Spiritual Drought:

Celebrating the Tomb, Forgetting the Rain

I must be honest and say that I’ve never really understood the concept of drought. Not that I don’t know what a drought is, that’s not what I’m saying. What I am saying is that I don’t understand what causes the drought, especially if you’ve received any significant amount of rain. It seems that it wasn’t long ago that we had quite a lot of rain, and yet here we are listening on the news about how our area is suffering yet again from the effects of drought.

To keep it simple a drought signifies a lack of water. When any given area has sustained a period of time where there has not been any rain, then it takes quite a lot of rain-slow steady rain-over a course of time to really begin turning things around. Our area needs a lot of rain before we can really begin seeing positive numbers again.

I cannot help but relate this to our spiritual walk with the Lord. Sure, we have times where we receive our “showers,” but even then, when we have undergone a sustained amount of time without those showers, a little rain here and there is not enough. Simply put, to get back to where we should be in our walk with the Lord, we need those long, sustained showers; the slow steady rain of not only God’s Word, but also His people to truly refresh us.

Every Easter if we are not careful, we can act just this way. We come celebrating the empty tomb on Sunday to only turn around and live our lives the exact same way on Monday that we were on Good Friday. Sure, we’ve received some nourishment in gathering to worship, sing praises, and listen to a good message with our church family but if we don’t sustain this with more of the same overtime then functionally, we are still living in drought. We celebrate an empty tomb, but we live as if the tomb was never empty in the first place.