What is Living Waters?

Living Waters is an in-depth, Christ-centered healing and discipleship series that helps born anew Christians to grow in loving others well, and thus, grow in Christ-likeness.  Living Waters addresses the reality that we are all broken in our relational ability, that is, in loving God and neighbors in a fallen world even despite having been born anew.  The goal of Living Waters is to lay a foundation for relational wholeness in our lives by experiencing the healing love of the heavenly Father without which we have nothing to really love others with.

Through the worship, teaching, prayer ministry and “small group” healing community of Living Waters we learn about:

• The depth of our brokenness and our continuing profound need for Christ and therefore the need to continually appropriate His finished work at the cross, after having accepted Him as Savior, for our sanctification and  transformation by the Holy Spirit through continual death of our old man and resurrection of our new man.
• God’s powerful love for us and how Jesus is central to our hope for relational wholeness
• The power of the cross to restore our souls, sexuality and relationships when we  continually share the cross with Christ within the Christian community.
• The process of walking out our healing
• Our place in the church and loving others honorably

Who is Living Waters for?

Living Waters applies to everyone, for who does not have relational brokenness, having been born into a fallen world?  We all have not been born into perfect families where we are to first learn how to relate with God and others through our parents.  Neither did we have perfect environment growing up and thus, we all grew up into adults with relational brokenness, to some degree or another.  These are expressed in various forms, like, self-hatred, fear, shame, inability to carry on male-female relationships or any relationship at all, hatred and fear of the same or opposite sex due to sexual abuse or molestation, attraction to the same sex, sexual and other types of addiction, emotional dependency, codependency, or just plain inability to love others or some groups of people well.

Thankfully, Christ’s capacity to touch and restore us at deep levels of shame and brokenness extends to all of us, regardless of the specifics of our issue.

How is Living Waters presented?

Living Waters is a 25-lesson program taught in a closed-group format.  The leaders have been trained and a confidentiality policy is in place to help ensure trust and safety in the group.  Each meeting includes:

• Worship of Jesus– We focus our attention and praise on God rather than on our problems.
• The Word  of Jesus– Living Waters’ teachings combine psychological insights and biblical truths that help us to know God and ourselves better.
• The Works of Jesus – Through healing prayer in large and small group settings, we invite the Holy Spirit to heal our various wounds.  We bring our sins and sins  committed against us to the Lord in a community setting and He is faithful to set us free (Jas. 5:16) 

                  Foundational to Living Waters is the reality that God created us in His image as male and female.  Therefore we value men and women working out their healing together.  Great healing comes as men and women minister and receive alongside one another, thereby reflecting God’s intention and character.  (Although small groups are single-sex, both genders participate together in worship, teaching and prayer in the large group.)

What will I learn?

Living Waters uses a detailed guidebook that includes teachings, questions and additional readings that help us move from brokenness to maturity.  Some topics addressed include:

• Acknowledging our need for God
• How “the fall” affects our sexuality and relationships (our “image-bearing”)
• Receiving the Father’s love
• Knowing Jesus Christ the Crucified and Resurrected One
• Aligning our will to the Father’s by the empowerment of the Holy Spirit
• Welcoming Christ into our gender brokenness
• Understanding triggers of gender insecurity
• The cross and confession (“walking in the light”)
• Renouncing our idols
• Narcissism and relational idolatry (“emotional dependency”)
• True masculinity and true femininity and reconciliation between men and women
• Healing from sexual and other forms of abuse
• Restoring the true self through the cross
• Understanding and overcoming temptation
• Overcoming sexual addiction and other forms of idolatry
• Embracing the church as our healing community
• Building healthy relationships
• Walking as mature Christians