Streams of Living Water: The Holiness Stream

As we enter the season of Lent this year, I am working on leading the people in this congregation deeper into relationship with God using the spiritual streams identified in Richard Foster's book, Streams of Living Water. Throughout his life and ministry, Jesus modeled several ways of being in relationship with God. From holiness to contemplation, from compassion to incarnation, from the work of the Spirit to the sharing of the Word, this relationship does not take on any single form. While Jesus, the only one to ever be perfect, was able to incorporate all of these ways of being into himself, for us it can be a different matter.

So I will be taking on one of these streams each week to explore what they look like and how we can use them in our own spiritual journeys. In some ways, these different streams of spirituality are something like love languages for our relationship with God. (Some may be familiar with the concept of the 5 Love Languages that ha been around for about 25 years now.) And just as not all of us speak the same love language in our everyday relationships, I suspect we will find along the way that no single spiritual language for our relationship with God works for all of us the same either.

This week, we looked at the Holiness Stream using the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness found at the beginning of Luke 4 (Luke 4:1-13).