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Our God is a giving God. The spirit of giving is an essential part of His nature and who He is. When you look around the universe, everything that God has created was created to give. The sun gives it's light to the universe and the earth. It gives heat to the life upon our planet. It's gravitational pull gives stability to the planets that are orbiting it. The moon gives as well. It gives of itself as a reflector to reflect the sun's light to us when we are turned away from the sun. The earth gives forth fruit. The sky gives forth rain and cloud cover. Water and air give nutrients that are necessary for life to exist. Every animal and creature give something to the eco-systems of the world. The universe every day screams silently that God is a giving God and that He loves to give of His abundant blessings! Aren't you glad that you serve a God that loves to give!?

All of us here today are recipients of God's giving of life. We all reap the benefits of the earth and the air and the sun, but God does not stop His giving there. A quick study of scripture reveals that He also loves to "pour out" gifts upon men and women. He loves to pour out His mercy and grace upon a sinner that repents. He loves to open windows of heaven and pour out blessings upon those who are faithful in tithing and offering. He desires to pour out his love upon the disenchanted. He loves to pour out curses and judgments upon the enemies of His precious people. God loves to pour out blessings!

The most important thing that God wants to pour out is His Spirit! Peter quoted Joel chapter 2 on the Day of Pentecost after they had received the Holy Ghost for the first time and said their Holy Ghost experience was:

The Holy Ghost had come and was being poured out upon whosoever would receive it! When you read in your Bible reading about the many sacrifices commanded of Israel in the books of Exodus, Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and Numbers, you will find many times that God ordered them to take wine or water or blood or incense and "pour it out" upon the altar and upon the flesh that was the sacrifice. Why did God command such a thing? He was trying to show the Israelites that He loves for things to be poured out and that one day, He was going to pour out His Spirit upon ALL Flesh freely! Somebody asked me the other day why did God use so many different animals for those sacrifices? In preparing this sermon, I just realized another reason why God used many different animals for sacrifices: He did not want anyone to be able to say that He only poured out things upon certain types and excluded others! If the animal was upon the altar, God would allow something to be poured out upon it. God does not care about your culture, race, language, looks, or background AS LONG AS YOU ARE WILLING TO PLACE YOUR LIFE UPON THE ALTAR as a living sacrifice, God will pour out His Spirit and blessings upon you!

God wants to pour out His Spirit upon ALL flesh, so why hasn't ALL flesh received it?! Because ALL flesh is not willing to place themselves upon an altar of repentance and commitment! But if you are willing to commit your life to God, He'll pour out His Spirit and His blessings upon you without measure! God loves to give; God loves to bless others; God loves to pour out His Spirit and abundance upon His people who will commit to Him!

When God came in flesh, He still kept His giving nature! Jesus spent His entire life giving. At His dedication, He gave an old prophet and prophetess hope. At the age of 12, He could not help Himself but spent several days giving the scribes and rulers of the temple revelation about the scriptures. He took some of the basest men and gave them the chance to be a leader in His kingdom! He took sick folks and gave them healing. He took the confused and gave them instruction. When 5,000 and then later 4,000 got hungry, He brake the food and blessed it and gave! When there were baskets of food left over, He did not keep it for Himself but gave it to His disciples! He was trying to show them how important that He believed giving was! He gave the evil Judas Iscariot chance after chance to repent. He gave Lazarus and the widow of Nain's son a second chance at life. But thank God that He did not stop there! He was willing to give everything at Calvary and give his very life so that we could have this glorious way to live and a hope of better place for eternity! Don't ever let the Holy Ghost grow old to you! Don't ever let feeling God's Spirit become commonplace. Because before He could pour out His Spirit upon you, He had to pour out His BLOOD at Calvary! What we feel today cost Him dearly, but He freely gave! The Spirit that you feel when you worship God and come to church ought to be a constant reminder that God loves to give!

I could go on and on but I'll just remind you that God did not stop giving to you when you received His Spirit! But God gives "beauty for ashes, strength for mourning, a garment of praise for a spirit of heaviness!" He loves to take the shattered pieces of our lives and give us a new hope and a new reason for living! Thank God that He loves to give!

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There is a story in scripture that of the prophet Elijah. The scriptures tell us I Kings chapter 17 that Elijah was hungry and had no place to go for food and God commanded him to go to the town of Zarepath and he would find a widow there whom God had ordained to sustain him.

So Elijah went to the town and found a little widow there gathering sticks to make a fire to bake some cakes. What he did not know was that the woman was going through the darkest time in her life. She had lost her husband, and a terrible drought had come and now the money had run out and she had a handful of meal and just enough oil to make one last meal and then she and her son would starve to death. She had made up in her mind that morning that the end had come and so she was gathering sticks to bake her last meal and then they would die.

Elijah walked up to her and asked for a cake to eat. She told him the story and said, "sir, I don't have enough for you, my son and I are about to eat our last meal and die. What Elijah told her was amazing: "he said go make your last cake and bring it to me to eat!" Then he said "and after you bring me my cake, go back and bake several for you and your son!"

God allowed that little barrel of oil and meal to never run out until the drought was over! Why? Because of several reasons. She believed the Word of God and trusted the man of God. She was desperate and hungry for God to do something. She acted upon her faith and went and made the cake. She brought the man of God her "tithes" of what she had.

But the important principle that I want to point out is that God was teaching her, Elijah, and us an important principle: Everything that God created automatically gives except for humanity! God has left it to be our choice whether or not we give! God will not twist your arm. If you become a giver, it will be because you desired to do so.

But listen to this preacher: We are never more like God than when we are giving! We are never more in the will of God than when we are giving of ourselves! Everything that God created was created for the purpose of giving! Creation was to reflect His nature! If you do not have an attitude and spirit of giving, then you will never be genuinely happy and will never really be in the perfect will of God! I am talking more than just money. If we are to be like Jesus, and be "as he is" in this world, then we must be willing to give of ourselves! We must be willing to sacrifice time and money, effort and prayers. We must be willing to teach others about Him and give our testimony of what God has done in our life! We must make time to give! Without a spirit of giving, we will never be what we were created to be, and will never be like Jesus!

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In our text in John chapter 7, we read about the Holy Ghost outpouring that God was going to give. Jesus stood up and with a loud voice screamed to the crowds at Jerusalem:

He did not just tell someone about the Holy Ghost. He did not just quietly tell a few. There was such a burning desire in His heart to give that He screamed at the top of His lungs! "If you thirst, come unto me and drink!" Verse 39 tells us that He was talking about the Holy Ghost. Jesus was so moved by the spiritual thirst of the people that were around Him that He screamed out that the Holy Ghost was coming! It was the Creator's great desire to give that moved Him to do so!

Verse 38 says that if anyone believes on Jesus as the scriptures teach us to do so that "out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water." That is exactly what happens when we receive the Holy Ghost! God's Spirit begins to flow into us and it begins to change some things in our life. When you receive the Holy Ghost, God gives you EVERYTHING that you will ever need at one time! You do not get part of the Holy Ghost at first and then a little more later and then a little more later on. When you receive the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of God come into you and everything that God can give has been given to you! It is not a diluted Spirit of God: all of the power and ability of God is resident inside of you.

The most important part about receiving the Holy Ghost is that it makes you "rapture ready." Paul made it very clear that when the trumpet sounds, it will the Holy Ghost that will bring about the change that will allow you have a new body and to fly through the air:

But God is giving you a whole lot more than a one way ticket to glory. When you receive the Holy Ghost, you have the cleanest feeling and you are the closest to God that you have ever been! God places the seeds of the Fruit of the Spirit within you and all nine Spiritual Gifts. God gives your conscience a "supercharge" and the ability to identify sin even before you commit it. God gives you power over the devil and power to overcome sin and completely obey the Word of God! You've got power within you to heal the sick and raise the dead, and take up the deadly vipers of false doctrine and kill them! You have received the Holy Ghost and you have received all of God's gifts and powers in one great moment! What a blessing it is to receive the Holy Spirit!

But the scripture says that "it is more blessed to give than to receive!" So you will never receive the blessings that God intended for you to have and you will never even realize all that God has already placed within you until you begin to give! Jesus said that "out of our belly should flow living water." God did not put the Holy Ghost in you for you just to keep it bottled up! It must flow from you! You've got to be willing to allow the Holy Ghost to come to you and then flow from you! Why do many people who have received the Holy Ghost never see God move mightily in their lives to heal the sick or cast out devils and are never used in the Gifts of the Spirit? Because they bottle up the Holy Ghost and never allow it to flow out of them! They received the Holy Ghost but they refuse to allow God to work through them. Listen to this preacher: I never discovered that God had an anointing on my life for teaching the Word of God until AFTER I stepped out and began to try to give a Bible Study! I never realized that God could heal the sick through me until I stepped out and began to pray for others! I never realized the benefit of a consistent prayer life until I began to spend the majority of my prayer time praying for other people! It is more blessed to give than to receive! If you thought receiving the Holy Ghost was something, then you ought to try letting it flow through you to somebody else! The blessing that you receive when you bless somebody else far exceeds receiving the Holy Ghost!

For some Christians, receiving the Holy Ghost was the climax and the most exciting point of their life and I've seen people backslide because they say that "they never feel what they felt that night again." Let me tell you why: those people are the same people who do not have time to work at the church, or teach a Bible Study. They never step out in faith and pray for someone at the job or worship with someone until the other person gets the breakthrough! They never prayed at an altar with someone not because they needed to receive something but because they wanted to help someone else receive something from God! And so their spiritual life grows stagnant and dull. What has happened? They have received and received and received and never gave anything! If you want to live for 50 years with the Holy Ghost just as exciting and as fresh as it was the first day, then you must learn to give of yourselves! It is more blessed to give than to receive!

In our text, Jesus used "water" to represent the Holy Spirit! Jesus never left the land of Israel in His entire ministry. That means that there were only two major bodies of water in his life: The Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. Jesus was raised near the Sea of Galilee and in scripture we find Jesus was always visiting around or upon the Sea of Galilee. The Jordan river flowed into it from the north and flowed out of it from the south. There were multitudes of fish in the Sea of Galilee and the first few disciples that Jesus called were fishermen upon the Sea of Galilee. In fact 11 of his disciples lived around the Sea of Galilee. There was only 1 disciple that came from the area around the Dead Sea and that was Judas Iscariot! Jesus walked upon the Sea of Galilee, calmed a storm there, taught from a boat just off of it's shore and made it's banks the center of His ministry! Jesus loved the Sea of Galilee.

But I never find that Jesus EVER visited the Dead Sea! He never walked upon it and never did a miracle upon it. The one disciple that came from that area betrayed Him. It was just to the west of the Dead Sea that Jesus was crucified. Now listen very carefully: The same river that flows into the Sea of Galilee, the Jordan river, also flows into the Dead Sea. But the Dead Sea has no outlet! Nothing flows out of it and so all of the mineral content in the water has accumulated until the Dead Sea is the only place on earth in which there is no life!

What is the point preacher? The Sea of Galilee was blessed by Jesus and blessed by life because it has an outlet! It gives of itself and flows out the south! The Dead Sea is dead because it only receives and takes and takes and never gives anything! Scientists say that the Dead Sea has enough minerals to solve most of the environmental issues of the world, but the process to extract them so that they are usable is so costly, complex, and difficult that we will probably never be able to tap into them! The same water flows into both seas, but only one has an outlet!

Can I tell you that everyone receives the same Holy Ghost! We all receive the same living water, but the reason that some people die spiritually is because they never allow the Spirit of God to flow through them! They never develop a ministry or sacrifice the time to give to others! They never really develop a burden for the lost world to the point that they are willing to change their lifestyle and dreams to reach others! So they die! They have every gift and every possible good thing and power that God could give inside of them, but God is never able to use them because they have determined in their heart that they will just receive!

There is a danger in coming to church service after service and receiving the Word of God and the blessings of God and never witnessing to someone or testifying to someone else! There is a danger to being in a move of God and then not developing a love or passion to reach other people and do what you can to win them! It is the danger of not having an outlet because eventually you will end up spiritually like the Dead Sea: no life and not profitable to God or man! When we come to church, we should have a made-up mind to praise God despite what we feel because He has given us so much, and praise is just a small way to give back to Him! I must have an outlet or else I will grow stagnant!

But when Jesus comes back the second time, He will descend to the Mount of Olives which is west of the Dead Sea. There will be a great earthquake and the scriptures say Zechariah 14:4, that the mountain will split down the middle east to west. If you study the geography of Israel, you will find that there is already a fault line in that exact location! Zechariah 14:8 tells us that "living water" will flow from Jerusalem and connect to the Dead Sea so that water flows in and out and the waters will be healed and life will live there once again! It didn't happen at His first coming, but it will happen when Jesus Christ comes the second time!

If you feel like it's been a long time since you felt the joy of the Holy Ghost and you feel like some of the life and passion that you once had is gone, then what has happened is that you have not allowed the Holy Ghost to flow through you and to bless other people! So the once "living water" has become stagnant and dead! You may feel like the Dead Sea spiritually tonight, but there can be healing today! How? You need a second coming of Jesus Christ in your life! Not the literal second coming, but you need a second touch of the Holy Ghost! God can restore the life and passion that you once had, and then you can allow Him to flow through you! We cannot have a selfish attitude about the things of God and we cannot afford to not allow the Holy Ghost to work through our life! The living water must flow through us to reach other people, or else we will die spiritually!

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We find this principle again with the children of Israel in the wilderness. God had provided a wafer-like food for them to eat and the first time that they saw it, they looked at each other and said "man hu?" which means "What is it?" When they asked this, Moses explained in Exodus chapter 16 that it was bread from heaven:

Manna if kept for more than a day became putrid and ruined. The only day that they did not have to gather manna was on the Sabbath day. The scriptures say that everyone was to gather an "omer" per person (an omer = two quarts). Also verse 16 tells us that no matter how much you gathered when you measured it at home, it would equal exactly what you needed per person in your household! God was teaching us that no matter how great the blessings of yesterday, we still need Him today, and that He will provide exactly what we need!

We realize the importance of studying the manna when you realize that Jesus said that He was the manna sent down from heaven!

Now if manna was a type of Jesus Christ then we can learn an important lesson about our walk with God from the fact that the manna grew sour and putrid after a day. Jesus Christ was created to be shared! If you try to hoard up and keep Jesus to yourself and do not share it with someone else, your religion will end up putrid and offensive! Why did Jesus tell His disciples to "go and teach others and make disciples out of them?" Yes, I know that we must reach others with the Gospel, but there is more to it than that: If I do not share Jesus Christ with someone else, my relationship with Him becomes ruined! Jesus Christ was meant to be shared! The only way that one person could gather more than two quarts of manna was if he was gathering to share with someone else! Do you want more of God? Do you want to see more of the blessings of God? Then get the revelation that God will bless you greatly and far beyond what you deserve, but you have to be willing to minister to others with the excess! If you keep it all to yourself, then it will ruin and become putrid!

The Psalmist said that God anointed his head with oil and his "cup runneth over." If you do not see the importance of ministering and pouring out blessings on others, then you need to get your cup completely full and over flowing! But when the blessings are overflowing and everything is going good, remember the reason why: God wants you to allow the living water to flow over and bless someone else! Don't keep it to yourself! Why do people sometimes backslide when everything is going great in their life and they are being blessed? Because they fail to realize the reason for the blessing is so that they can bless someone else! Enjoy the blessings but remember that the overflow is to bless somebody else! Pour out the living water upon someone else!

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I close with this. The prophet Elijah must have passed on the importance of becoming a giver to his young servant Elisha, because after Elijah had passed on into the heavens and Elisha had taken up the mantle of anointing, we find a very similar story that happened. It happened in II Kings and again it was a widow in distress and financial trouble:

Her husband had died and left her in severe debt, and she had no money to pay. To make matters worse, the creditor was coming to take her two sons as slaves as payment for the debt. This lady was about to lose everything that she had! So she went to Elisha for help:

What the prophet told her is amazing! He asked her what she had, and the only thing that she could think about was a pot of oil. Elisha told her "here's what you do: go borrow as many empty vessels that you can from your neighbors and come in and shut the door. And then take what you have, and pour out into your neighbor's pots until they are full!

Now had this been us, we'd probably have been like "wait a minute, the last thing that she has and God says to pour it out to somebody else?"

But as she began to pour out of what she had, a miracle began to happen: her jar never emptied! She poured and poured and poured until she had filled the entire neighborhood's jars and vessels, and yet there was just as much oil in her pot as when she started!

Could it be that we stay at a certain level of anointing so long because we are not willing to pour it out into other people! I have had preachers tell me, that "I can't believe that you put your sermons on the internet so that other preachers can steal them!" "Everybody else will be preaching your best ideas!" I've had other people tell me at music conferences "my piano teacher will not show me like you do how to do some of those tricks because they say that that is 'their stuff'!" But I've got news for you: the more I share with others, the more God gives me! I have been pastoring for two years and I have not run out of sermons yet! I have been playing the piano for 14 years and I am still learning new tricks and licks even this month! Why has God blessed me? Because I haven't hoarded up what God has given me, but I have taken it and multiplied by sharing it with other people!

If you want to go beyond your level of anointing, then do not get hung up on "I only have one pot of oil," but share it! Become a giver of what God has given you! You will find out that as you pour of yourself, the more that you have! The more I bless other people, the more blessings I receive! The more money I give, the more financial blessings that I receive! The more I worship, the more power that I feel come upon me! All of the time that I invest into the kingdom of God is nothing when I realize that He will bless me with living forever one day! But you've got to be willing to give of yourself! What God has given to you was to bless someone else, but don't worry, God will never let a giver run dry!

The lady came and told the man of God what had happened and then he told her a miraculous thing: "go and sell the oil and pay the debt and live thou and thy children of the rest!" When she was willing to give of the little that she had to other's vessels, not only did God fix her debt, but also gave her enough to live on for the rest of her life!

Do you want to live your whole life in spiritual plenty and in the blessings of God? Then become a giver! Become a pourer-outer of the blessings that God has given! Become a giver of the living water that God wants to flow through you! Bless others and see if God will keep your cup full and running over for the rest of your life! I must become a giver and sharer of God's blessings!