Streams of Living Water

Celebrating the Great Traditions of Christian Faith

Richard Foster

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781473662117
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Cristianismo

In this landmark work, Richard Foster examines the 'streams of living water' - the six dimensions of faith and practice - that have defined Christian tradition around the world and down the centuries. In this inspiring book he looks at: - the Contemplative tradition - or the prayer-filled life
- the Holiness tradition - or the virtuous life
- the Charismatic tradition - or the Spirit-empowered life
- the Social Justice tradition - or the compassionate life
- the Evangelical tradition - or the word-centred life
- the Incarnational tradition - or the sacramental lifeFoster's celebration of the spiritual life incorporates history's most significant Christian figures and movements and argues for a rich, well-rounded faith, free of constricting labels.

Chapter 1

Imitatio:
The Divine Paradigm

Looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.

—Hebrews 12:2

We must imitate Christ’s life and his ways if we are to be truly enlightened and set free from the darkness of our own hearts. Let it be the most important thing we do, then, to reflect on the life of Jesus Christ.

—Thomas à Kempis

1

AS JESUS WALKED this earth, living and working among all kinds and classes of people, he gave us the divine paradigm for conjugating all the verbs of our living. Too often in our concern to make doctrinal points we rush to expound upon Jesus’ death, and in so doing we neglect Jesus’ life. This is a great loss. Attention to Jesus in his living gives us important clues for our living.

Jesus lived in this broken, painful world, learning obedience through the things that he suffered, tempted in all the ways we are, and yet remaining without sin (Heb. 5:8, 4:15).¹ We are, to be sure, reconciled to God by Jesus’ death, but even more, we are “saved” by his life (Rom. 5:10)—saved in the sense of entering into his eternal kind of life, not just in some distant heaven but right now in the midst of our broken and sorrowful world. When we carefully consider how Jesus lived while among us in the flesh, we learn how we are to live—truly live—empowered by him who is with us always even to the end of the age. We then begin an intentional imitatio Christi, imitation of Christ, not in some slavish or literal fashion but by catching the spirit and power in which he lived and by learning to walk “in his steps” (1 Pet. 2:21).

In this sense we can truly speak of the primacy of the Gospels, for in them we see Jesus living and moving among human beings, displaying perfect unity with the will of the Father. And we are taught to do the same, taking on the nature of Christlikeness—sharing Jesus’ vision, love, hope, feelings, and habits.

One of the best things we can do for one another, then, is to encourage regular immersion in the Gospel narratives, helping each other understand Jesus’ perceptions into life and his counsels for growth and then making constant application to our daily experience. The dimensions of this task are infinite, of course. However, for the sake of our concern here we want to consider how Jesus in his living provides us a clear paradigm for our living, especially as Jesus’ living relates to the several streams of devotion that frame the structure of this book.

PRAYER AND INTIMACY

Let’s consider the Contemplative Stream, the prayer-filled life. Nothing is more striking in Jesus’ life than his intimacy with the Father. “The Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise” (John 5:19). “I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge” (John 5:30). “The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works” (John 14:10).

Like a recurring pattern in a quilt, so prayer threads its way through Jesus’ life. As Jesus was baptized by John, he “was praying” (Luke 3:21). In preparation for the choosing of the Twelve he went up the mountain alone and “spent the night in prayer” (Luke 6:12). After an exhausting evening of healing “many who were sick” and casting out “many demons,” Jesus got up early in the morning “while it was still very dark … and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed” (Mark 1:35). Jesus was “praying alone” when he was prompted to ask his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” (Luke 9:18–20). When Jesus took Peter, James, and John “up on the mountain to pray,” it led to the great transfiguration experience, and Luke notes that the appearance of Jesus’ face was changed “while he was praying” (Luke 9:28–29). After the disciples had failed to heal a sick child, Jesus took care of the matter for them, explaining their failure in these words: “This kind can come out only through prayer” (Mark 9:29). Jesus’ fiercest anger came when he saw how people had turned the temple, which he said was to be a house of prayer, into a den of robbers (Matt. 21:13). It was after Jesus finished “praying in a certain place” that the disciples asked him to teach them to pray (Luke 11:1).

And teach them he did. Not only the now famous Lord’s Prayer, which is found here, but teaching layered upon teaching. Jesus taught them to come to God in the most intimate of ways, saying, “Abba, Father” (Mark 14:36). He gave parables about the “need to pray always and not to lose heart” (Luke 18:1). He taught his disciples to pray “in secret,” to “pray for those who persecute you,” when praying to “forgive, if you have anything against anyone,” to “believe that what you say will come to pass,” to petition “the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest,” and much more (Matt. 6:6, 5:44; Mark 11:25, 23; Matt. 9:38).

And the teachings are matched by continual practice, not only of prayer itself but of intense times of solitude. Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness for forty days (Matt. 4:1). He “withdrew … to a deserted place by himself” after learning of the beheading of his dear friend and cousin, John the Baptizer (Matt. 14:13). Following the incredible experience of feeding the five thousand, Jesus immediately “went up the mountain by himself to pray” (Matt. 14:23). When the disciples were exhausted from the demands of ministry, Jesus told them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while” (Mark 6:31). After Jesus’ healing of a leper Luke seems to be describing more of a habitual practice than a single incident when he notes that Jesus “would withdraw to deserted places and pray” (Luke 5:16).

Without question, the most intense and intimate of recorded prayers is Jesus’ high priestly prayer in the Upper Room, where he poured out his heart to the Father on behalf of his disciples and “also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word” (John 17:20). And of course any discussion of Jesus’ prayer life and intimacy with the Father must culminate in the holy work of Gethsemane, where Jesus’ sweat became like great drops of blood and his anguished words, “Let this cup pass,” reached completion with, “Not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42).

Jesus, who retreated often into the rugged wilderness, who lived and worked praying, who heard and did only what the Father said and did, shows forth the Contemplative Tradition in its fullness and utter beauty.

If you are anything like me, even this cursory look at Jesus’ love and intimacy with the Father stirs within you longings for a deeper, richer, fuller experience of the divine milieu. No doubt you too ache for a steadfast faith, a boundless hope, an undying love. Jesus points the way.

PURITY OF HEART

Consider with me the Holiness Stream, the virtuous life. It is simply a marvel to watch Jesus move among children and women and men—always timely, always appropriate, always capable. How did this come to be?

We cannot understand the holiness and ingrained virtue in Jesus without carefully examining those forty days of temptation in the wilderness. In that single event we see a lifetime of practiced virtue coming to the fore. Throughout those forty days Jesus fasted from food so that he could all the more fully enter the divine feast. Then, when his spiritual resources were at their maximum, God allowed the Evil One to come to him with three great temptations—temptations that Jesus undoubtedly had dealt with more than once in the carpentry shop and that he would face again throughout his ministry as a rabbi. Yet these were not just personal temptations; they were temptations for Jesus to access for his own use the three most prominent social institutions of the day—economic, religious, political.²

The economic temptation was for Jesus to turn stones into bread (Matt. 4:1–4). This was more than a taunt to ease private hunger pangs; it was a temptation to become a glorious miracle baker and provide “wonder bread” for the masses. But Jesus knew how short-lived all such solutions are and rejected the live-by-bread-alone option: “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4).

The religious temptation was for Jesus to leap from the pinnacle of the temple and, by having angels catch him in mid-flight, receive God’s stamp of approval on his ministry. Divine certification inside the sacred boundaries of temple territory would surely have guaranteed the fervent support of the priestly hierarchy. But Jesus saw the temptation for what it was, and he directly confronted institutionalized religion—not only here in the wilderness but throughout his ministry, wherever and whenever it became idolatrous or oppressed the faithful. He knew that in his person, “something greater than the temple is here” (Matt. 12:6).

The political temptation was the promise of “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” in exchange for Jesus’ own soul (Matt. 4:8–10). This mountain temptation represented the possibility of worldwide political power—not only coercive force, but also the glory and acclaim of sitting on the world’s highest pinnacle of influence and status. It was a temptation that fit perfectly the messianic hopes of the day for a Savior who would cast off the oppressive Roman occupation. But Jesus knew that domination and force were not God’s ways. He rejected coercive structures because he intended to demonstrate a new kind of power, a new way of ruling. Serving, suffering, dying—these were Jesus’ messianic forms of power.

In those forty days in the wilderness Jesus rejected the popular Jewish hope for a Messiah who would feed the poor, bask in miraculous heavenly approval, and shuck off oppressive nations. And he undercut the leverage of the three great social institutions of his day (and of ours)—exploitative economics, manipulative religion, and coercive politics. What we see in those forty crucial days is someone who understood with clarity the way of God and who had the internal resources to live in that way, instinctively and without reservation. Jesus’ actions were a living embodiment of the Holiness Stream.

But action, by itself, is not enough. It needs to be accompanied by adequate teaching on the virtuous life to lead ordinary people into genuine progress in holiness. Jesus clearly understood this—hence his abundant instructions on life as it is meant to be lived.

The heart of this teaching is the Sermon on the Mount, and the heart of the Sermon on the Mount is the law of love—the “royal law,” as James calls it. Nothing more fully or more beautifully describes the life of holiness. Love is so compact a word that it needs unpacking, of course, and this is what Jesus does in his famous sermon. The life of virtue reflected in that teaching is governed by the maturity of love rather than the immaturity of binding legalism. It is a teaching that takes us beyond the “righteousness … of the scribes and Pharisees” (Matt. 5:20).

Now, the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees consisted primarily in externals that often involved manipulative control of other people. Instead of this sort of righteousness, Jesus points to an inner life with God that transforms the heart and builds deeply ingrained habits of virtue. If we develop those habits, we will have the interior spiritual and moral resources with which to respond righteously when we are faced with temptations of any and every sort, as Jesus was in the wilderness.

If you seek holiness of life, I encourage you to make a good friend of the Sermon on the Mount. It is an expanded commentary on the royal law of love. And Jesus’ life is an expanded commentary on the Sermon on the Mount. I find it endlessly moving to watch how Jesus walked among people, healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, bringing good news to the oppressed. Always appropriate. Always able. Always giving the touch that was needed. Always speaking the word that was needed. It is a wonder and a marvel.

We see Jesus consistently doing what needs to be done when it needs to be done. We see in him such deeply ingrained “holy habits” that he is always “response-able,” always able to respond appropriately. This is purity of heart. This is the virtuous life. To see the vision of the Holiness Tradition in all its robust dynamic, we need look no further.

This brief look at the holiness of Jesus calls out to us. It calls us to a more consistent life, a more obedient life, a more fruitful life. Jesus, who lived fully every teaching of the Sermon on the Mount long before he taught it, shows us the way.

LIFE IN THE SPIRIT

Let’s ponder together the Charismatic Stream, the Spirit-empowered life. Nothing is more satisfying to observe than how Jesus lived and moved in the power of the Spirit. As Jesus arose out of the baptismal waters, “the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’” (Luke 3:22). Directly on the heels of this dramatic event, “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness” (Luke 4:1). Then, after the temptation encounters, Jesus returned to Galilee “filled with the power of the Spirit” (Luke 4:14). Such is the refrain that echoes down through his entire ministry: “full of the Holy Spirit” … “led by the Spirit” … “filled with the power of the Spirit.”

It is a wonder to watch Jesus moving among people, exercising spiritual charisms¹ with ease and aplomb. The charism of wisdom was absolutely legendary in Jesus. People listening to his teachings were utterly dumbfounded, “for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (Mark 1:22). In fact astonishment was the standard response to his teachings. The reason for this response is that when Jesus taught he did far more than what we think of as teaching. He spoke life into each heart and soul. Wisdom as a charism of the Holy Spirit is far more than knowledge or information, more even than truth; it is truth applied to the heart and the mind in such a living way that the person is transformed.

The charism of discernment is another of the gifts Jesus used frequently. Any number of times he refused to entrust himself to particular people because, as John puts it, “he himself knew what was in everyone” (John 2:25). Do you recall that when the paralytic came to Jesus for healing, Jesus first forgave his sins? This threw the scribes into a tailspin, “questioning in their hearts” about Jesus’ authority to do something only God could do. Their hearts, however, were an open book to Jesus: “At once Jesus perceived in his spirit that they were discussing these questions among themselves” (Mark 2:1–8). This is the charism of discernment at work, and evidence of a Spirit-empowered life.

We must not leave out the charism of miracles. Consider the miraculous catch of fish and the equally miraculous multiplying of fishes and loaves. Consider also the turning of water into wine to bless a wedding couple and the cursing of the fig tree to teach a lesson in faith. Consider further the amazing calming of a storm at sea and the even more amazing walking on the waters of the sea. Finally, consider the most astonishing of all the miracles, the transfiguration of Jesus and the appearance of Moses and Elijah with him.

Another spiritual charism Jesus exercised—one we are rather uncomfortable with toda...