Weather Report From Heaven: Sunny and bright, with an abundance of light and lots of singing and rejoicing.
“Has any nation ever traded its gods for new ones, even though they are not gods at all? Yet my people have exchanged their glorious God for worthless idols! The heavens are shocked at such a thing and shrink back in horror and dismay,” says the Lord. “For my people have done two evil things: They have abandoned me— the fountain of living water. And they have dug for themselves cracked cisterns that can hold no water at all!”– Jeremiah 2:11-13
“ Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”- John 6:35
“Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”- John 4:13-14
Insight: Broken Cisterns is what we get when we reject God, yet it seems our entire Nation is turning away from Him, and trying to create a man made path to nirvana. But it never works, never has and it never will, because there is no such thing. Instead, what we are witnessing is the chaos that occurs when you move God from the center of civilization and try to replace Him with lesser gods, which in much of the world today seems to be government. Trying to replace the Omnipotence, Omniscience and Omnipresence of God with Government is a fool’s game, and it leads to the destruction and chaos we are witnessing all around us. So, I started thinking about the sculpture above from Jeremiah 2:11-13 and from John 6:34 and 4;13-14 in more detail. How many times a day do I choose to strive after other things with more passion, intensity and focus than I do in my relationship with God? That was a question that a Pastor posed to a large group of twenty somethings gathered at a recent Christian event in Georgia. But the question was also for me, and maybe for you as well. For the Pastor’s point was that anything that comes before God is ultimately a cracked and broken cistern, incapable of holding the Living Water that we so desperately need and desire. Lesser things leave us thirsty, while only the Living Water that Jesus offers fulfills us deep in our soul. Lesser things can never satisfy because when we choose lesser things, we are rejecting the promises of God that He will give us what we need most, which is Him. In our prideful rebellion, we are in essence saying to God, we got this! We know what we need more than you do and we will go find it on our own. What stubborn fools we are!
Matthew 6:33 says “Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.” So do we believe Him? The Bible is full of stories where people sought to find their own created gods to bring them what they thought they needed and they ended up reaping destruction for their wickedness. The very thought of rejecting God or deciding we want to do it our way and don’t need Him anymore is the essence of evil. Yet we do this all the time. So I asked myself what do I put before God with more passion and intensity and focus? Things like sports, career, success, comfort, romance quickly came to mind. Does God oppose these things? No! But I need to get the alignment right. I must seek Him first with all of my intensity and focus and then every good thing comes from my relationship with Him, rather than me seeking these things apart from Him or thinking I can do it on my own. These things apart from God can become destructive forces in our lives. As an example, 1 Timothy 6:10 teaches us that money is not evil but “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Have you ever considered why that is? It is because we are substituting money at the top of the pecking order where God belongs. We are in essence making money a god.
Paul says in Romans 14:23 “everything that does not come from faith is sin.” In other words, anytime we think we can do it on our own, create our own path and lessen our dependence on God, we are sinning because we are forfeiting His glory for a lesser thing. We cannot find contentment apart from God because it doesn’t exist. God deserves all the glory! Yet in our stubborn and foolish pride we as the human race have been trying this since the Garden of Eden, to find real contentment and joy apart from God and the results have always been the same. Empty and broken cisterns!
Prayer: Lord help us to not expect to receive the answers to the things we are seeking from any source other than you, for nothing else can ever satisfy. You are all we need, and You are always enough. Everything else is a broken cistern, incapable of holding the Living Water that we all need.
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