Broken Cisterns

The Good Book:  Living in the Light Devotions - Day 5

Read

You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. Psalm 16 v 11

Reflect 

The preference for other things over God is like replacing the sun at the center of the solar system of our lives with an inferior planet—such as money, sex, power or simply self—so that the planets of money and sex and power, which were once held in their God-glorifying orbits, are flying wildly and dangerously out of orbit.

Money is zigzagging everywhere, awakening covetousness and greed, and becoming the currency of “pride in possessions”(1 John 2 v 16, see ESV footnote) and dishonesty and anxiety and theft and bribery and embezzling. Sex is spiking up and down erratically in fornication and adultery and pornography and public nudity—or even the fear of sexuality, as if it were not a good gift from God. In all these sins we turn God’s glory into shame, and our shame into so-called human glory. And power is thrusting itself through everything in every manner of self-exalting control and domination and exploitation.

All of this ruin and destruction come because we have exchanged the glory of God—the blazing sun—for other things—things that cannot hold our lives together. We find more pleasure in these other things, and other persons, than we do in God. The psalmist tells us in Psalm 16 v 11, “In [his] presence there is fullness of joy; at [his] right hand are pleasures forevermore.” But God says in Jeremiah 2 v 13, “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.” We were made to live with God as the all-satisfying center of our lives, with everything else in good, godly, happy orbit. Instead, we have a solar system with competing gravitational centers, and nothing else flying in its right orbit.

But there is deliverance. In spite of the way we have all insulted God by our preference for other things, God, in his unspeakable mercy, has done what we cannot do for ourselves, to give us a future and a hope in him. He did something on the cross. He did something when he gave us spiritual life and inclined our heart to believe in Jesus. And he does something every day. The result is that we find ourselves—unworthy though we be—in his presence and at his right hand, where there is fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. And everything in our life changes.
 

Think

• What is it that deep down you find yourself “thirsting” for, precisely? What are the “broken cisterns” you turn to to drink from (Jeremiah 2 v 13)? How can the glory of God—and his intervention at the cross—truly satisfy these particular longings? 
   
• Think back over what you’ve read and reflected on in the last five days. What would it look like to have the worlds of money, sex, and power in their God-honoring orbits in your life? 
   
• “We find ourselves—unworthy though we be—in his presence and at his right hand, where there is fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. And everything in our life changes.” What has God already changed in your life? What are you going to ask him to change today?