You are a River of Living Water

by Olga Hermans

On the day of Pentecost, fifty days after Passover, Jesus poured out His Spirit on believers in the upper room, and they began speaking in a new language. Rivers of living water flowed out of them, and they prophesied. This experience – the baptism of the Holy Spirit – is available to every born-again believer.

The origin of the rivers written about in John 7:38, is the river that flows from the throne of God. It is the life of God Himself. As we worship God, His river flows. As we speak in other tongues, His river flows. As we prophesy, His river flows. As we speak the Word, His river flows up and out of us.

Notice that Jesus didn’t say that rivers of living water will flow once in a while from those who believe in Him. He said these rivers of living water will flow continuously. That living water is the Holy Spirit. In this passage, Jesus talks about the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which we have received if we have accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior – the Person and the power of the Holy Spirit in us.

The river of living water flows within you and me. It is not supposed to be stopped up, but it is to bubble up within us and flow out of us. Many people have never experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit. They have never let the rivers flow out of them. This experience was foreign to me as I was growing up, because I was raised in the Catholic Church. They also spoke a language that I couldn’t understand – Latin.

I remember very well the day that I got baptised in the Holy Spirit. Although I told people that I desired to speak in tongues, nobody told to me that I could receive this gift any time. My ideas about how spiritual things worked came from my upbringing in the Catholic Church. So I thought that I had to go to a certain service to receive this baptism. Knowing this, God told me to go to a certain meeting that was a two-hour drive away.

At the end of the meeting, they asked if there was anyone who wanted to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I did, and received it gloriously, fluently speaking a language that I had never heard before. I jumped in, and that language suddenly came alive. I loved it.

When you receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit, you are filled with a power that affects your entire being. To walk in victory, you must release the refreshing rivers of the life of God that have been deposited inside of you.

In John 7:37-38 Jesus says, “If you’re thirsty, come and drink and I will cause rivers of living water to flow out of your innermost being.” You see, Jesus was talking about rivers and not just one river.

There are many, many rivers flowing inside of you. One of those rivers is the river of reconciliation which actually is a ministry and is entrusted to every believer.

This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun! And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to Himself through Christ. And God has given us this task of reconciling people to Him. For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And He gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. 2Cor. 5:17-19

There are 3 things in this passage.

You have been made a new creation
You have a new ministry
You have a new message fit for a new creation. You definitely have become a new creation; something profound has happened to you.

I want to share a secret with you that my pastor shared with us. If you like to know more about this you can buy his book.
The more you yield to the river that is most prominent within your spirit, the more it will make exit from within your spirit for others in your life.

There are rivers of prayer, rivers of your destiny, rivers of full things that the womb of your spirit is pregnant with from Heaven; and when you begin to yield yourself over to the ministry of reconciliation, it will become the doorway to the destiny that God has for your life.

Isn’t that awesome? So, when you start to reconcile people to God, that river starts to flow on the inside of you to them and that river opens up other rivers on the inside of you and the door of your destiny will open up before you.

I like to encourage you to yield to that river of reconciliation. That river is on the inside of every believer, and this river is a river of life. You have life on the inside of you to give.

It is good to yield to the Spirit of God, to yield to that grace, and allow the Holy Spirit to control us. Have you ever experienced that God touched your heart in spite of you being hardened or stubborn? Maybe you realized that there was a change in your heart and that’s why you were able to respond to God? That was because of the grace of God that went into your heart.

The grace of God lives on the inside of you; in your heart and when you let it bubble up from within you, it will influence the rest of your life and your whole being and then is tangible for people around you to see it. THAT is your destiny!

You can subscribe to The Daily Choice which is a SPIRITUAL Devotion that helps you to make the right choices in your life!

How To Keep It Simple

How to keep it simple

by Olga Hermans

If ever God would be speaking about simplifying our life, it would be now. People wonder often why they don’t see God’s glory, His presence, or His anointing. They want to experience all the things that seem to happen to other people regularly.

The answer is very often that they need to simplify their life in order for them to understand what God says in His Word.
There is this transformational power in God’s Word; freedom comes and life comes in your heart when you read it. It penetrates your heart when you let it and positive change will happen.

Yet not enough believers experience these kinds of breakthroughs; let’s have a look at why that is.

The primary reason is that their life is too complex. Most people don’t enjoy God’s presence, God’s anointing, or God glorious plan because life is just too complicated.

Then there are people who sit in church or fellowship with one another and talk about the Word but never gain any insight. These people hear the Word, but the revelation of the Word never comes. They don’t seem to have the ability to absorb the fullness of God’s wisdom.

Psalm 119:130 tells us that the entrance of Your Word gives light and it gives understanding to the simple. So, when you would sit under the preaching of the Word, light should come and God’s revelations should come.

The word ‘simple’ doesn’t mean that you are not intelligent or whatever; it means that you are open-minded and that you live a simple life. Have you ever wondered why older people have so much wisdom? I think because they have the time to process life’s experiences. Their life is simple.

Complexity in itself doesn’t have to a bad thing. Our body in itself is very complex and works wonderfully. The reason people don’t know God the way they should is that their lives are just too cluttered and too complicated.

So, if you are born again and baptized in the Holy Spirit, you can be sure that you have the ability to perceive the leadings of the Lord. The problem is that the busyness of your life and the noise of your flesh are depleting your spiritual life, which make it difficult to hear His still, small voice in your heart.

Your spiritual senses are overwhelmed by worldly clutter so they can’t function as they were designed to be.
I will picture an image here: let’s say that you are sitting in a room with your best friend. You are engaged in each other’s conversation and you can hear each other very well. You can pick up every variation of her voice; you know her so well that your communication gets more and more intimate.

Well, all of a sudden the room fills up with people who are all talking at once. Then TV goes on with a football game; people get so engaged in the game that they raise their voices more and more.

Your friend is still speaking and you can still hear her, but you can’t discern what she is saying as easily as you could when the room was quiet. You might miss a few words and misunderstand a few things.

Now they open the windows and all the sound of the street comes in; buses, trams and taxis are driving and honking their horn. You are looking at your friend and you see her lips moving, but you can’t figure out what she is saying. There is too much noise in the room; you are unable to distinguish the one sound that is important. You are unable to hear the voice of your friend.

This is what many people experience in their prayer life. Our flesh and our natural concerns of this world are making too much noise and are asking attention from us all the time. Too bad, because what God wants is right there to talk to us, but we have to get quiet before the Lord and give Him all our attention just like you would do with your best friend.

People keep waiting on the leading of the Lord; they think that He is not leading them right now. But that is not true; He is always leading us. But if we don’t obey those leadings, He won’t be able to take us any further. We find ourselves spiritually stuck and unable to rise up to higher levels where our heart desires to go.

It says in Psalm 46:10 that if we will be still before the Lord, we will be sure that we hear Him tell us how much He loves us and that you are a son to Him. Hearing Him say that will give you such a boost that you want to come back again and be still before Him and listen to that still small voice and hear some more from Him.

But if our life is too busy and too cluttered and has gotten a little too comfortable with the ways of this world, we won’t be able to hear Him. People think that it is ok to talk to God while listening to the noise of the world. If you talk to God while you go and do certain things, that is perfectly fine and it is a good thing.

But there should be times in your daily routine that you set yourself apart from everything around you and make time for God. Get your emotions and affection untangled from the earthly affairs.

It is time for us to set our minds on things above, not on things on the earth. It is time for us to get the worldly clutter out of our minds so that we can more readily hear and respond to the voice of the Lord.

We do that by purposely putting more time and energy into spiritual things. We do it by spending extra time each day worshiping the Lord, meditating on His Word, and praying. We do it by giving more of our attention to Him.