Press in to the Rain

At our Beauty for Ashes group, the song My Soul Longs for You by Jesus Culture was played during worship.  There is a portion of the song that says:

I believe you will come like the rain
You’ll come like the rain
So let it rain,  Let it rain

I love the rain, in the natural and in the spiritual.   In our area we have a lot of different rains, from wet mists that saturate to torrential downpours that cause flash flooding.  As we sang this song I thought about what rain really does – refreshes, cleanses, floods and saturates.

These are also things that God wants to do in our life spiritually with His rain.

1. God’s rain is refreshing  Acts 3:19  Repent therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord
2. God’s rain is cleansing Ephesians 5:25-26  For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word
3. God’s rain can be flooding Ezekiel 13:13 Therefore thus says the Lord God: “I will cause a stormy wind to break forth in My fury; and there shall be a flooding rain in My anger, and great hailstones in fury to consume it.
4. God’s rain can be saturating Isaiah 55:10-11 For just as rain and snow fall from heaven and do not return there without saturating the earth and making it germinate and sprout, and providing seed to sow and food to eat, so My word that comes from My mouth will not return to Me empty, but it will accomplish what I please and will prosper in what I send it to do.”

We like the refreshing rain and even the saturating rain that brings us into His presence.  However, just like we can keep the rain from impacting our physical lives with umbrellas, shelter, rain boots, rain coats, and more extreme with sandbags and other gadgets, many of us end up keeping God’s spiritual rain from impacting our lives.   We fail to press into the flooding because it overwhelms us or the cleansing that brings about change in our life.  We keep these at bay by creating space between us and God.  We allow other things to busy us and occupy our hearts and minds so that we can ignore his correction.

It is time that we allow God to work completely in our life and press in to the rain.  If we allow His flooding rain to bring to the surface things that have been buried, we can allow His cleaning rain to wash it away.  Then we can allow His refreshing rain to bring forth new growth as He saturates us in His presence.