Two Seas and the Secret of Living Water

In Israel, two bodies of water are fed by the same river, yet they could not be more different. The Sea of Galilee receives the Jordan River from the north, and its waters flow out again to the south. Fish dart through its currents. Fishermen have cast nets from its shores for thousands of years. Vegetation lines its banks. It is alive.

Sixty-five miles south, the Dead Sea receives those same waters. But it has no outlet. Every drop that enters stays, growing saltier and more concentrated with each passing century. Today its salinity hovers near thirty-four percent — nearly ten times that of the ocean. Nothing swims in it. Nothing grows along its mineral-crusted edges. It takes in and never gives out, and so it earns its name.

James understood this principle long before modern hydrology mapped these watersheds. "Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves," he wrote. "Do what it says." The Word of God was never meant to pool inside us, collecting like stagnant knowledge we admire but never act upon. Scripture is living water meant to flow through us — into our marriages, our workplaces, our Monday morning decisions, our treatment of the stranger at the gas station.

A faith that only receives eventually dies by its own accumulation. But a life that hears and does — that lets the Word move through hands and feet — stays teeming with the life God intended.