Emptiness(2)
A big Thank You!
Thanks to all of you who commented on my previous post about emptiness! My time with the students at Silverdale Baptist Academy went well today.
In our time, we focused on the broken cisterns that can hold no water from Jeremiah 2:13.
“for my people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me,
the fountain of living waters,
and hewed out cisterns for themselves,
broken cisterns that can hold no water. ”
There are so many things that lie to us. So many different empty promises, wooing us with the promise of lasting satisfaction. We listen. We follow. We dig. Yet, we're never truly satisfied. God gave his chosen people a vivid, relatable word picture. They have rejected Him as the fountain, the gushing spring of living waters. They've walked away from this living spring to dig in the dirt, getting their own hands in the dry earth, trying to build a better well. As their digging, God tells them that this "better" well will never hold any water. Imagine someone digging in the dirt, scraping and scrounging in the dirt, going deeper and deeper, trying to find that satisfaction.
"I can't get no... though I try and I try..."
I've had many conversations with students afterward concerning the wells that they currently find themselves in right now. Yes, the typical highschool guys and girls scenario, the wells of success, power, porn, drugs... the list got pretty lengthy.
What's the answer?
If you've run after empty things and have become empty, where do you go? You're there, in the pit that you've dug with your own two hands. What do you do?
Put the shovel down.
Cry out to God for deliverance.
The conversation between Jesus and the woman at the well (some 600 years after Jeremiah) in John 4 rings true today.
