Broken Cisterns

"My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns,
broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”
Jeremiah 2:13

There is an in-born quality in you and I to thirst. When we think of being thirsty, often we picture a man crawling along the sandy desert floor, with a dry tongue and a desire to find an oasis of water. Gatorade boasts that their product is the “Thirst Quencher”. Sprite tells you to “Obey Your Thirst”. When we are really thirsty, we need something to quench it.
God often uses the physical world to explain a spiritual truth, and often water represents God and His Holy Spirit. John’s gospel records Jesus making a great claim: “On the last and greatest day of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, ‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.’" (John 7:37-38). Jesus was talking there about the abundant life we can have when the Holy Spirit is upon us. Even the last invitation of the gospel in the Bible is for those who are thirsty to come and drink (Revelation 22:17). So God has created a spiritually thirsty place in each of our hearts that only He can quench.
But what happens is that we commit two sins, like this verse in Jeremiah talks about. We first leave the fountain of true living water, and then we grab our shovels and start digging our own spiritual springs! Out in the wilderness, people would divert the flow of rainwater into small dams which led into cisterns, carved out of the sandstone. They worked hard at it and could gather the scarcest amount of rain. But the problem was they weren’t fresh springs, they were runoff water. That meant that this water got stagnant because it wasn’t fresh flowing. If you own a pool, you’ll know the value of having a pump to keep the water fresh and flowing! If not, don’t ask why your pool parties aren’t as heavily attended as they used to be!
And so too, the things that we replace God with, whether it is money, careers, popularity, talents, or even false religions, have no fresh flow. They are broken cisterns and are stagnant, spiritual cesspools. We dig into these things, thinking that they will quench our thirst, only to find that they are like salt water, leaving us thirsty for more!
Jesus spoke to a woman like that. Her ‘cistern’ was to find fulfillment in relationships with men, and Jesus met her at a well, which changed her life forever. He said to her, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." (John 4:13-14). He alone can give us Living Water, so that we will never thirst again.
So maybe you’ve been digging for a while, and found yourself dirty and dusty, and still thirsty. Digging is hard work, a lot harder than simply coming to drink! The salty water you’ve been digging for won’t ever quench your thirst. You need Jesus! Pray today and ask God to fill you afresh with His Spirit. Don’t let your life be a stagnant pond of self-sufficiency. Take the step of faith and taste and see that the Lord is good!