In high school, we were required to take a swimming class that taught us basic strokes. Sure, it could be said we needed to know how to swim because it’s a fun thing we all need to do, but it was required because they wanted us to be able to survive in the water during a precarious situation.

I wouldn’t say it’s likely that many of the hundreds of thousands of students who went through that course were going to find themselves in the situation where they needed to practice the survival techniques—treading water, dead man’s float, etc.—learned in that class. Most of our water experiences are fun ones. But what if? So we learned the techniques and spent hours learning how to survive in the water.

Use the Holy Spirit the way it was intended, and let’s quit treading water in our spiritual walk with God.

If you haven’t learned to tread water, it is basically a stroke that requires the minimum amount of effort you can exert to stay afloat. Your head stays just above the surface as your lower extremities relax, only staying above water by quick, minimal motions of the hands called heeling and sculling. The idea here is to do just enough to stay alive until someone can rescue you. The dead man’s float is when you’re exhausted and simply stop moving for a while, put your face in the water and float there until you’ve regained some strength to tread water again. It’s a position you never want to find yourself in.

Recently I was thinking about our spiritual lives in this sense. Am I simply doing the bare minimum in my Christian walk to “get by?” Does God want me to simply get by or does He want me to bear much fruit? Consider the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:14-30. The servant that used his gifts invested his talents and saw a return on it. He was told, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” But the servant who did the bare minimum and hid his talent was not so fortunate.

“You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest. So, take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.  And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

The bare minimum is not enough.

In 1 Thessalonians 5:19, we are told not to quench the Holy Spirit. Do you ever think about how that could be manifested in our lives? I picture it as having the Spirit but doing nothing with it, or the bare minimum to get by, which is just as dangerous.

You see, we cannot be spiritually treading the water of our Christianity. What would that look like exactly? I’m sure at some point in all our lives we may have experienced this. I know I have. It’s just a sort of lack-luster approach to having a relationship with God. It’s saying that it’s OK to put work, school, friends, family, entertainment, anything before God. It’s justifying all of that and reasoning within ourselves to say it’s fine. It’s having a Christian exterior when on the interior we’re not so bright and shiny.

We’ve been given this great gift that helps us understand God’s truth and to put it into practice in our lives. The Holy Spirit is the power of God. So, in essence, when we aren’t using that power in the way it was intended for us, we are having a form of righteousness but denying its power (2 Timothy 3:5). As a fire is put out by withdrawing fuel from it, so we quench the Spirit if we do not fuel it, if we do not stir up that fire and kindle it. We quench it by staying in that water too long, by not power stroking through that water until we reach shore.

We cannot be content to stand still in stagnant waters of an unzealous Christian life. We can’t tread spiritual water and think we can just skate by. We should be making crashing waves on the shores of this world with our Christianity. People notice a wave. It’s a lot harder to spot a person barely afloat out in the ocean. Getting out of the water and stoking the fire that was started in us when we were first called is the goal. Every day we need to start out stoking the fire set inside us. We need to use the gifts our Heavenly Father has given us and bear fruit.

How can we stoke that fire? By doing good to others, especially those of the household of faith. Praying. Studying God’s Word. Meditation. Fasting. It’s easy to list them out in this article. It’s a lot harder in the application of our lives. But thankfully God has given us His Spirit to overcome. Let’s use His Spirit the way it was intended, and let’s quit treading water in our spiritual walk with God.