With the Current

The mid-length version, built for a message, a class, or personal study without the full depth of the Expanded edition.

God is the Creator, and everything He created moves with a purpose. Scripture was given to root our decisions in truth, and to remind us that freedom of choice has always been God's gift, never His afterthought. This teaching is about learning to move with God's current instead of exhausting ourselves fighting against it.

Almost nothing God made simply sits still — water flows downhill, seeds push toward light, migratory birds travel fixed paths built into them. Direction is woven into creation from the first chapter, and a life surrendered to the Creator was always meant to move the same way.

This matters because so much of the anxiety people carry about their spiritual life comes from treating it like a problem to be solved through sheer willpower, rather than a current already flowing that they need only turn to face.

God the Creator, and the Truth He Has Given Us

Scripture is not a collection of suggestions — it is God's teaching, given so we could make decisions rooted in truth rather than guesswork. A Creator who made everything knows how everything works best, which is why His instructions are wisdom handed down to enable us, not restrictions meant to limit us.

A manufacturer's instructions for a machine are not an insult to the machine's freedom. They are the only reliable map to how that machine was actually built to run. In the same way, God's instructions were never restrictions handed down to limit a person, but wisdom handed down to enable them.

The Freedom of Choice Has Always Been His Gift

From the garden onward, God has never once removed a person's freedom to choose.

Obedience that was never free to be disobedience was never really love. What we need is not more restriction, but the Spirit of that truth living inside us, so that when the moment to choose arrives, we are already leaning the right direction.

God does not want a universe of programmed responses. He wants sons and daughters who choose Him because they actually want Him. A choice that could not be otherwise was never really a choice at all.

With the Current, Not Against It

Picture a swimmer fighting upstream — straining, exhausted, gaining only inches. Now picture that swimmer turned the other direction, moving with the current instead of against it. The same river that exhausted them now carries them. That is the difference between a life lived in the flesh and a life lived in the Spirit. God's truth was never given to hold us back. It was given to carry us.

Their strength is no longer being spent fighting the water; it is being spent going somewhere. The exhaustion so many people feel in their spiritual lives is very often not a sign that faith is too demanding — it is a sign they are still swimming upstream.

Fighting the current rarely looks dramatic. It looks like forcing decisions on our own timetable, or resenting a season of waiting instead of trusting God to use it. The good news: turning around does not require starting over. A swimmer can turn right where they are, and the same current that was working against them starts carrying them instead.

What Fighting the Current Actually Looks Like

It looks like managing anxiety by controlling every variable instead of trusting the One who already knows how the river bends up ahead. It looks like resenting a season of waiting as wasted time, when God is doing exactly what a current does during a season of waiting — carving the channel wider and deeper before the water ever picks up speed.

Living Water

Notice Jesus did not say a trickle would flow from within the believer. He said rivers — moving, alive, always flowing outward toward whoever is downstream.

Living water is not water that sits still in a cistern, stagnant and closed off. It is water in motion, always flowing outward from the person who has received it toward whoever is downstream of them.

The Current Moves Toward Others, Not Just Forward

A river does not gather water for its own sake. It gathers water and carries it somewhere — toward fields that need irrigating, toward towns that need drinking water, toward a sea that will evaporate it back into rain for the next generation of rivers downstream. Living water, the same way, was never given to a person to keep. It was given to move through them, toward whoever is downstream of their life: a spouse, a child, a neighbor, a stranger at a well who happened to be thirsty at noon.

A current does not ask permission to keep moving. It simply moves, continuously, toward whatever is next in its path. A believer moving with God's current is not someone carefully rationing out grace to the people who seem to deserve it most. They are someone who has stopped trying to control where the water goes at all, and simply lets it flow toward whoever is next.

From a Drop to the Mississippi

A great river does not begin as a river. It begins as a single drop, joining a trickle, joining a brook, joining a stream — and out of hundreds of small, unremarkable tributaries comes something wide and powerful enough to carry ships. That is the picture of spiritual growth. Nobody starts mature. Every believer starts as a single drop, easily overlooked, that was never meant to stay alone.

Little becomes much, not because the little was insignificant, but because it was faithfully added to.

A single creek looks like nothing next to the Mississippi Delta. But without that one creek, the river is smaller than it was made to be. Every small act of faith, every early and immature step, is a tributary that God intends to use to build something far larger than the person taking that first step could have imagined.

Every Drop Feeds the Whole

No single teaching, no single drop of truth, looks like much on its own. But truth added to truth is exactly how a body of believers grows from something small into something that can carry real weight.

Do Not Despise the Day of Small Beginnings

Who dares despise the day of small things? (Zechariah 4:10, NIV). Every great river was once a day of small things too — a drop nobody noticed, falling on a hillside nobody was watching. The temptation, in a season that still looks small, is to conclude that nothing significant is happening. Scripture says the opposite. The size of the beginning was never the measure of what God intended to do with it.

A River Shapes the Land It Flows Through

Given enough time, a river reshapes the very ground it moves through — carving canyons out of solid rock, depositing rich soil along its banks. None of that happens quickly. A life moved by God's current shapes the people and places around it the same way — not usually through one dramatic moment, but through the accumulated faithfulness of moving the same direction, day after day, long enough for the shape of things to actually change.

This is also why comparison is such a poor measure of whether the current is working. Every river carves a different landscape. What matters is not that the shape matches someone else's river. What matters is that the water keeps moving, faithfully, in the direction it was always meant to flow.

Every river shapes different ground because every landscape is made of different rock and different resistance. A person's life moved by God's current will not look identical to their neighbor's, and does not need to — what matters is that the water keeps moving.

All Glory, Honor, and Praise

A river does not exist to glorify the creek it came from. Every stage of this growth belongs to God. Move with the current. Drink the living water Jesus offers, and let it become in you a river flowing out. Whatever small beginning you feel like today, it was never meant to stay small.

A Closing Word

Lord, thank You for building direction into everything You made, and for inviting me to move with Your current instead of exhausting myself fighting it. Forgive me for the seasons I have spent straining upstream, calling the exhaustion normal. Teach me to turn, right where I am, and let Your Spirit carry what my own strength never could. Let the small, unremarkable drop of faith I bring today join with countless others until it becomes, in Your time, an ocean. And let all the glory for that river belong to You, now and forever. Amen.

For Further Study

• Genesis 1:1 — In the beginning, God created
• Deuteronomy 30:15,19 — Life and death, choose life
• John 4:13-14 / John 7:37-38 — Living water and rivers within
• 2 Peter 3:18 — Grow in grace and knowledge
• Romans 12:4-5 — One body, many members
• Romans 11:36 — From Him, through Him, for Him are all things