IS YOUR CISTERN BROKEN
Jeremiah 2:1-13;
The Word of the Lord came to me: 2 “Go and proclaim in the hearing of Jerusalem: “This is what the Lord says: “I remember the devotion of your youth, how as a bride you loved me and followed me through the wilderness, through a land not sown. 3 Israel was holy to the Lord, the first fruits of his harvest; all who devoured her were held guilty and disaster overtook them,’” declares the Lord. 4 Hear the word of the Lord, you descendants of Jacob, all you clans of Israel. 5 This is what the Lord says: “What fault did your ancestors find in me that they strayed so far from me? They followed worthless idols and became worthless themselves 6 They did not ask, ‘Where is the Lord, who brought us up out of Egypt and led us through the barren wilderness, through a land of deserts and ravines, a land of drought and utter darkness, a land where no one travels and no one lives?’ 7 I brought you into a fertile land to eat its fruit and rich produce. But you came and defiled my land and made my inheritance detestable. 8 The priests did not ask ‘Where is the Lord?’ Those who deal with the law did not know me the leaders rebelled against me. The prophets prophesied by Baal, following worthless idols. 9 “Therefore I bring charges against you again,” declares the Lord. “And I will bring charges against your children’s children. 10 Cross over to the coasts of Cyprus and look, send to Kedar and observe closely; see if there has ever been anything like this: 11 Has a nation ever changed its gods? (Yet they are not gods at all.) But my people have exchanged their glorious God for worthless idols. 12 Be appalled at this, you heavens, and shudder with great horror,” declares the Lord. 13 “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.
Bear with me in this message as I take you a bit further in this all-important water that comes from God. If you are older like me, then you will know what a cistern is or you may have actually seen or used one at your home. Before any of us had city water and underground pipelines, it was common for people to catch rainwater from their roof and collect it in a cistern. But, as with any such contraption, there were problems with cisterns. First if it didn’t rain, you had no water, and second, even if you had enough water, the cistern probably leaked. Having said that and getting back to this message, it is interesting to note that cisterns were especially important in Israel during Jeremiah’s day.
We know this to be a fact because archaeologists have uncovered thousands of them. The land of Israel was arid and the rains were infrequent so it was often dry for a long spell. The people in those days would dig their cisterns, line them with bricks and then plaster them to hold the water. But the cistern would often break and would not be able to hold the water. If you were able to collect a little water it was important that you did not lose it because of a broken cistern. But even if you did manage to catch enough water it would often stagnate and usually the supply was inadequate.
In the passage above which I trust you took time to read, Jeremiah says, “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;
Jeremiah is painting a picture on the minds of the people to whom he is talking and he uses a familiar metaphor and mixes it with the ridiculous. He is painting the familiar picture of cisterns, but the absurd part of the picture is, people relying on old, broken cisterns which they have made, while right beside their cistern there is a continuous spring of living water.
It was a laughable scene. People trying to fill broken cisterns, and scooping out the little bit of stagnant water in the bottom. All the while they were refusing to drink from the fresh spring water which was flowing right next to them.
But this farcical picture drove home the point that Jeremiah was trying to make. It was a picture of the people of Israel. When they laughed at Jeremiah’s metaphor, they were laughing at themselves. They had rejected the true God who was called the spring of living water. They relied on their own efforts to satisfy the deep longings of their lives. They had wandered from the One the psalmist called the fountain of life, and gone after other gods Psalm 36:9;
They had tried to find satisfaction in all kinds of different sins and other futile attempts to fill their lives. But, like Jeremiah said, their attempts were like trying to fill broken cisterns. Whatever they did accumulate became stagnant, and they were not able to hold on too much of what they found. They were constantly running after life, but life was running through their fingers. They were trying to accumulate things, but they had nothing of real value. There was a stench and an emptiness inside, but they were unwilling to turn to the true God whose supply of life was endless and effervescent. They were not sure they could trust the Lord to satisfy their thirst.
There is a truth found here in Jeremiah that is worth our taking a look at. The point is, we all are thirsty. In other words, there are legitimate deep thirsts and longings in our lives that are placed there by God. We long for our lives to have meaning. We are searching for a legitimate purpose in which we can invest our lives. We are looking for love and intimacy. We pursue joy and happiness. We desire peace. We crave freedom. All of these longings are a part of what makes us human. We are created in the likeness of God, and these are the things that He wants for us as well. God has made us with these hungers and thirsts, but the question is how will we fulfill these longings.
It is not a sin to be thirsty, but satisfying that thirst in misdirected ways can be sin. It is not a sin to desire love, but how you decide to meet your need for love may be sin. It is not a sin to want meaning and purpose in your life, but when your life’s central purpose and meaning does not line up with God’s will for you, it is wrong. It is not a sin to desire freedom, unless you are wanting to be free from God and all the moral restraints He wills for us. It is not a sin to want to be happy, but trying to meet your longing for happiness outside the will of God is not only wrong, it is destructive. It is like drinking smelly, stagnant, diseased water at the bottom of a broken cistern. How do Christians respond to these thirsts in life?
First of all, we recognize that these thirsts come from God. He is our Maker. He has created us and all the longings which we feel. We understand that these are legitimate longings. But secondly, we understand that God has designed a way for these longings to be met in the best way possible. That is why we do not forsake the ‘Spring of Living Water’ (which is Christ), for broken cisterns of our own. We have needs, but we need to seek to satisfy those needs God’s way rather than our own way. We understand that we are inadequate to meet these needs. We might be able to build a cistern, but it will be inadequate. We cannot begin to create a spring of living water. We know that God is the source of our supply, and our best attempts to satisfy our needs in our own way results in failure. We know that God loves us and wants our lives to be fulfilling. That is why Jesus said, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.” John 7:37; He said, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” John 10:10;
God is not holding back on us. He is not trying to frustrate our God given inclinations and desires; He is trying to show us how to meet those needs in the best possible way. He gave us those needs. He designed life, and he knows best how life was meant to be lived. Meet those needs his way and you experience fulfillment and freedom. Meet those needs your way and experience frustration and failure. If you have needs then you need to look to God to fulfill those needs. He wants the best for you.
But thirdly the Christian understands that our needs can never be fully met in an imperfect world. In Christian theology we talk about a fallen world. It means that ever since Adam’s failure in the Garden of Eden, sin has entered the world. The world fell away from God and his original plan and design. It is an imperfect world and nothing we can do will make it perfect. The promise of the Bible is that there is a perfect world which is coming. The Bible says, “But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness.” 2 Peter 3:13;
We wait with hope and great anticipation for the deepest longings in our lives to be fulfilled perfectly in the kingdom of God which is yet to come in its completeness. We don’t place unrealistic and unreasonable demands on this world. We are people of faith and hope. We accept the fact that this is an imperfect world, and we are looking for something more that is to come. The Bible says, “But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” Romans 8:25;
Are you waiting patiently, or are you demanding that your needs be met here and now? But Jeremiah takes us further by showing us through the Word that many people are still too busy digging cisterns.
We are not so different from the people of Jeremiah’s day. The one thing that is different is that we have more things available to us with which we try to satisfy the deep longings and thirsts of our lives. We pile up possessions and seek for pleasure. We treat ourselves; we entertain ourselves and we amuse ourselves. We are still playing the absurd game of trying to build our own cisterns while the streams of God are flowing right next to us. God is calling out to us inviting us to come, but we don’t want to hear what God is telling us.
Have you ever noticed that people are afraid of silence, I have! The radios in some cars are so loud, the doors are pulsing in and out a foot. The music is so loud you can hear it fourteen cars away. And that’s with the windows in your car up! The vibrations from the music jar your bones and it is not even your radio. I guess the goal is not to be able to hear yourself think or see who can go deaf before they turn 21.
Some people have not got a clue how anyone can sit still and be quiet without saying anything. How many know that an empty house can get pretty quiet? If you happen to be in an empty house sometime, you may even be able to hear the still small voice of God. When you are at peace with yourself, and at peace with God, it is not hard at all to be quiet. You hear things that you would not otherwise hear and think things that you would not otherwise think. But today’s world is filled with noise so that we can’t hear God.
We also try to forget how empty our lives are by peering at other people’s lives. There’s a new voyeurism in America. It is called the reality show. Sitting still and watching some idiot sleep with 99 rattle snakes or eating slugs or doing some other stupid idiotic thing for shock value. I even tried to watch one of those shows one night and was bored stupid in two minutes. I was trying to listen but their conversation was insane. All they wanted to talk about was their petty grievances with the world and with each other and then complain about their shallow existence. We live virtual lives and think we are really living. We are trying to fill up the cistern with something, anything, but it is all fantasy and life is leaking out faster than we can fill it.
What is it in us that makes us prefer to do things our way rather than accept God’s way? Why do we insist on building broken cisterns rather than drinking from the spring of living water that will never run dry? Why do we run from one thing to another, never finding satisfaction, but never running to God? There is a simple yet a loaded word for it and that word is rebellion.
We have the attitude that we may be ruining our lives, but who cares, at least no one is telling us what to do and that includes God! It does not matter that His way is the path of life and fulfillment, we see God as interference.
There is an interesting story in the New Testament that takes place around a well and I am sure you know it well, no pun intended. Jesus was sitting at a well when a Samaritan woman came to draw water there. He looked at her and said, “Will you give me a drink?” Now, in that culture, it was inappropriate for a man to speak to a woman in public. It was even more unacceptable for a Jew to speak to a Samaritan. When she questioned him, he said, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” John 4:10;
The story is ironic because Jesus begins by asking for a drink simply because He has no way of getting water from the well himself. And then He says that if she knew who He was, she would be the one asking Him for a drink instead. But Jesus knew that this particular woman had tried to satisfy her thirst for life in all the wrong ways. She was living with a man who was not her husband, and she had had five husbands before him.
The point of the story is that Jesus was not talking about water, He was talking about life. 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;
Jesus was inviting her to come to him as the source of the water of life. Her pathetic efforts to make life work had done nothing but disappoint her and break her. She had ruined her life and the lives of others as well. Her life was a broken cistern. She was alienated from her community, her family and herself. All the life had leaked out of her and she was desperate and hopeless. And then!!! Jesus came into her life. He was offering her more than water; He was offering her life in all its fullness. When that life began flowing through her it became a bubbling stream, and she could not keep quiet about what God had done for her. She began telling all her friends and neighbors so that many others began to drink of real life.
Pascal said, “Human beings are peculiar in that they pursue ends they know will bring them no satisfaction, gorge themselves with food that cannot nourish and stuff themselves with pleasures that cannot please.”
There are many people like that today. They settle for pretend relationships. They look for intimacy in pornography. They look thrills through someone else’s life. They try to escape reality. Instead of living water, they search for a drug to anesthetize them. They protect themselves from any real feelings. They avoid thinking, and they live in fear. But they seem to be more afraid of God than they are of living an empty life.
Whether they are poor or affluent, they are broken cisterns, or as the Bible describes them, “They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted twice dead. They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame; wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever.” Jude 1:12-13; They have what C. S. Lewis called, incommunicable and unappeasable want.
What makes it so tragic is that it is all so unnecessary. But Jeremiah makes it clear to us that we have a choice to make. We can go on trying to supply the desires of our lives, or we can come to God to have our deepest longings met. We can try to make our lives work by our own effort, or we can ask God for his presence to fill our lives. We can do it our way or God’s way. We can follow our plan or God’s plan. But understand this: either way there is a cost. Jesus said, “In the same way, any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14:33;
If you want eternal riches, it will cost you everything you have. But which is worse: giving up everything here to get everything there, or giving up everything there to get something you want here? What will happen when you stand before God? What excuse will you offer when you have the final audit of your life? How will you explain to God that you were so busy doing trivial things. That you never became involved in eternal things? How will you explain that you were so busy repairing and refilling your broken cistern, that you never took advantage of the fountain of life He was offering? Some will have to explain why you never committed your life to anything. Others will have to explain why they were committed to a hundred things that weren’t important.
Again, C. S. Lewis said, “The only thing Christianity cannot be is moderately important. It cannot be just one of the many things on your list. It is the list or it is nothing.”
As a pastor I fear for those who have never made a real commitment that is 100% for God. Your life is hectic, and it even looks full, but you are losing it. You are trying to be a casual Christian and it is not working. You can say all the right things, but down deep something is terribly wrong. What will happen at the end when God asks you what you did with your life. You have to say that you spent all your resources on yourself? There will be unsurpassable embarrassment and monumental regret. What was I thinking, you will say to yourself. How could I have wasted my life? With all that God had given me, and with all that he was offering me. How could I have treated God’s purpose for my life as though it was unimportant? How could I have majored on the minors and minored on the majors?
That is the ultimate cost of not living for God. Coming to the end of life and knowing you have missed the meaning of life. Consider carefully the cost of living for God. But consider also the cost of a life wasted without God.
Turn your life around by saying with the Psalmist: “O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” Psalm 63:1;
Jesus continues to call to us: “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.” John 7:37;
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