What is Your Cistern?

For a long time I was using the Moravian Text as my guide for this devotional. They still come in my email and I want to go back to using them. This was the verse that stuck out to me today:

My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water. Jeremiah 2:13

Very few of us who are believers consciously forsake God.... but sometimes it happens gradually. We get involved in things and slowly realize that we are not the person we used to be, nor are we as close to God as we once were. And we often walk away from God, the fountain of living water, to create our own "god." And even if that god seems to us to be a good thing, God tells us through Jeremiah that the comparison is ironic: A Fountain of LIving Water compared to a cracked cistern.

A cistern is a funny word, but basically was a receptacle to hold liquids, usually water. And the irony is that as humans, we walk away from a fountain of living water .... to build a small container that is cracked.

Do you have a cistern that you keep turning to to fulfill you? Is it your work? A hobby? Endless activity? Achievement? Success? Money? Another person? Your family? Friends? Food? Alcohol? even your church?

It's a funny image. A huge fountain flowing with living water, available to anyone who wants to continually drink it -- and all of us as humans, turning our backs on that fountain and busily scurrying around frantically digging out cisterns, putting all our time and energy into something that not only does not produce the water, but cannot hold any because it is cracked.

I've been proud of some of the cisterns I've built over the years. But when I make the comparison... a living-water-fountain provides everything I need, never lets me down. God is always there, beckoning us, no matter what shape we are in and no matter what else fails..

And he is waiting to hear our concerns when we have no one else to share them with, to feel our pain, to forgive us, to heal us, to help us, to pour out that living water on our souls. All we have to do is ask.

I'm asking today, are you?