Broken Cisterns

"For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water." (Jeremiah 2:13). When we attempt to dictate the terms of our relationship with God, when we place limits on the manner and the timing with which the Lord must answer our prayers, when we try to swallow up God's will with our own, we are carving out cisterns, broken cisterns that will hold no water, especially no living water. The Lord wants us to come to Him, the Fountain of Living Waters, often and freely, every time we thirst or even just every time we want to be near that great and glorious fountain. But we have to come to Him. We can't scoop up some of the living water and take it back home and keep it in a specially prepared cistern. For it to be Living Water, it must be constantly flowing from the fountain. Once we've locked it up in a box, it is no longer Living Water. We don't get to lock God up in the basement to do our bidding like some Stephen King character. He's not a genie we can carry around in a bottle that we open long enough for Him to grant us a wish and then it's back in the bottle for the creator of the universe. When we rely more on the letter than the spirit of the law, when we put more value on past revelations than present ones, when we trust more to pre-established systems than the constant guidance of the Holy Ghost, then we have fashioned a stone cistern, a prison for our God, a rigid and inflexible framework through which our Heavenly Father is allowed to operate in our lives. The bitter irony is that if we just open ourselves up to the Lord and put our faith and our trust in Him, then He will cause His fountain of Living Waters to spring up within our Hearts, so that we may always have His living waters to be with us. We don't have to carry around a tiny, pathetic piece of God in a bottle when instead we can love God with all of our Hearts and He will come dwell within our hearts, all of Him, every single last drop of His living waters. Carving a cistern is like trying to place a stone around our hearts. It might trap the living waters inside, for a time, but it also locks them up so that we may not access them. The good news is that we are imperfect in our efforts to confine God. The cisterns we carve out and in which we encase our hearts are broken cisterns and can't hold the fountains of Living Waters forever. Drop by drop the Living Waters will furrow cracks and holes in our cisterns and the Love of God will spill past our defenses and into our lives. We may have become jaded and thus made of our hearts a stone but God will break through that stone and love us and bless us whether we want it or not.