic proportions began with unusually heavy rainfall across the states of the upper Midwest. For the next two months, continuous summer rains awakened nearly one-hundred and fifty tributaries which then rushed to empty themselves into the two major rivers of the Midwest - the Missouri and the Mississippi. These two mighty rivers joined forces in the heart of the St. Louis region and for hundreds of miles the floodwaters breached over one-thousand man-made levees to submerge homes, farms, even entire towns.
Television images during those months left us all feeling a sense of awe at the power of this river. It's easy to view floods such as this as being terrible and destructive. They are indeed terrible and destructive, but only to those who insist upon capturing the river with man-made constraints, taming it, and imposing our will upon it. What we don't often hear about are the ways in which the land benefits from such floods.
Whenever a river overflows its banks, it dumps sand, silt and debris that it has carried downstream onto the surrounding land. After the flood waters move away, the soil is more fertile, because of the organic matter and minerals in this material.
Farmers since the time of the ancient Egyptians have known about the benefits that a flood can bring. Indeed, the ancient Egyptians planned their farming, and their lives, around the regular flooding of the Nile. They learned over time that, the higher the flood, the better that year's harvest would be.
A certain character from the Bible was once invited to stand in awe of the power of a river. In a vision, the prophet Ezekiel was beckoned by an angel to walk along the bank of the river flowing out of the temple of God. He stopped every fifteen-hundred feet or so to wade in and feel itâs power until finally reaching the point where even swimming was out of the question. At this point, the only interaction he could have with the water was to surrender to itâs power and be carried to wherever it would choose to carry him. As he wrote of this experience he was careful to explain that everywhere the river went, what was once dead, was awakened to new life.
We have said here at Christ Community Church that a river is the metaphor of our life together as followers of Jesus Christ. If a river serves as the metaphor for our life together, then our metaphor for the ways in which we interact with and impact the world around us must be that of a flood. For it is only when the power of our Christ-centered life together overflows into our neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces that people who don't know God are awakened to new life.
The power of Christ in our life floods into the world around us when two mighty streams converge: the stream of our personal intimacy with Jesus Christ and the stream of our relational intimacy with one another.
As the new overseer of “Live” ministries here at Christ Community Church, I am preparing for a flood; a flood that will forever change lives, marriages, and the fruitfulness of future branches on multitudes of family trees - perhaps even a flood that will alter the social fabric of our city. Just as hundreds of tributaries converge to form rivers powerful enough to submerge a town, God will use people in his body to submerge the Chattahoochee Valley in the love and power of the Kingdom of God. This post is an invitation issued to those who long to be used by God to transform their world. It is an invitation to join our lives together as a new faith community wherein we will devote ourselves to pursuing intimacy with Jesus Christ, relational intimacy with one another, and exploring the unique ways in which God has equipped and called us as individuals to be the floodwaters of the Kingdom of God in our neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools. Very soon this group will begin meeting every other week at the home of Bill & Lynn Huffhine. Each time we gather we’ll begin our time together by sharing a meal and celebrating communion. From there we’ll move into a time of worship and listening to the voice of God. And out of this a learning time will be built around the theme of finding our personal place in local outreach and global missions. We’ll likely read a book together and discuss it when we gather. We’ll talk about how we are being used by God to touch the lives of those who don’t believe. We’ll encourage one another in an environment of grace out of which the river of God will flow into the dry and thirsty land through which all of us walk every day.
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