Well, good morning, and it is a pleasure to be here with you. What I will strive to do is, more than anything, this morning in this particular setting, in this particular text that we'll look at, is really to kind of treat this more in a devotional kind of a mindset and meditation upon what does it look like if we were to abide in Christ, if we were to abide completely and to trust Him for everything. And so that will be my strive to do that with you this morning. Let me pray. Heavenly Father, we do bless You for today and we thank You for the sweet occasion that we've already had and that we anticipate to have all day long as we seek your face and as we long to hear from you and to walk with you in this God-ordained day right now.

So, Lord, we want to be pleased in You always. Come and help us to do that. In Jesus' name I pray, Amen. Amen. So I bring you greetings from Idaho.

You help the economy of Idaho every time you eat a potato. So bless the Lord for your support of our economy. I don't know who the master behind the promotion of the Idaho potato, but it was some kind of a genius. Everywhere I go, people ask if I grow potatoes or if potatoes grow everywhere, and surprisingly, I have to go to Oregon to get an Idaho potato. Because we've mastered the export I guess but I do bring you greetings from my my wife who usually comes with me but this particular time was unable to, and so I bring you greetings from her and from my sweet church, that I've had the sweet occasion of being a pastor here in this church for over 17 years and so I bring you greetings from them as well.

And then I have an extraordinary greeting to give you from the second row, a sweet family of mine, Alex and Joanne Villard from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. My responsibility and my duty here is not to talk about those God-ordained days back in 2010, but this is a unique occasion for me because through the providential hand of God, which, by the way, I'm always pleased to speak of God's kindness in those extraordinary days of unexpected hardship and I see those days as some of the sweetest days of my journey with the Lord. This young man is a very intricate part of that journey and that providential work of God in my life. And for the first time since 2010, I'm about to introduce a man that brought food to me every day while I was in jail for 19 days. I'm about to introduce him to my church.

And I'm very excited about this. I've been weeping for about two or three days just thinking about it. And my duty is not to tell you about that good story, but if you ever have the time, I'd love to tell you about it. And it is among my sweetest days walking with the Lord. From that teaching me many, many things that have increased many other sweet days in the Lord.

So let me get to the task. Ezekiel 47 is my assigned responsibility here, And I'm pleased for us to walk here and really to just spend some time thinking, meditating, letting the occasion this morning. It'll be perhaps fitting for us in this that this first session of the day for it to sit up on us maybe if We could treat it more of a devotional meditating kind of thinking as We consider what Ezekiel describes for us and it's gonna be so familiar as a matter of fact as dr Lawson was speaking the first night of the conference, and he's reading Revelation chapter 22, verses one and two, I can't help but think about Ezekiel chapter 47. And I can't help but think about John chapter 6 and John chapter 7 where Jesus is described as the living water and this abiding in the river of Christ, the abiding in the river of God. And so let me read the text.

It's likely in our time this morning that we're going to read these 12 verses multiple times. And each time we read them, we might stop and meditate and think through particular words. So let me just read the text first, and then let's come back and meditate upon particular components of the text in the upcoming other times that we'll read through it. So this is Ezekiel chapter 47, and I'm reading verses 1 through 12. This is, Then he brought me back to the door of the house, and behold, water was flowing under the threshold of the house toward the east.

For the house faced east, and the water was flowing down from under and the right side of the house from south of the altar. He brought me out by way of the north gate, and led me around on the outside of the outer gate, and by way of the gate that faces east. And behold, water was trickling from the south side. Well when the man went out toward the east with a line in in his hand he measured a thousand cubits and he led me through the water, and now the water is reaching the loins. And again he measured a thousand, and it was a river that I could not ford, and the water had risen, enough water to swim in, a river that could not be forded.

He said to me, Son of Man, have you seen this? And then he brought me back to the bank of the river. Now when I had returned, behold, on the bank of the river there were many trees on one side and on the other. And then he said to me these waters go out toward the eastern region and go down into the arabia and they go down they go toward the sea and being made to flow into the sea, and the waters of the sea become fresh. It will come about that every living creature that swims, or which swarms in every place where the river goes will live.

And there will be many fish for these waters go there, there will be many fish for these waters go there and the others become fresh. So every thing will live where the river goes. And it will come about that fishermen will stand beside it. From En Gadi to the Inglium there will be a place for the spreading of nets, and their fish will be according to their kinds, like the fish of the great sea, very many. Will be left for salt.

Verse 12, by the river on its banks, on one side and on the other side, will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither and their fruit will not fail. They will bear every month because their water flows from the sanctuary and their fruit will be for food and their leaves for healing. Isn't this an amazing piece of text? And there's so many things to stop and meditate on when we walk and we journey through this.

So if you'll allow me, let's just spend some time and think about these things first of all Did you notice how often the word water was mentioned? It is obviously a significant theme of the text I would Exhort you to to meditate upon that whenever we read this, and we won't read every verse again, but whenever we come across this word water, think about how significant water is to us. Now, it rained all day yesterday. Where I come from, if it rained like that, everyone goes and buys a boat. I live in the desert.

We get eight inches of rain a year. So you got that. You can get that in about an hour or two, can't you? In places like this. I don't know.

That kind of raining is very rare for a guy like me. So whenever I think about water, it for me hits me perhaps a bit different than someone who sees water all the time. You also would notice here the word river is a significant word in the text. And I hope that as we look at this, there'll be some things that even already in the first read through or perhaps likely in your familiarity with the text that there's some things about this river that are very peculiar, that are not like most rivers. And matter of fact, I should back that off, they're not like any other river at all.

Then I hope you'll also see that there's talk about living and prospering or flourishing language that would speak to that. And so we'll come back and kind of chew upon a few of those things as we consider these, as we walk through. Go back with me to verse 1 and see this. So there's a lot of backstory to chapter 47. We've walked up to a swimming pool and we've just jumped in with it in a cannonball position There's without a lot of the backstory without a lot of the things that are helpful to come along but Ezekiel is being shown some things by a messenger of God and he's showing him the significance about this river.

So what he's done here is this messenger has brought Ezekiel here and he's brought him to the back door of the house And Ezekiel's observation is, behold, water is flowing. So in chapter 47, it's the first time that we see Ezekiel describes water. Water is one of those things we recognize. We don't have to be told this is water. We know what water is.

We know what it's for. We understand that it is. And he describes this water, so look at the descriptors along the way here. This particular observation of the water is flowing, And it is coming out from the threshold of house. We learned that this house is the altar.

And then we see that there are locations. There's pointing to the north or to the south, to the east. And again, where I come from, these kinds of descriptors are so significant. You have to know, where I come from, your GPS doesn't work everywhere. So you have to know where north and south and east and west are.

I have the privilege of taking people into the wilderness of Idaho and backpacking trips. It's a very troubling thing for my wife because I can easily get lost. But by the grace of God, I've never been lost in the wilderness, only in places where there's a lot of concrete and I can't see the horizon. You can know where the north is, you can survive and you can make your way into anything. This particular consideration that Ezekiel's giving is he's noticing there's water and it's flowing.

For anyone who's ever been in the desert or ever been in a wilderness kind of a setting, there is something that's very, very important that you know where the water is. If you don't know where water is, you may not survive. So Ezekiel notices this water and he notices that it's flowing. So here's another thing that's really important. There's a difference in water that's flowing and water that's stagnant or, as he'll describe later, that's more like a swamp.

You want to find flowing water because flowing water is the water where it sustains. The swampy waters are the waters that will do more damage to you than any good. You'll be better to not drink it than to even consider putting it into your body. So Ezekiel notices this. This water is flowing.

So in an observing kind of a matter, for one who's thinking about how am I going to survive, how am I going to live, you're looking for flowing water. You don't want swampy water, you don't want stagnant water. Again, from the scenario where I come from in the desert, high mountain desert regions of southern Idaho, to get into the glorious peaks of the Sawtooth Mountains, you have to first get through the desert foothills and there are certain times the year where there is no water. There's water up in the high country and there's water back down in the valley but in the desert foothills there is no water. From about this particular year, 2018, we went a hundred and seven days without rain.

That's a long time without rain. So that's I was the crazy guy who was standing outside while it was raining all day yesterday, because I don't experience that very often. This is what rain is. I hadn't seen it for so long. It was a refreshing and sweet thing.

The consideration, this is, just to begin to get a grasp on perhaps what Ezekiel is wanting us to see in his description that this water is flowing, this water is moving, this water is fresh, this water is good. So he notices where it's coming from and all of there's there's going to be some things that we're just for the sake of time, we're not going to be able to stop and observe along the way and meditate on but there's no doubt we need to see what Isaiah says about the water. Now again in trained in certain levels of survival in the wilderness, because whenever I do go out and take people backpacking, I have a level of responsibility that I've promised husbands, I've promised husbands' wives that I'll bring them home as Lord willing. That's how I close every statement up. Lord willing, I'll have him back home soon.

Or families that I take out that we intend to be back, there is a mapping out that we're going to go to places where I know the water flows. Another thing that is true of the natural world that we're familiar with that Ezekiel is going to describe the water at first as trickling. So if you can for a moment consider that you've made it to the high peaks of the mountains where there's still snow capped And there's the temperature is warm enough that the ice is melting, it's dripping. And it's just a few little drops at a time. And the water is literally just trickling out from under the glacier.

It's just barely moving along. Ezekiel makes this notification that out of the first notice of the water that's flowing from this altar is trickling. It's slight. It's not moving a lot. That kind of water doesn't have the same force that a raging river has.

One thing that I want you to take note of here, maybe if just Consider your early years of being taught about how river systems work. To get a river in the natural world, it requires a lot of trickling rivers. You don't get a raging full force river without thousands of little trickling rivers but I want you to notice something about this description that Ezekiel gives us this altar the water that's coming from this altar he does not identify any other fork, as it would be called, a fork of water that comes into this river. The source of this water is coming from one place. And here at the altar, it's trickling.

So that's familiar. We would get that. We would understand. That would make sense from the the spring from the foot from the source that this is what it looks like in this place but don't look at this river like you would any river in the natural world because it's not like that it is all together different this river Ezekiel doesn't describe any other river that merges into this river. In places in the wilderness we run out of names to give rivers, and so we just call it the North Fork of the Snake or the South Fork of the Snake.

Do we really just not have enough creative names to name all the rivers that come into this? We've got to name it the North Fork or the South Fork. Those are coming from different watersheds. I know you didn't come here to get a lesson on water. If we just observe it and meditate upon this, it takes mountain valleys where you get different regions of the water, the watersheds.

For example, I live on the west side of the Great Continental Divide, not the, I don't know, what do you call this divide over here, the Appalachian Divide? Is it a continental divide? It's probably not as true of a continental divide as the Great Continental Divide, but it does make a difference of the water that moves into the Atlantic over here or into the Gulf. The Great Continental Divide divides all waters that flow into the Pacific or any waters that flow into the Gulf or eventually into the Atlantic. That watersheds of those water systems, Ezekiel only identifies and only describes to us this one source of the water and it does match something that we would expect to see here.

Here it's a trickle. He even describes it as such that we can walk out into it and when we're in it, the water is at our ankles. Now this tells me something that I think is just an observing. The process of meditating, all we can do is really take what we know about the known world and to bring it in and see if there are are there comparisons and are there things that we can learn about it from this spiritual observation in this in this respect and I can tell you this you don't want to be an ankle deep water from a glacier because your feet will be, you'll want them to fall off of you. They'll be so, your feet will hurt so bad.

It'll be like that when you eat ice cream too fast, You get a brain freeze. It immediately happens to your feet whenever you step into that cold of water. But this water is not like that. This water appears, doesn't appear to be uncomfortable for Ezekiel. He doesn't describe it in a way that's, I can barely put my toe in it, but he describes it.

This water is deep enough that it's now up to my ankles as we're in it. We watch and you see Ezekiel as he describes some more, as He notes it, and we see it in verse three. He's been measured out now a bit further down the river, and he's saying as the water is moved from trickling, it's now moved to the place where it's now reaching my ankles. That's interesting, just in an observing kind of a position here because there is no other water that's being added to the first original trickle. But now at this condition it's reached a bit deeper.

And then in verse 4, the messenger of God measures out another thousand cubits and your translation say may say another third of a mile perhaps in the consideration of the distance of this but he's gone a bit further down the river and now the water has reached his knees now now Now we're talking about your kind of water, the kind of rain, the effect that significant rains will bring and water rises into a different level. Knee deep water is dangerous water, isn't it? Again, in my scenario, in my situation and taking people out in wilderness backpacking trips into far reaches places we do not walk through knee-deep water because it's too risky. Water that's knee deep, now we're not talking about a lake that's knee deep, we're not talking about swimming pool that's knee deep, we're talking about a river that's knee deep. Did you know it only takes two feet of water to move a vehicle?

Swift moving water that's two feet deep can move your car. That's why everyone tells you if you if you can't see the road underneath the water you shouldn't drive through it. That's not only a good public safety message for you, it's to let you know the force of a river. And I think Ezekiel wants us to see, as his description, anyone would see that a river that's two feet deep is dangerous. But he doesn't identify this water is dangerous so from the observation we might make from the natural world of what we would what we would naturally know and the cautions that would come with it Ezekiel saying something to us about this water that is knee deep, but he's not cautioning anyone to stay out of it.

He hasn't built a bridge to get over it. He's not diverting people around it. His observation is this water is at this condition. And so he describes some other things. Now he's measured out another thousand in verse four.

Not only is it up to his knees, but again, when you go a bit further down the river, another thousand cubits, another third of a mile, have reached now all the way up to his waist. Now we're clearly in dangerous water. There was an occasion one time I had both my sons they were both teenagers at the time and had gone out with a group of about 12 individuals, men and boys out on a five-day backpacking trip. It was going to be necessary for us to, you're going to love this, to cross the north fork of the Boise River. It was June and if you know anything about mountainous places, June the mountains are still packed with snow.

You might have flowers and grass growing in the lower areas of wilderness areas, but the mountains are still packed. And I'm not talking about a little patch here and a little patch there. I mean completely packed, white, solid white packed high country. So the North Fork of the Boise is moving quite fast at this point and it's extremely dangerous and very... The dangers of hypothermia, the dangers of being swept away, all of these things are part of the reality.

And so in this particular outing we had to find a way to get across the river because the snowpack was so heavy that year and the water flow was so high that all the bridges had been washed out and there was no way to get across the river without going through the river. So we travel with ropes and we travel with we do all that we can to safely get where we want to get And so this particular stretch of the river, we found the narrowest part of the river, and we found the part of the river that was, as best as we could tell, the most shallow. So I sent the first test pilot out. I didn't go first. I'm not stupid.

No, I didn't really do that. We knew that this water, we could not get into it. We surmised it was at least waist deep, And of course the temperature of the water was going to be risky at all for us to consider. So we considered, do we abandon this all together, go back to the maps, look for another place to go, consider this. We came up with the ingenious idea of finding a felled tree that was laying on the side and we thought there's enough of us that we could get this tree back up in vertical condition and push it across the river and that we might be able to walk across the river.

It took every one of us to get that tree up enough to where we could push it to where it would fall across. Of course, we had to heave it and hove it to get to the bank shore. By the way, don't ever do this, what I'm telling you. This may be the first time I've ever told a public group of people what I did with those people. We get it there and we do send the first guy across and we have him hugging the tree all the way across the river with the rope and we have him tied across the other side of the river with a rope and we secure the other side to a tree as well and then we begin to moving the group across the river.

So I've sent my oldest son across first. I did at least have enough, I don't, I wasn't a clear thinking person on this trip, because I wasn't thinking I might have to come back home and tell my wife what happened on the trip either. But I thought I should at least send my son out first. And so we took his backpack off of him to get him across the river and he's using the rope to secure himself as he gingerly walks across this tree. And the whole time he's doing this I'm thinking this is a really bad idea.

And about the time I said this is a really bad idea and about the time I said this is a really bad idea he fell off of that log and I could say fortunately and unfortunately he fell on the upstream side of the log. I say fortunately because if he fell on the downstream side of the log, it would have been a long time before we could have found him. The bad side of that is that the force of that water pinned him up against the log. I believe I walked on water that day. I really didn't, so don't go home saying we met a guy who walked on water.

I'm saying I responded in such a way it felt like I walked on water. Immediately got out there and another another individual arrived there pretty quickly with me and we were able it was the force of waste deep water you have no idea the kind of risk that that is And Ezekiel's describing to us he's in waist-deep water of a river. That's amazing. Well, you need to at least know that we all arrived home safely. We abandoned that trip and went home and ate ice cream.

We may have stopped for pizza along the way too, I'm not really sure. He describes it even further in verse 5. He says again, he measured out a thousand And it was a river that I could not ford. The water had risen. Notice again, Ezekiel has not described another source of water feeding into this river.

It's still coming from the altar. It's still that that original source trickling out under the threshold and now it's of such a river that it cannot be forded. It cannot be all you could do in this river is swim. All you can do in this river is be completely immersed in it. All you can do in this water is to be wet.

You can't be anything but that in this river. That's Ezekiel's description for us. So these waters he describes to us as they go from here, he describes the regions in which they go. The river moves into the valley or into the desert, as the new American translation describes as the arabic, the valley where the water has moved out of the watershed region and now it's filling into the agricultural community. Well then, to just be an observer again and to meditate upon what has happened in this river and where this river is going.

Again, perhaps I'm describing things to you you know nothing of and I hope that it's not completely lost on you, but again because I'm from the desert. A river, people only build cities where rivers are in the desert. You don't build a city, you don't build a house that doesn't have a source of water. You don't want to have to to walk four miles every day to get your water. You and I know nothing different than walking 20 feet to turn on a faucet to get water.

I say that you may you may love living like those in the good old days where you have to go get your own water. It's hard work. It's not a convenient thing. But this water, everything in life revolves around life sustaining water. And so as its water moves into the desert, as it moves into the agricultural district of the region, now this water is sustaining all of life.

Where I am in southern Idaho, the Snake River comes out of Yellowstone and as it comes in a moon-shaped crescent direction to the to the south and to the west through the desert of Idaho, if it were not for this, not just if it were not for the Snake River, but if it were not for the invention of irrigation, where I live the shades of brown dominate the valley but because the water flows through the desert through the arabia through the valley You'll see this in verse 9 that Ezekiel says, everywhere this river goes, life abounds. He talks about the fish that are in the water. He talks about when it dumps into the sea, that even there the fresh water overcomes the salt water, which again is not something that occurs in the natural world. When the fresh water dumps into the oceans, it becomes salt water. But in This condition, this river impacts the place where it ends and it becomes fresh.

So this water is altogether different than what we would see and what we would naturally observe in the natural world, but there's things to meditate and consider of it. Everywhere this river goes, life abounds. Again, from the perspective of the desert, if it were not for investors back in the early 1900s, You would know nothing of Idaho potatoes because you can't grow vegetation without water. You cannot have crops without water. You would not be able to sustain any crop in any region that only gets eight inches of rain a year unless you put that river up on the desert soil and let life abound from it.

Some of the most fertile soil in the western United States is in southern Idaho and it's because of the life-giving sustaining source of the river. Now that's in the natural world. We don't want to just stay there and think about the natural world and be impressed by all these things. What we want to do Ultimately here is to give consideration What can we learn what can we observe? By this who is this river?

Who are we and what do we need to sustain ourselves in this world that we live in. Well, we know from the totality of Scripture, we can see this river and we can see some levels of in the debated scholarly world is this river God, is this river Jesus, is this river the Holy Spirit. There's valid arguments I think inside of all these when from its origin it's let's just call it God because that's who it is let's not get lost in the the weedy side of the theological realm of this remember here we're here primarily this morning to be more of a meditating devotional thinker so this river is God if we look at it in this respect everywhere that God is life abounds now think of this we look at our culture we look at our day and it appears it's becoming more and more of a desert It appears that it's becoming more barren. It appears that it's becoming less sustaining of life. But this is good news, because everywhere the river goes, life abounds.

You see, it was in 1897, I believe, that an investor from the east thought, if we can get the water out of the Snake River up onto the desert in Idaho, we can grow crops. So people came out with their shovels and they began to move dirt. Well they moved very little dirt, they mostly moved rock. There's another thing about southern Idaho, it's a volcanic field. So underneath about four or five inches of good fertile vegetative type of soil is volcanic rock.

And if you're going to get a river up to the desert floor, you're going to have to dig through through rock. So investors came and laborers came and they came out, they strapped on their work boots, they came with their work gloves and they did all they could to get the river up onto the floor the desert floor where I live in Twin Falls the river is four hundred and eighty feet below the land soil of the city of Twin Falls that's because there's this massive Canyon We live right on the precipice of the Snake River Canyon the old people in here will know who evil Knievel was and his dumb idea of trying to launch himself on a rocket across that river, across that canyon. It happened a mile down from my house. It is crazy and dumb, and don't ever do that either. But you cannot get that much water up that high unless you divert that water miles upstream and you dig through miles and miles of hard, fallow ground.

And The reason you do that is because you know that life sustaining power of the river will bring life everywhere that it goes. You think about that in verse, in that ninth verse, it says, which speaks about how the water, this water affects all other water is speaking about the fish that survive and and and flourish in this river in verse 10 it talks about the kinds of fishermen again the agricultural community the the that that is surrounding this both in the the crops that are described from the trees in verse 12, these trees that the leaves never fall, the fruit never ruins, This is an altogether different source of water. This is the kind of water that our nation needs. This is the kind of water that the nations of the world need. And you know what it's going to take?

It's going to take hard-working people with their gospel shoes strapped on, with their gospel shovels ready to go out into the desert and get the river to where the people are. Can you not see the significance of how important, when we know how important this river is, that we'll do anything to get the river to them? Let's be found a gospel moving people who are observers of this kind of water. Well, you've drank from this river before. You know this is a life-sustaining river.

You've planted yourself here. You know this is where all of life exists. So you've come here to the river. You're abiding here at this river, but let's get this river to the nations. This water must reach the fallow soil on the top of the canyon rim.

We cannot be satisfied ourselves to have tasted this water, to have lived in this water, to abide in this water. We must completely devote ourselves to this water and get it to the people. Can you can you in this consideration, this meditating, this thinking about this water, is it not a sweet thing to abide in it, to be in it with safety. Otherwise it's a raging, dangerous river. It'll push and move everything out of its way.

But you've been invited to come and to abide in this river. And it's a safe river now. It's a good river now. It's a life-sustaining river. Everywhere this river goes, life abounds.

Don't abandon the river. Don't go look for another source. Don't go build your house somewhere far away from this river. You stay by this river, you live in this river, and you do all you can to get this river to as many people as possible. This is our day.

This is our responsibility. Let's be like those good investors that came to Idaho in the late 1800s because they knew this river had life in it. Let's get this river that is altogether different. Let's put all that we have into it. Let's get it and move it along.

Dear God, we bless you for today. I pray for each one of us that we would be pleased and happy to abide in this river. Oh God help us to not be selfish. Help us to strap on our gospel shoes, put on our gospel gloves, and take our gospel shovels and move this river to the desert. Come, dear God.

Give life. In Jesus' name we pray, Amen.