The Hunter Home

We are grateful to God for the privilege of hearing, believing, living and spreading the gospel with God’s people at Desert Springs Church in Albuquerque, NM.

Our pastor, Ryan Kelly, has explained well the church’s name on the about page of Desert Springs Church’s website:

Desert Springs Church is so called not because it sounds neat for a church in an arid New Mexican climate, though certainly that connection was intended by those who came up with it. More importantly, the idea of water in the desert (or a desert spring) is a frequent and glorious theme in the Bible. It is a long-promised and beautiful picture of God’s fullness coming, and our thirst ultimately being quenched in Jesus Christ. It is worth reminding ourselves (and staying reminded) why we call this group of Christians in Albuquerque, Desert Springs Church.

…Here we live in dry and dusty Albuquerque. We may complain and groan for moisture for our lawns and plants, but God created deserts in this world for a purpose. God purposefully and intentionally created dry and dusty lands called deserts in order to give us a vivid picture of our spiritual state of deadness and mere dust. The idea of the analogy comes first in the mind of God: the creation is there to serve the need for an analogy, not vice-versa. Our perfectly wise God plans all things with purpose, intention, and great forethought; and if that is true, that means that we live in Albuquerque, where the natural landscape carries the purposeful and planned theological reminder of a spiritually dry and dusty people who are desperately in need of water.

He is our water, our satisfaction, our quench; and He is all these things for us because He became our highway of holiness. This highway of holiness is not a road that merely enables us to live holy lives; rather, we walk on the path of someone else’s holiness—the perfect holiness of God Himself in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus makes the connection between Himself and the promised satisfaction of a spring of water. God Himself is this anticipated water. He said in John 7:37-39,

…If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, “Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive…