Living Water

There's nothing like chocolate to soothe me when I'm feeling down--and that's the problem.

Gerald May, in his fabulous book, Addiction and Grace, says in effect, that humans are created with an ache to be filled in our hearts in a way that, ultimately, only God Himself can fill. Saint Augustine said something similar, that is, that each of us has a kind of God-shaped vacuum.

"Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee" (Augustine).

The problem for us humans is that we tend to look to sensual things to scratch that itch when the answer is really spiritual.

Jeremiah says it to Israel: "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" (Jer. 2: 10).

A cistern was a huge sunken vessel, like a water-well, that provided water in arid places. Obviously, a broken cistern would leak and become useless. Going to a broken cistern for water is futile.

For Israel, the "broken cisterns" were the idols of the nations whom they had begun to worship instead of Yahweh, the One True God, who had actually redeemed them from Egypt and given them the Promised Land. How could those who had been so miraculously delivered turn away from God?

"The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" (Jer. 17: 9).

The answer lies in the deceptive nature of our own hearts. And who does our heart deceive more than ourselves? When I yearn to be filled with God's comforting love and presence, I convince myself that something other-than-God will satisfy me. For me it is chocolate. For others it is alcohol or work or spending. You name it, you can go to it for water and find that it does not really satisfy.

God is the source of living water. And we know that Jesus claimed this moniker for himself.

"If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink," Jesus said in John 7: 37. And when we learn to bring our deepest thirsts to Him, when we draw from the well of living water, there will be an overflow from within us. "Whoever believes in me, as the scriptures have said, streams of living water will flow from within him" (John 7: 38).

Let's learn to go to the True Well of Living Water when we're thirsty.