Learning to swim is a skill most of us acquire in childhood. It’s not easy: having mastered the skill of walking, we have to, in essence, learn a completely different way of moving in water, because water is a very different medium to terra firma. Legs and arms have to be coordinated in movements that are very different to walking and we have to learn to trust the water to keep us afloat, learn how to breathe differently (or we end up choking and swallowing water!) and learn how to tread water and float for the times when we have to rest. Learning to swim in the safety of a swimming pool is different to swimming in rivers or the sea, where currents and tides all affect our abilities.
When I was learning to swim as a child, I used to practise at home, balancing on a dining-room chair and desperately trying to master the ‘frogs’ legs’ needed for breaststroke. I found that no matter how hard I practised, I could not actually swim unless I entered the water.
So often, we are afraid to enter the river of God, afraid of the living water He provides. We hold back, believing that God can speak to other people, but not to us, believing that He can work miracles through other people, but not through us. We hold back out of fear: fear of getting it wrong, fear of failure, fear of other people’s ridicule and scorn, fear of looking foolish. Yet God calls us, like Peter, out onto the sea, to put off our old self and put on the new clothes He provides (see Eph 4:22-24, Col 3:8-10). He calls us to a radically different way of living. Living by faith means learning to swim in the river of God; living by sight means walking with the earth firmly beneath our feet.
As we take in God’s mercy and love and revel in His forgiveness and goodness, as we learn to be buoyed up by His presence with us in the everyday routines of life as well as in the highs and lows of emergencies and celebrations, we find that we are then in a position to give those things out to others. We are enabled, by the living water God’s Holy Spirit has brought into our lives, to minister to others. Phil Wickham has captured this idea far more poetically than I can. In his song, ‘Wild River’, he reminds us that ‘there is a fountain that never runs dry, forever flows with water of life.’ He reminds us, straight from the verses in Ezekiel 47, that ‘where Your river runs, everything lives’ and ‘where Your river goes, we’ll never thirst again.’ He talks about being swept away in the limitless ocean of God’s grace, about drawing from the well of God’s goodness and drinking from the water of life. But he also reminds us that the consequence of this is ‘Your grace, like a flood, pouring out of me.’ Grace. Not retaliation. Not anger. Not selfishness. Not the old self. The new life, with God’s character manifest in us. Grace pouring out of us, because grace has been poured into us. We swim; we draw from the wells of salvation, because Christ has made this new life possible through His death and resurrection. All we have to do is plunge in to His life.