Devotional - August 25th, 2020

Hi everybody my dad said I could write today. And I want to write about something I really like.  That’s water. See we live in a house where sometimes our backyard gets flooded with water. My dad calls it irrigation. Anyway, when that happens, we get all kinds of birds and ducks too.  Sometimes lots of ducks and they like to swim on the water. And we can hear them quacking. So, I stand at the door and whine until somebody lets me go outside and I try to catch them. But they always fly away. Then I get to run in the water. I LOVE to run in the water, and I run in big circles and my dad says I make whitecaps, but I don’t know what that means exactly. When I am done playing in the water, I am always soaking wet and sometimes my feet get all muddy. Then I have to wait until my dad gets a towel and dries me off so I can come inside. I don’t really like that part.

But I am not the reason we get all that water. It is so the fruit trees can grow and the rose bushes and the plants. See water is really important and since we live in a desert it is really, really important. Because without water nothing can live. There are different kinds of water. There is the water I like to run in and there is swimming pool water and there is the water that goes in my dish inside and the water in the shower. But my dad says there is another kind of water and that is living water. I don’t know how water can be alive, but he told me it is in the Bible, so I know it is true.

There is a story in the Bible about Jesus sitting down by a well in a place called Samaria. It is far away from here. Anyway, this lady came to get water from the well in the middle of the day when it was the hottest. That doesn’t make sense, but my dad said it was because people made fun of her, so she came when the other people didn’t. Jesus asked her for a drink of water because Samaria is in a desert too and Jesus was hot and thirsty. But then Jesus said something to the lady about He could give her not well water but living water. Because the water that we drink, like well water or the water that comes out of the faucet… we have to keep drinking that water. But Jesus’ water, living water takes care of us being thirsty for something other than water. Dad says that this living water of Jesus is the Holy Spirit that lives in us and takes care of our being thirsty for God. And that sometimes we don’t even know we are thirsty for God. We just know something isn’t right.

And then my dad told me there are lots of places in the Bible that talk about water. Like Noah who had to build a really big boat to hold all the animals because God was going to make a flood way bigger than in my backyard. That flood wasn’t to play in. God used it to get rid of all the evil that was on the earth.  And He only saved Noah and his family and two of every animal. I bet that boat really smelled after a while. And dad told me that Jesus’ first miracle was when He went to a wedding and they ran out of wine and Jesus told some servants to fill these big jugs full of water, so they did. And then Jesus turned that water into wine for the people to drink. And it was the best wine they had ever had!

There was a time when the Israelites were out wandering in the wilderness. They had to do that for 40 years because they didn’t do what God had told them to do. Anyway, there were millions of people and animals and they couldn’t find any water to drink and the people yelled at Moses because they thought it was his fault. And then Moses yelled at God because he was tired of all the people always complaining and God told Moses to take his stick and hit this rock and then water came out of the rock and everybody had enough to drink. I think God does some really amazing things!

Dad told me a story in a book called the gospel of John about Jesus getting together with His disciples to eat a special meal called the Passover. I think that is for a whole different writing. Anyway, people usually had their feet washed by a servant when they went to someone’s house but that night there was no servant…except Jesus and He got up from the table and got the basin of water and He washed everybody’s feet…even Judas who told the bad guys where they could find Jesus. Jesus was even nice to him. Dad says we are supposed to treat people like that. But sometimes it’s really hard.

Then there was the time when the Israelites were being chased by the Egyptians and they came to a dead end at a place called the Red Sea and the Egyptians were closing in on them. It was really scary but God told Moses to hold his stick out over the Red Sea and the waters parted in two and there was dry ground and the Israelites got to walk through the water and God kept the Egyptians away. The Israelites had to trust God. That’s hard sometimes too.

I think lots of things are hard when God asks us to do them. But he does that to see if we will really trust Him and then when we do…and everything goes good, we feel kinda silly for not trusting Him. But dad says every time that happens, we learn a little bit more that we really can trust God with anything. That’s all I have for today.

In His grip
Casper Wiswall