DRINK NOW AND FOREVER

Ps.36:8 – They drink their fill of the abundance of Your house;

And You allow them to drink from the river of Your delights.

Fallen humans are clueless to real joy. They have no idea that there is a spiritual, supernatural joy available to all that come to the Lord by faith. Certainly Jesus had today’s passage in mind when He cried out in the temple, “If anyone is thirsty let Him come unto Me and drink”. He also spoke about drinking living water to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. In that incident He said, “If you drink the water that I have to give you will never thirst. It will become a fountain springing up inside of you”. There is no way to ever comprehend this unless you drink for yourself. Knowing about living water is not sufficient, you must drink it in for yourself. Here is how Charles Spurgeon described this passage.

“And thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures. As they have the fruits of Eden to feed on, so shall they have the river of Paradise to drink from. God’s everlasting love bears to us a constant and ample comfort, of which grace makes us to drink by faith, and then our pleasure is of the richest kind. The Lord not only brings us to this river, but makes us drink: herein we see the condescension of divine love. Heaven will, in the fullest sense, fulfill these words; but they who trust in the Lord enjoy the ante-past even here. The happiness given to the faithful is that of God himself; purified spirits joy with the same joy as the Lord himself. “That my joy may be in you, that your joy may be full.”

I love the word that Spurgeon used, ante-past, and his description of drinking from the river of delight. I wasn’t sure what ante-past was so I looked it up. It means a first course for a meal to whet the appetite. The full banquet will be the overwhelming joy found in eternity in heaven. We will experience the same joy that Jesus enjoys with His Father, absolutely unthinkable. Drinking the living water now is the foretaste of the heavenly life. When you drink this living water Jesus said you will never thirst again. What He was saying was that we will never thirst for this world’s pleasures because we are drinking from the fullness of joy found in the River of God.