Weekly Magazine | Rivers of Living Water
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Rivers of Living Water
By: Sandy Mayle
The Allegheny River ran through my childhood.
What I didn’t know as I splashed in it, camped beside it, and kayaked on it was that the Allegheny starts as just a small spring in a farmer’s field in northern Pennsylvania. The trickle widens until people are baptized in the flow, fishermen pull Muskie from the depths, and speedboats skim the surface while loaded barges inch along.
In Pittsburgh, the Allegheny joins the Monongahela River to form the Ohio, surging southeast to merge with the Mississippi River and empty into the Gulf of Mexico. In the process, the mighty Mississippi grows to some 11 miles wide while hosting at least 260 species of fish. Its watershed covers over a million square miles, reaching people from the Appalachians to the Rockies and even a bit of Canada.
I wonder… does that farmer’s field in northern Pennsylvania have any idea what is happening downstream?
FROM TRICKLE TO RIVER
In Ezekiel 47, the prophet is shown a vision of the temple in Jerusalem. He follows a trickle of water coming from under the temple wall, which grows ankle-deep, then knee-deep, then waist-deep, until that trickle has become an uncrossable river. Although it flows through desert land, the river nurtures many trees along its shores, including all kinds of fruit trees bearing nourishing fruit and healing leaves. It eventually flows into the salty Dead Sea, turning the waters fresh so that they become filled with many kinds of fish, for “where the river flows everything will live” (v. 9).
In the same way, Jesus’ death and resurrection unearthed a spring of living water that bubbled forth at Pentecost in Jerusalem, rose knee-deep through Judea, waist-deep through Samaria, and finally widened to cover the whole earth with its offer of abundant life (Acts 1:8).
This same Jesus said, “‘Whoever believes in me…rivers of living water will flow from within them.’ By this he meant the Spirit” (John 7:38-39).
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