Come Thirsty

Max Lucado's books are such a joy to me ... he has such a gift with words and imagery.  I just read Come Thirsty, which is subtitled No Heart Too Dry For His Touch.

Here are some of my favorite analogies Lucado made in this book:

- The Spirit of Jesus is like water entering our body.  We take it in and do not give it any direction.  We have no control over where it goes in our body. We do not drink a glass of water and say "one ounce go to my spleen, two ounces to my leg, and a half ounce to my fingernails."  In the same way, when we accept Christ we cannot tell the Holy Spirit what to do in our lives ... He goes where He decides He is needed.
- We can only get a glass of water into our body by pouring it into our mouths and swallowing it.  Water will not force its way into our bodies.  It must have our permission to enter.  Same with Jesus ... we have to give Him permission to enter our lives.  Likewise, we can stand in the middle of the Colorado River, surrounded by water, and still become dehydrated.  We actually have to drink the water ourselves.  Being surrounded by Christians is not sufficient.  We have to accept Christ for ourselves.
- Imagine a person who uses the power and strength of Jesus to start his car's engine and then hops out and proceed to attempt to push the car down the street himself.  Instead, we should allow Jesus' strength to continue to carry us through life.
- Imagine an ordinary house fly trapped inside an airplane at 30,000 feet.  The fly flaps his wings as hard as he can, flying up and down the aisle of the plane, getting exhausted.  A passenger asks the fly "Why don't you sit down and rest for awhile?"  The fly responds "I have to keep this plane and all these people aloft, so they don't crash and die."  The fly doesn't understand that he is surrounded by a strength far greater than his little wings, that his efforts are futile.
- A "bad situation" for a middle schooler is a pimple.  That same situation would not even appear on the radar of that same middle schooler's parent.  Situations that we, as adults, consider "bad" may be so minor in the big scheme of things that they do not even appear on God's radar.
- An air conditioner can produce tons of cool, refreshing air.  But if we close the vents, we will not benefit from the air conditioner's efforts.  Even if we sit in front of a closed vent, we cannot feel the breeze.  Likewise, there are things in our life which may be closing the vents between Jesus and us.