Tapping The Supply Within
Written by Apostle Les D. Crause
Proverbs 5 : 15-16 - Drink waters out of your own cistern, and running waters out of your own well. Let your fountains be dispersed abroad, [and] rivers of waters in the streets.
Jeremiah 2 : 13 - For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, [and] hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.
I remember reading once about a man that was traveling through the desert and ran out of water. (We saw last time that water is essential to life, and when you are going through a desert and run out of it, you don't have much chance of surviving.) However as he pressed on he saw an object looming in the distance. It looked like a pole jutting out of the ground, and as he approached, he discovered that it was a water pump.
Obviously someone had dug a hole at some stage and sunk a pipe down into an underground stream. With eager anticipation he took hold of the handle of the pump and began to move it up and down. It just moved freely and nothing happened. No water came out of the tap. After trying feverishly for some time he realized that the water must have run dry and that nothing was going to come out.
But then he noticed a compartment at the bottom of the pump that seemed to have something in it. He reached in and found with great joy a bottle of water. Lifting it out he reached to open it and take a life-giving drink, when he noticed that it contained a label with some words written on it. The label was a set of instructions.
Personal Gain Or the Greater Good
It instructed the person finding the bottle to pour all of the water into an opening in the pump. This would cause the pump to become 'primed' which would cause it to function correctly. The person was instructed to make sure that after they had used all the water they needed, they should refill the bottle and replace it in its storage compartment for the next thirsty traveler to use.
Now a decision had to be made. Should he drink the water and quench his thirst, or take a chance and pour all of it out into a pump that might not work? After an agonizing period of indecision he decided to trust the person that wrote the instructions on the bottle.
He poured the water into the pump and then reached out to take the handle of the pump. Sure enough it only took a few lever actions and water started to pour out of the pump. There was more than enough to not only quench his thirst, but also the thirst of anyone else that might have been with him. Enough to fill up his own water bottles and enough to refill the special bottle that was left behind for the next person in need.
Underground Stream
We have seen in the Scriptures that Jesus promised the Holy Spirit to those that would believe in Him. He said that this would be like rivers of living water flowing outwards from within a person's inward parts. We considered the fact that when a person is born again the Holy Spirit comes to live inside a person's spirit. And that which flows forth comes from within the spirit of man, but with the Holy Spirit as its source.
You see the Bible teaches that when we are born again by the Spirit of God, we receive from God our own underground stream. It is a powerful gushing river of living water that can pour out with life to others. But like all underground streams it is not visible to the naked eye and we cannot even begin to draw from that water either for ourselves or for others, until we have sunk a pipe down into it.
Those who have their own water source on their property know what a tremendous advantage it is to be able to draw from their own water supply. You can draw for yourselves and your animals and anyone else that needs water, without having to rely on a municipal or other external water source. And there is no limit to how much water you can draw, other than what your underground stream can supply.
Drink From Your Own Cistern
Solomon tells us in our first reading that we should drink water from our own cistern, or water supply. Then he says, let this water also flow out to meet the needs of others. He seems to be saying something similar to what Jesus said to the woman at the well. He told her that the water he gave would meet her own needs, so that she would never thirst again, and that it would result in water supply that could flow out in continual supply.
This means that every believer has within their own spirit, because of the presence of God's Holy Spirit, a source that can meet not only their own needs but also the needs of others. The problem is how do we tap that water and get it to come out?
Drink from your own cistern, says Solomon, but we always look somewhere else for God's blessing. Yet Paul tells us in Ephesians 1:3 that God has blessed us, once for all, with every spiritual blessing that is available in the heavenly realm, in Christ. And He has done this by giving us the Holy Spirit, who is the source of all blessing.
You have an underground stream in you that will not only meet every need you could ever have, but also impart to you every blessing that God is capable of giving. You have in the Holy Spirit, everything that Heaven has to offer. In fact Paul tells us that the Holy Spirit is the down payment or first installment of our inheritance Ephesians 1:14. He is like a deposit that has been made in the bank for you to draw on.
But sadly, most believers do not know how to tap their underground stream. They don't know how to sign the check that will allow them to draw money from their heavenly bank account. So they go around begging and pleading for God to bless them.
They go from place to place seeking someone that has the blessing of God flowing in their life that they can get some of the overflow. Instead of being a water source, they are continually drinking from the cisterns of others. They are a bit like the man in our story who if he had drank the water instead of pouring it into the pump would have quenched his thirst for a while but later grown thirsty again, and he would have denied others the opportunity to also draw from the underground stream.
Sink The Pipe
So how do we draw from our underground stream then? I do not have space to cover the subject in detail here, but I will give you some of the basic principles to meditate on and then I will explain them in more detail later. The first stage to tapping into your underground stream is to sink a 'pipe' down into the water. If you do not have a pipe you have no way of drawing it out.
The problem with sinking a pipe into an underground stream is that it takes hard work. You have to drill down into the ground until you hit the water source. This might start off easy, but the actual water is usually found in the rocky layers below the surface of the soil. That means you might have to drill through solid rock before you hit the water.
We have been giving you hints for some time now in the Daily Word as to how you can sink a pipe down into your underground stream. You see the pipe that carries the water is the Word of God. The Spirit always works according to the Word, and without the Word there can be no action from the Spirit.
Drilling Down
Think about the creation of the earth in Genesis 1. We read that the Spirit of God hovered over the waters ready to perform the creation, but nothing happened until God's Word went forth into the earth. With the Word came the acts of creation. So if you want to tap the resources in your spirit that are available in the Holy Spirit, you are going to have to start drilling down into your spirit to make place for the Word.
It is here that so many people go wrong. God said through Jeremiah that His people were making two mistakes. Firstly they had turned their backs on the only true source of blessing and secondly they had turned to inferior sources.
When believers fail to cause the Word to sink down and penetrate their inward man, they make the same mistake. The Word has to go deeper than the mind. The mind, as it links with the body, allows us only to understand with our brains and we have to rely on the memory cells in our brain to hold the information. We try to work things out ourselves intellectually or resort to doctrines that seem to make sense to our minds.
This is like drilling down only below the soft sand of the surface of the ground. You will not hit the underground stream until the Word has penetrated the rocky layers of your heart.
It takes a process of drilling until the inward man is pierced. We get a hint of this from Hebrews 4:12:
For the word of God [is] living, and powerful, and sharper than any two edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and [is] a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
There has to come a piercing at the point where the soul and spirit meet. This is where the rocky surface lies. This is where you will find what the Psychologists have called the 'sub-conscious mind.' And until the Word passes beyond this point you have not created an opening to the power that lies within.
And then when you have created a path for the water to flow and you have inserted your pipes, you need to have some way of pumping that water out. A well or borehole without a water pump are of little use. We will look at this final aspect in our next study. You will find out how to set up your water pump and how to make sure that it works correctly. And we will bring together everything we have shared so far to explain how you can enter into all that the Lord has for you.
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Tapping into Your Spirit
Written by Apostle Les D. Crause
Acts 3 : 6-7 - Then Peter said, Silver and gold I do not have; but what I have I give you: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk. And he took him by the right hand, and lifted [him] up: and immediately his feet and anklebones received strength.
Revelation 5 : 8 - And when he had taken the book, the four beasts and twenty four elders fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them harps, and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of saints.
Revelation 8 : 4 - And the smoke of the incense, [which came] with the prayers of the saints, ascended up before God out of the angel's hand.
When I was at school (in the old old days) they taught us in science about two different types of pump that you can use to pump water. If I remember correctly they were the lift pump and the force pump.
Don't ask me to remember what each did or what the difference is between them, I don't think I even understood it then. But I recently found a plastic water pump to use in our large bottles of purified water and I was curious to see how it worked. I think it is probably a lift pump, because it lifts the water up out of the bottle. I imagine the pumps that they use to draw water up from boreholes are similar.
There is just one thing about the pump that is quite frustrating at times. When it has been standing without use, the water that is in the column of the pump seeps back out into the bottle, leaving it full of air. This means that if you want to pump water out you have to first fill the column of the pump by pumping out the air and filling it with water. Once the column is full of water, the water gushes out with each pumping action.
Your Spiritual Underground Stream
I began to realize that this is exactly the way it works with our spiritual underground stream. We have sunk our pipe down into the underground stream, but the water is deep in the earth. The column of our pump reaches down to the water, but when we try to pump no water comes out.
The reason for this is that we have to cause the column to fill with water first before it begins to pump out. This is the same concept we looked at last time concerning 'priming' your pump. You see if the column is full, then it takes very little action to cause the water to gush forth. But if it is empty there will be a lot of pumping without any action.
Have you ever gone to the Lord in prayer and found that it feels like He is a thousand miles away? Well we know that He is not a thousand miles away, because He is in our hearts. But you see the evidence of His presence that is communicated by the Holy Spirit is in your underground stream. The presence of God is as far as your pump is from the water. If your pump is filled then you will see results the moment you start to pump.
How do pump? Well what is the only gate you have through which data can be sent out from within your spirit to the world? Of course, it is your mouth.
Hearing God's Voice through your Spirit
You see there are five gates through which information may be received into your heart, but it is only via your words and your bodily actions that anything that comes out of your heart can be sent out into the world. So if you are going to draw water from your underground stream, you are going to have to 'pump' it out with speech. This is a complete subject in itself and we will be covering it in another article.
What I would like to see today is how we can come to the place where our pump is continually 'primed' and the column continually full of water, so that when we need to draw out it is available immediately. Then I would like to consider how we could also build up a reservoir that would give a large supply and also increase the pressure.
Have you noticed a windmill as you have driven through a country area? What has happened is that someone has sunk a pipe deep into the earth to an underground stream. They have set up a pump on it and they have attached this pump to a windmill.
Now when the wind blows, the windmill turns and it begins to pump water. This would be a problem if the wind were blowing all the time, because you would keep pumping out water even if you didn't need it and it would be wasted. So the way to do it is to get the pump to fill a water reservoir, and when the water level reaches a certain point, the pump disengages from the windmill. (I think that's how it works). Now you have an immediate water supply, and when it runs low, the pump starts pumping again with the wind.
Using the Word to Tap into your Spirit
What we have here is a beautiful picture of how we should set things up in our spiritual lives. You start by tapping into your underground stream with the Word. Then you attach a pump by learning to pray the kind of prayer that Jesus taught us to pray.
In what has become known as the Lord's prayer, Jesus taught us to pray by starting out with two important processes. We start with praise and worship to the Lord - "Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your Name." This causes the water to start pumping up from within.
If you want to consider the idea of producing a river from a source, you can see a similar principle here. Our prayers and worship we are told are like vapors rising up to the Lord. If you think of these as the mists that rise up in evaporation to form clouds, then the more you do it the more you create 'clouds of blessing' which start to come down in rain, forming streams that collect to create a river.
The second thing Jesus taught us to pray was, "Your Kingdom Come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." This statement is not a request but a command. It should say, "Come Your Kingdom. I command your will to be done on earth."
In other words it is a prayer that takes the water that has been drawn up through praise and pours it forth into the world, causing God's power to bear upon someone in need or a situation in this world. It is the release in ministry of that which you have drawn from within the well of your spirit, from the indwelling Holy Spirit.
Many believers have failed to realize this and think that prayer involves us crying out to the Lord and then standing back to watch Him rain down from heaven. You need to realize that what God does in the earth He does through human vessels. You are His instrument in the earth. You are His hand extended.
It is through you that He wants to pour forth His blessing. And if you expect to be an instrument for His glory, then you will need to recognize that this can only happen when you have learned to tap the power that is within your own spirit through the indwelling Holy Spirit.
Get 'Prayed Up'
So what you need to do is set up your windmill and get 'prayed up.' You need to fill your reservoir by spending time in the presence of the Lord, not crying out to Him, but drawing out of His resources in you through praise and worship.
Instead of coming to Him with your request, come to Him in adoration. Soak up His glory like someone walking through a rain forest. Fill up your reservoir until it is so full you cannot take any more. Now go with that power and give it out to a world that is in need.
When Jesus heard that Lazarus was dying He prayed to the Father to find out what He should do. At that point He knew that His prayer was answered and He did nothing more than continue in the presence of His Father daily as He had always done, filling up His reservoir.
When He came to the graveside of Lazarus, he did not cry out to the Father to raise Lazarus. The prayer He prayed was not for His benefit, but for the people to hear. But then He took from the resources He had gathered in the presence of His Father, and He spoke to the dead body Himself. And when He did, that power went out and raised him from the dead.
Perhaps you are feeling too 'humble' to do something like that. You would rather cry out to the Lord to help someone when you pray for him or her. But Jesus and the disciples did not operate that way. Jesus had told them 'freely you have received, freely give.' So they took what they had received and gave it away.
Peter said to the man at the beautiful gate, "I don't have silver or gold, but what I do have I am giving you." And that is exactly what he did. He obviously had his windmill in place and had filled his reservoir. He was already prayed up and could tap that power whenever it was needed.
Experience the Wind of God
It's quite simple really. You don't have to make any effort. All you need to do is 'get in the wind.' The Bible uses wind also as a type of the Holy Spirit. So you learn to let the Lord move on you by being available to Him at all times. You know then that when you come into His presence on a daily basis, the wind will blow, and your windmill will turn, and you will be filled and overflow until you have built up a resource that is available to meet the needs of others.
If you cannot find the time to do this, then not only will there be no water in your reservoir, but also the column that goes down to the water will have drained. Then you will pray and nothing will seem to happen, and God will seem a million miles away.
The decision is yours. The river is there. The Word is there. The pump is there. All you need to do is put them together and get into the wind. As you do, your life will change and you will enter into a spiritual dimension that you did not know existed.
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