Experience the Rivers of Living Water - Revival: Baptism of Fire!

Hey, I'm Pastor Steve Hole.

I want to empower you today to walk in your true identity as a worshiper and warrior.

Today, embrace the power of God's Word and the Holy Spirit.

Welcome to the Born for War podcast.

All right, men and women, turn to John chapter 7, and this is what we're going to talk about today.

John 7 · chapter mention

Last week we had a baptism of the Holy Spirit with fire.

It was amazing.

Hundreds came forward for prayer.

Many of you got baptized in the Holy Spirit for the first time.

It was really exciting.

Some of you, second or third time, and if you don't know what I'm talking about, follow me today because I kind of decided to do a part two.

I had another message.

I ditched it because of last week, because so much happened, and nobody wanted to leave.

So we had people, I don't know, I know at least five or six couples that came up and said, we stayed for all the services, because they just wanted to keep getting it, which was awesome.

But in John 7, here's the situation.

Jesus is trying to present to his disciples and to those around, I'm leaving.

I'm going to be leaving you, and I'm going to send my Holy Spirit.

And they are confused, and even the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the priests are hearing this, and they don't understand what Jesus is talking about.

Now, Jesus is at the great feast, the Feast of Tabernacles, the Feast of Tabernacles, important to understand, was a feast based on Exodus 12.

In Exodus 12, there was an outpouring of the Spirit through a rock.

The Spirit came through literal water where the disciples came, excuse me, it was Exodus 17.

The Jewish nation came, they were thirsty, they were in the wilderness of sin.

They were doing what the Jews of the Old Testament did better than anything else, complain.

So they were complaining.

How many hear you complain sometimes?

Okay, we're just like the Old Testament.

Okay, you're an Old Testament saint, okay?

But you're complaining, they're complaining.

Moses calls out to God.

God says, go touch with the with your staff the rock, and water's gonna gush out of it.

That's what they're celebrating at the Feast of Tabernacles.

So at the Feast of Tabernacles, they would take a picture, a silver pitcher, and they would uh pour water into it from the pool of Salaam down in Jerusalem.

They'd walk up, they walk up to the temple, everybody's rejoicing, everybody's fired up, everybody's just singing the joy of the Lord, the salvation of the Lord through the Spirit.

They're singing these songs to the Lord, and then they come up and they would pour that water from the pool of Salaam upon the altar in the temple as a reminder of what God had done in Exodus 17.

Now they didn't say Exodus 17, they have chapters back then, but they remembered that story of Moses touching the rock.

Now in Hebrews, it talks about the spiritual water, the spiritual water that comes from the spiritual rock.

So that's where we pick it up.

So we're in John 7, 32.

The Pharisees heard the crowd murmuring these things concerning him, and the Pharisees and the chief priests sent officers to take him.

Then Jesus said to them, I shall be with you a little while longer, and then I'll go to him who sent me.

You will seek me and not find me, and where I am not, you cannot come.

This is really confusing to everybody who's listening.

So listen to what their analysis of it is.

Then the Jews said among themselves, where does he intend to go that we shall not find him?

Does he intend to go to the dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks?

What is this thing that he says, you will seek me and not find me, and where I am you cannot come?

So this is in juxtaposition to John 14, 15, and 16.

So if you don't turn there, but later, if you want to look at that, Jesus is talking about leaving.

He's gonna physically leave, but then spiritually, he's gonna come through the Holy Spirit.

So he's preparing people for that.

Now, it's the Feast of Tabernacles.

All this bleeds together.

All right, so he's talking about leaving, Spirit's gonna come, everybody's confused, even the disciples, and now it's the Feast of Tabernacles.

Look at verse 37.

On the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood.

Remember, he might be standing there right now when they're pouring the water from the pitcher from the pool of Salaam on the altar.

If anyone thirst, let him come to me.

Remember, he's conjuring up the image of thirsty Jews in the wilderness of sin, thousands of years before.

He says, if anyone's thirsty, let him come to me.

I'm basically saying, I'm the spiritual rock.

I'm the one.

I'm the one.

The type of me is that rock in the wilderness, a typology of the prophecy.

If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.

He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers.

Rivers, not creeks, not little dribbles out of a faucet, rivers of living water.

Now listen to the commentary by John.

But this he spoke concerning the Spirit, whom those believing in him would receive, for the Holy Spirit was not yet given because Jesus was not yet glorified.

He's talking about rivers of living water, folks.

He's talking about a flow of a river that they experienced in that desert, which was a type of what Jesus would bring and festive surrounding of the Feast of Tabernacles.

He stands there and says, Everything you're looking for is in me.

Shocking.

Shocking.

He just said, I'm gonna leave.

Now he's saying, I am gonna, I am the living water.

But then he just said he's gonna leave.

So, church, he's talking about the Holy Spirit.

And last week we talked about the baptism, the filling of the Holy Spirit.

Baptism of fire.

Some might say, well, that that's that's a baptism of judgment, right?

Could be interpreted that way.

But I interpret the fire as the burning bush of Exodus 3.

That Moses is up there on Horeb, he's walking along, and suddenly he sees this bush on fire, but not consumed.

How about you?

Don't we want to be on fire with the Spirit but not consumed?

That's the picture.

Exodus 3 is also the picture of Acts 2.

Holy Spirit coming down.

And so many of you, hundreds of you came up and said, I want to get baptized in the Holy Spirit, I want to get refilled with the Holy Spirit, I want to receive Christ.

Blast week.

This is the rivers of living water we're talking about, church.

We're talking about not just drinking from this little tiny faucet like I had yesterday.

Because I had the hose on and it froze up.

And it was a really dumb idea, but that's what I did.

And so I went, I don't think that's supposed to be happening here.

And so I had to take that thing off and then gush it out and clean it out and everything.

But that's where a lot of us are.

We're frozen.

We're kind of frozen where we've been.

And where you are now is where you were then, but where you were then is not where you need to be now.

There's new problems.

There's new mountains, there's now issues.

And as I said to Jeff in the first service, I'm not gonna say it again to Jeff and Lisa or Jeff Anderson, but they've got now problems.

It's one thing to run for office, it's one thing to win the running of office, and now it's gonna be facing all the issues that are coming with the Trump administration and new Congress and everything, right?

So Jeff needs a fresh baptism of wisdom.

He needs a fresh baptism of the Spirit.

And so does Jeff Anderson to know to navigate now issues.

And so some of you in this room have got mountains in front of you that you don't know what to do.

Well, guess who put them there?

Jesus did.

Because he wants you to grow.

He wants you to grow, he wants you to keep growing, he doesn't want you to quit.

Because here's what happens.

If there's no mountains, there's no mountains.

And if there's no mountains, what happens?

We get complacent and we get placent, we get boring, and when you get boring, you start losing ground.

That's just ask your spouse.

Like ask your spouse, am I boring right now?

No, don't ask that.

Don't ask that.

Okay, look at verse 37 again.

So I want to look at three things here in this passage that Jesus says.

He says, first of all, church, if anyone thirst.

So to experience the rivers of living water, you gotta be thirsty.

If you're not thirsty, you won't drink.

If you don't drink, you don't get the power.

You can have mental assent to the power.

Oh, yeah, I believe in the Holy Spirit.

Yeah, I believe in church, yeah, I believe in all that stuff that Steve's talking about, but you're not experiencing it.

But that begins with thirst.

You gotta be thirsty.

Here's I'll tell you my thesis.

My thesis is everybody in this room is thirsty.

Everybody created in the image of God, which is all of you in this room, even though sometimes you look in the mirror and you don't like what you see because of shame and brokenness and hurt and pain and a lot of betrayal and defeats in your life.

God wants to change that.

God wants to empower you to look in that mirror and see a new creation in Christ.

In Christ.

Okay, so we're at that place, we're thirsty, we're all thirsty for purpose.

It was Viktor Frankl, the great Jewish psychologist who spent all those years in Auschwitz in the concentration camp who talked about the fact that everybody's searching for meaning.

All of us in this room are searching for meaning.

You show me a man who commits suicide, I'll show you a man who's lost meaning and purpose to his life.

You show me a man or a woman that is just constantly depressed, constantly under the gun, I would challenge them.

You need a fresh baptism of the Holy Spirit that the Spirit of God can give you a new purpose and new meaning.

Because guess what?

Every one of us, every one of us in this room, the purpose and meaning that God gave us 10 years ago may not be the same right now.

Because you've grown.

And you come to the road, you grow.

People who leave the road go to other churches, I think that's awesome.

Go where you grow.

But you're here and we're growing together, and that's exciting.

So I just think it's exciting what all the churches are doing in Colorado Springs.

It's fantastic.

Someone said to me the other day, they said, Man, I just love the liturgy.

I just love the richness of the liturgy.

I said, dude, I grew up with 18 years of the richness of the liturgy, and I can put up with it for two Sundays.

And then it's just like too repetitive for me.

But for them, it was like awesome.

I said, fantastic, go for it.

That's fantastic.

I just love that.

And it's really, really cool.

Are you thirsty?

Men and women, are you thirsty for God?

Do you want more?

Are you facing things in your life where you know you need more?

Well, in the Old Testament, dealing with this issue by Jeremiah, he says this for my people have committed two evils.

They've forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, the fountain of living waters, the rivers of living waters, and hewn themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water.

So, as many of you know, I grew up on a ranch, and on that ranch, uh, granddad had um had these uh horse troughs all around, different places where the cattle could come.

Those are cisterns.

Those are modern metal cisterns.

These were wooden or pottery back then that they were built.

And a cistern is something that it caught rain water, as well as the farmer, the rancher would pour water into it.

If it stays there very long, it stagnates.

And so what Jeremiah is saying, some of you have forsaken me.

Some of you out and out forsaken me, like uh Psalm 2.3.

I'm gonna break those bonds off of me, I'm gonna be break, I'm gonna be set free.

That's not many in this room, in my opinion.

Now, you may have an area of your life where you're struggling with that, but I think for most of us where we struggle is we're drinking from cisterns that we've created.

We've created those cisterns.

It might be sex, it might be immorality, it might be pot, it might be uh an illicit drug, and pot, I guess, okay, pot's legal, all right?

So using it maybe less than or more than just medicinal, but those areas of our life that we try to find purpose in.

And let me just say this is probably the case for all of us.

We struggle with family and children.

We find so much of our significance from our family.

How many have adult children?

All right.

You realize you can't control adult children.

That you've got to let them go.

I mean, as my mom used to always say, we build a nest and we give them a nest and we give them wings, right?

So they're supposed to fly away.

But for some of you, you want them to just keep circling around the nest, man.

And then what happens is they fly over here and you go build another nest right under now.

Have you ever thought how many times they're gonna move in their lifetime?

You're just gonna keep moving and running after your kids.

That can be, not always, but it can be a broken system.

So we we build these false water systems that's not the living water.

It's not the living water of the Lord, it's other stuff.

And by the way, other stuff's not bad.

I'm not saying that.

I'm saying good, better, best.

Good, better, best.

Everybody say good, better, best.

The best is the living waters.

The best is the living waters.

And so we find ourselves at that place where we learn, oh my goodness, there's a fountain.

Well, Steve, I got that fountain years ago.

Great, you got saved, you're in, fantastic.

But then God is allowing some new mountains and some new struggles and some new betrayals and some new brokenness.

Because he wants you re-baptized with his Holy Spirit afresh.

He wants you to be refilled with the Holy Spirit afresh.

He wants you to have new power, now power for new problems and now problems.

Because you weren't facing those 10 years ago.

You weren't even facing those last year, but now you are.

We need a fresh filling, a fresh baptism.

Holy Spirit, Jesus is come, drink from me.

Drink from me, and when you drink from me, I will be unto you a fountain of living water.

PH quality.

Guaranteed.

Spiritually purified water, spiritually enhanced with electrolytes from the Holy Spirit.

You ever get those waters?

I wish I had one right now.

Essential.

It's my favorite one.

Essential.

That's what it says on the side.

It says pH quality guaranteed, purified water enhanced with electrolytes.

That's the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit gives you all that.

He pours that drink living water.

Jeff and I have hunted together, and we both know that when you're in the mountains and you're hunting or fishing, you go to living waters.

You go to streams, you go to rivers.

That's where the life is.

Life's not in cisterns.

You go out east and you'll see a big cow trough or you'll see a water container for the horses or for the cows.

And if that thing isn't regularly taken care of, it just, man, it just putrefies, right?

Because you have to, because who's doing all the work?

You are.

You're doing all the work.

Everybody look at me.

It takes a lot of work to be empowered by sin.

It takes a lot of work to be empowered by sin.

Takes a lot of work to get the buckets of water and come and put it in your man-made cisterns.

Or we come to Christ, we come to him in the power of his Holy Spirit, and we start drinking from him, reading his word, prayer, church, coming together, being around other believers that challenge us and help us grow, and then it's his power that changes us.

And so when you get into these rivers of living water, there's plants everywhere, and there's deer and there's elk and there's fish and there's flowers because there's life.

There's life there.

Granddaddy Joe, my grandfather, he had a spring on one of the pieces of property down where we had the cabin.

In that spring, he he built out a pond about two acres.

Out of that pond came another pond, about two acres.

And out of that pond came another pond, one acre, and out of that pond came another pond that was five acres.

One stream.

Four ponds full of big, largemouth bass, full of brim, full of crappie, full of fish.

One stream.

Church.

When we start drinking from the streams of living water, God creates all these ponds in our life.

God, if you let him and if you obey him, he'll start taking care of your finances.

He'll take care of your family.

You learn to forgive people that are unforgivable.

Anybody ever met an unforgivable person?

You guys need to get out more often.

Okay?

But you have people in your life that are just, they're crazy.

They're crazy.

But you love them and you forgive them and you bless them.

Where does that come from?

That's the power of the Holy Spirit.

Somebody stabs you in the back, they betray you, they steal your company, they steal something of yours.

How do you forgive?

Power of the Holy Spirit, drinking from the living waters.

You don't have the natural ability to do that.

God can do it through you.

Ponds coming off the living water.

And then he says, If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.

Come to me and drink.

So come to Jesus and drink from him.

Forget those cisterns.

Move past those broken cisterns.

Take those cisterns that you've been drinking from and transfer that into a passion for God.

And I say this at the wholehearted men.

When we do a wholehearted, passionate, wholehearted advance conference, a retreat with men, this is what I say.

In one of my messages, I say, until your passion for Christ eclipses your passion for lust, you will not change.

Until your passion for Christ eclipses your passion for lust, you will not change.

That's based on Romans 6, 7, and 8.

In other words, church, we send, we we get all we all get zeroed in on our lust and our problems, and I say, that's the wrong focus.

Focus on Jesus, fall in love with Jesus, get around Jesus, read the word from Jesus, build up your faith, stir yourself up, and over time the passions for lust will gradually subside because you have a passion for Him.

You see what I'm saying?

So same thing, drinking from the living water makes drinking from cisterns obsolete after a while.

Who wants that?

So I wasn't very healthy two weeks ago.

Two weeks ago I was at someone's thing, and they had Coke.

I never drink Coke.

I haven't drank a Coke in a decade.

But I needed to go from this Bible study that I was teaching up in Woodland Park for men down to the airport to pick up my dad who was coming, my 92-year-old dad, and I thought, oh, that looks good.

And I had this memory of how good Coke tastes.

The problem was I haven't drank one in 10 years.

So I pulled it off, I started drinking it on the way, and I wanted to puke.

Because my body isn't ready for that much junk coming in all at once.

Now, some of us, you drink coke every day.

So you're just fine.

But for me, it was like, ah, it was the worst.

And I remember I stopped over to 7 Eleven on the way, and I got essential.

Got one of those nice essentials, man.

Ah, it was so much better.

So you start you start drinking the essential, purified, living water of Jesus, you gradually don't want coke anymore.

And so there you go.

Now you're at John 7.

Go to the left.

And I'd be remiss if we didn't pick up a story that's very similar in John chapter 4.

John 4 · chapter mention

John chapter 4 is the woman at the well, the Samaritan woman.

John 4 · chapter mention

And he begins a dialogue with her in verse 7, in which he talks about himself as being the living water.

The woman of Samaria came to draw water.

Jesus said to her, Give me a drink.

For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.

And the woman of Samaria said to him, How is it that you, being a Jew, ask a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?

For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.

And Jesus answered and said to her, If you knew the gift of God and who it is who says to you, Give me a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.

The woman said to him, Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep.

Where then do you get this living water?

Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from himself, as well as his sons and his father?

You know what he's saying here?

She doesn't get it yet.

She's going to get it later.

But she's saying, Are you greater than religion?

Do you know how many people have been going to church their whole life and they're going to go to hell?

Because they're married to religion and they've never gotten married to Jesus.

So he goes on and he says to her, verse 13, whoever drinks of this water will thirst again.

But whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst.

But this water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up.

Springing up.

Springing up.

Springing up into everlasting life.

That's why it's called a spring.

It's called a spring because it springs.

And so this springing up, this living water.

How many of you have seen in Colorado a pond where there's a spring in the middle where they oxygenate the water, send the water up?

They're oxygening, they're cleansing that water, right?

That's the springs of living water, listen, to oxygenate your life.

Oxygenate your life with righteousness, peace, and joy.

With righteousness, peace.

But you got to drink from it.

It's not enough to know it.

Got experience in our heart, gang.

And that's hard work sometimes.

And you get you get messed up in this life.

We all get hurt.

We all get blown away by things that happen as well.

Well, God, I did this, this, and this, and look how it turned out.

It's a mystery, isn't it?

Isn't life a mystery?

All I know is this works.

All I know is this works.

And then we keep drinking from him.

You and I will spring up with living water.

Now, for some of you, your spring's about this high.

Let me tell you, the spring in my grandfather's ranch in South Carolina was this high.

And filled four ponds as the years went by.

So it doesn't matter how much.

We keep going and we drink from Him.

And it's two steps far and it's one step back.

And it's two steps forward and it's one step back.

But we don't quit.

At the road, we don't quit.

We keep battling for more.

Battling for more.

That's the filling.

That's a baptism of fire.

That's the baptism of Holy Spirit.

Turn back to John 7.

Look at verse 38.

And I'll conclude here.

John 7, 38.

He who believes in me, as the scriptures have said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.

So thirdly and lastly, put your trust, put your belief, put your trust in the power of the Spirit.

Put your trust in Jesus.

If you've never put your trust in Christ, that's step one.

If you have a re-baptism of the Spirit, is step two to get rebaptized.

And as I shared last week, you remember?

Remember I'm going to biology class?

I'm going to biology class at Georgia.

I'm just walking along and the Spirit came down on me.

And suddenly it was like I could hear the birds singing.

I could hear, you know, I always think of St.

Francis of Assisi taking his clothes off.

But I wasn't doing that, fortunately.

But I suddenly had this experience like I was lifted up into a second heaven or something, and for three hours, it was a baptism of the Spirit.

And then right after that, revival broke out at Georgia through me and a bunch of other guys, and we saw like half of the gymnastics team coming to know the Lord, and then we saw so many hundreds in the athletic department.

Then in Okinawa, I'm in there and I don't know what to do.

It's a new mountain in my life, linguistically, uh culturally, all that stuff.

And God baptizes me afresh, and in that time I spoke in tongues, and the Spirit of God came upon me, and we started seeing hundreds get healed and hundreds delivered from the demonic.

And then we're at Mountain Springs Church.

We planted that church, we're struggling along, and I feel like I need a fresh baptism of fire, I need a fresh baptism of spirit.

And I go out one day and I'm praying about all this, and the rain starts coming.

Lightning, boom, thunder, boom, boom, boom.

And then I hear this crack.

Huge, like a like an explosion in our woods.

And I'm like, whoa.

So I go in the woods, and you can see where a lightning strike had hit this pine tree that was about this big, and you can see the mark just running down from the very top all the way down until it grounded into the ground.

Probably about two inches thick.

Boom, lightning.

And the spirit began to move.

That was a prayer for wisdom and leadership.

I didn't feel like I had what it took for Mountain Springs at that time.

And I could go on and on and on and on.

But here's the deal.

All of you have mountains.

I think it's a good thing to have mountains.

I think it's a good thing to not know what to do.

Because God's positioned you here right now, this year, right now, to be rebaptized and refilled with the Holy Spirit.

Have wisdom from Him.

Thank you for listening to the Forn for War podcast.

We hope today's message has empowered you to make a difference in your world.

To connect with Pastor Steve's sermons, books, and blog, visit Steve Holtonline.org.

God bless.