Broken Cisterns or Living Water
Water is essential to life. Living water from Jesus is essential to nourish our spirituaI life. I don’t feel well unless I drink a half gallon of water over the course of a day. Water is a source of life in the plant and animal kingdoms, carrying nutrients needed by cells to sustain life. Outside of drinking water, people also bathe themselves and wash things in soap and water.
Sources of living water.God gave one of His spokesmen, the prophet Jeremiah, a message the people he spoke to could understand from everyday life. “For My people have committed two evils; they have forsaken Me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13). Just as God provides for our need of physical water, so He also yearns to be our source for sustaining and nourishing our spiritual life.
Gaining spiritual nourishment from Living Water. As an illustration, my mother is an example of God nourishing someone spiritually. Her favorite Bible verse in her older years was Isaiah 58:11, “And the LORD shall guide thee continually and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones: and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.” She had written this verse on a piece of paper, which she pulled out every night. She went to sleep meditating on it.
Always striving to nourish her soul, in her 90s she memorized Psalm 1. True, she asked me to help her, but she took the initiative to work on this project and she was successful. Out of her flowed the source, the fountain of living waters.
PROBLEM SOLVING Drink from “the” spring of living water
Too often instead of turning to God for help, we come up with our own solutions to problems. Secondly, we turn to other people for help. Just like the Israelites, both solutions leave God out of the equation. When we forget to ask God for help it is like settling for collected rainwater when we could be drinking from a spring of fresh water.
RAINWATER To Live
Where water is plentiful it is casually discarded. Where it is scarce it is collected. At the time Jeremiah lived (620 B.C.), they collected rainwater in underground tanks called cisterns. Therefore, they could have water when it was not plentiful. Cisterns chiseled out of the rock and improperly sealed became porous and leaked.
WATER FILTERS
Recently, something happened at our house. It rained for two weeks. I developed mouth sores. We tested the water and discovered it was unfit to drink. After we changed the water filters and retested the water, we had clean water again. Consequently, my mouth sores went away.
LIVING WATER
God through Jeremiah told His people, “For My people have committed two evils; they have forsaken Me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water”. Most importantly, we see God’s passion for being the source of living water for His people. As a result,we become toxic when we don’t feed on His Word. When we meditate on His Word, the indwelling Holy Spirit activates the Word and makes it living water for our soul. By this He helps us get rid of the impurities of sin we may be hoarding to our hurt.
Have you drunk some of that Living Water today?
Shirley Logsdon
