I’m praying often that God would fill me with the Holy Spirit. He’s the water of life and I’m pretty thirsty! One day I was praying and I asked the Lord to fill my “canister” with the Holy Spirit. Canister was a strange word for me to use so I paid attention to it. I often find the Holy Spirit giving me words that would normally not be in my vocabulary for the express purpose of drawing my attention to something that He wants me to see.
The first thing that came to my mind was one of those canteens that soldiers used to carry around. Anyway, I began to think of an old dirty army canteen laying around from the 2nd World War and someone decides to fill it with water and drink from it.
I can’t imagine anybody would think that would be a good idea without thoroughly cleaning the inside first! Who wants to drink from an old dirty water bottle?
Understand, that as children of God we’re not gathering water from a lake with sediment in it. The Holy Spirit is the Crystal River that flows from the Throne of God and is the purest, cleanest water a person could ever drink. If you have access to really pure water you want a really clean vessel to put it in!
If I’m going to be a water bottle for Jesus I want to be sparkling clean! I don’t want anything to contaminate the pure Water of Life that God’s pouring into me.
When God pours His Holy Spirit into me His expectation is that what comes out of me would be without mixture. The last thing that I want to do is contaminate the pure flow of the Holy Spirit that would come out of me to others by being an unclean vessel. Am I clean inside or dirty? We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that it doesn’t matter. It will affect the taste of the water of the Holy Spirit that we give to others.
A good example of this is prophecy.
The flow of prophecy
The flow of prophecy that comes from the Holy Spirit is as pure as can possibly be. When He pours Himself into our earthly container, our earthly water bottle so to speak, it’s coming in with the purity of heaven. It’s untainted, uncontaminated, without the slightest bit of earthly sediment. However, and this is a big however, the contamination of our earthly container can pollute the flow of water when it’s poured out to others.
An unclean water bottle is not a great thing to drink from. It doesn’t taste good to me, it doesn’t taste good to God, and it doesn’t taste good to others. Nobody likes to drink dirty water!
When prophecy comes from an unclean vessel it will taste bad to the person who receives it. The purity of the word that God wants to pour from us can become clouded from the contamination that’s in us. When that happens words spoken by us that have genuinely come from the Holy Spirit can have an “off-taste” to them. On the one hand it tastes like it should, on the other hand it doesn’t! The taste of God’s Spirit through us is often directly affected by the purity or contamination of our vessel. Are we offering people the pure water of the Holy Spirit or is there a mixture of purity and pollution being poured out of us?
Some prophecy leaves a bad taste not because of the message itself but because the unclean vessel has leeched into the Water of the Word.
We taste the person and not the Holy Spirit! I don’t know about you but if I go to drink from a water bottle I don’t expect it to impart a taste to the water I put into it. A clean vessel allows for the unaltered taste of the Holy Spirit to be poured out to others.
I don’t mean to say that God doesn’t impart His Spirit through an individual’s personality, He certainly does! When I read the Bible I see that John is very much different than Paul. But here is the beauty of purity- both Paul and John pour forth from their vessels the Lord Jesus Christ in holiness, love, humility and power. We can read their lives and see that it is Jesus written all over them. We can taste their message and instantly recognize that it is pure and clean.
The Word of God says that we are nothing more than “jars of clay”, but we can be clean jars! Clean vessels! It makes a difference to God that we are.
“In a large house there are articles not only of gold and silver, but also of wood and clay; some are for noble purposes and some for ignoble. If a man cleanses himself from the latter, he will be an instrument for noble purposes, made holy, useful to the Master and prepared to do any good work.” -2nd Timothy 2:20
Now I want you to see something here. It is not whether you are a vessel of gold or silver, or whether you are wood or clay that matters. What matters is whether you are noble or ignoble. This is the point that the Apostle is stressing. You can be a stainless steel water bottle, a glass water bottle, a 24 karat gold water bottle or a simple clay water bottle and that is not what matters. What matters is, are you clean or are you filthy? Are you noble or are you ignoble?
Let’s look at the verse again…
“If a man cleanses himself from the ignoble he will be an instrument for noble purposes, made holy, useful to the Master…”
So we’re talking about being water bottles for Jesus. Vessels that He can pour His Holy Spirit into. And what this verse is basically telling us is that we need to be clean water bottles, we need to cleanse ourselves from what is ignoble, because God likes to use clean vessels!
Here some synonyms for ignoble:
base, contemptible, currish, despicable, detestable, dirty, dishonorable, execrable, ignominious, low, low-down, low-minded, mean, nasty, paltry, snide, sordid, vile, wretched
These are the kind of things we need to cleanse ourselves from. An uncontaminated vessel is a wonderful thing!
So we can say as a general principle that it’s extremely important that our lives are marked by purity. We shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing that it doesn’t matter whether or not we walk in holiness. But let’s look into this a little deeper and move from the general principle of holiness to see how this plays out in actual life. After we establish the absolute necessity of a holy life we need to consider that there are some finer points to this.
For example, there are certain people who I cannot trust to prophecy to me when it comes to certain things. I’m not speaking ill of them. They love the Lord. I believe they desire with all of their hearts to be clean vessels and practice a lifestyle of holiness. They possess a wonderful flow of the Holy Spirit from God in many areas of life pouring out pure clean words of prophecy, but when it comes to certain subjects more often than not their words will be tainted by their failure to deal with certain unresolved personal issues stemming from their past.
Bitterness, resentment, and unforgiveness can be like mold growing on the bottom of your otherwise clean water bottle. It may go undetected until a certain subject comes up when suddenly the words from your mouth start tasting really bad!
What happened? You were sounding so much like the Holy Spirit when suddenly you began sounding like the Accuser!
When you have issues that have not been dealt with your prophetic words can end up being a mixture of what God is saying blended together with your past life experiences. You’re pouring out clean water to someone when suddenly they get a taste of a root of bitterness! At that point you are actually prophesying out of your own heart instead of the heart of God.
“Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” -Luke 6:45
The NLT translation puts it this way:
“What you say flows from what is in your heart.”
Now prophecy is all about flow. Ideally we do not pollute the flow of the Holy Spirit by adding uncleanness that comes from our own heart.
If there’s an abundance of unrepentant sin, bitterness, unforgiveness, uncleaness and worldliness you can be sure that it will find its way into the water of prophecy pouring out of your mouth!
This is why it’s so important to let the Holy Spirit take a scrub brush to our water bottles! Sometimes we think we’re clean when there’s actually mold and bacteria growing on the walls of our heart.
God is relentlessly in pursuit of holiness on our behalf. Let’s cooperate with Him in His efforts to keep our water bottles clean!
Before I close I would like to address one more area because I believe it to be something that is vitally important when it comes to being clean vessels in which the Holy Spirit can be purely poured into and out of.
Keep yourself from idols
I have personally found that one of the greatest detriments to the pure flow of the Holy Spirit in my own life is when I’ve entertained idolatry in my heart.
Allowing idols in my heart is like setting a table for demons.
“I do not want you to be participants with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too; you cannot have a part in both the Lord’s table and the table of demons.” – 1 Corinthians 10:20-21
You may not realize it but idols attract demons! And demons like to speak!!
The result of idolatry is the flow of false prophetic words. This is like having your vessel filled with Heaven and Hell at the same time. The Holy Spirit is filling your water bottle, but demons keep topping it off!
The more rooted the idoltary is in my heart the more polluted the word will be that flows out of me especially in the area of my idoltary.
This is why many times we cannot ascertain the will of God properly for ourselves. If the idol was gone it wouldn’t be competing with the Holy Spirit and we would have the pure flow of His unadulterated word. Having an idol is like taking polluted water and pouring it into our water bottle and expecting it to taste good! George Mueller used to say that the most important thing in discerning the will of God was not to have a mind of our own about the subject that we are praying about. In other words, we need to have a surrendered clean container for God to pour Himself into.
Please don’t assume that you don’t have any idols! Idolatry often comes wearing the mask of your good intentions and your most treasured desires. It is a sinister and self-deceptive evil and most of the time we have no idea that it’s affecting us!
In a practical sense this means continually coming before the Lord seeking to be constantly renewed and cleansed.
I have a water bottle that I use every day at work. It would be kind of gross if I didn’t bring it home and clean it on a regular basis.
“Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.” – Ephesians 5:25-27
The love of Christ is the greatest invitation to holiness. His perfect love casts out fear reminding us that we can always come to Him with every uncleaness knowing that He has open arms and a willing heart to forgive. He exposes the contamination of our vessel not to condemn us but with the loving assurance that He is on our side and is always acting in our best interest.
“Therefore he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them.” -Hebrews 7:25
For a closer look at how idolatry effects prophecy please see, “Idolatry Opens The Door To False Prophecy”
The Water of Life
We have the amazing privilege of joining the Holy Spirit in giving thirsty people an invitation to drink of “the water of life”. Have you ever thought about the fact that the first taste that people will ever get of that water is from you? Let’s make sure that we are the cleanest water bottles that we can possibly be! Let’s be sure to be offering them the pure water of the Holy Spirit so that those who are thirsty will wish to drink!
“The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let the one who hears say, “Come!” Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life.” -Revelation 22:17