Living Water

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." - C.S. Lewis

On Thursday nights I attend/help my mom out with a high school girls Bible study for my sister and her friends. We're doing Beth Moore's Breaking Free, one that I'd done a few years ago. There's "homework" every day, and then during our meeting we discuss what we've learned and then watch a teaching by Beth. It's a really good study, focusing on issues like actually knowing and enjoying God, finding satisfaction in Him, having our broken hearts healed, and breaking off generational sins and letting those idols stop with us. It applies Scripture to everything.

Last Thursday, Beth's teaching was about the Samaritan woman at the well --- a familiar story, but she spoke about it in a way that I'd never thought of before. She points out how Jesus always gave his name in context of the need. When the people were hungry, he fed the 5,000 and then said, "I am the bread of life." When Lazarus was dead and he was comforting the sisters, he said, "I am the resurrection and the life." And when the woman at the well came to draw water, he explained how if she knew who he was, she could've asked him for "living water" and never thirst again.

Beth found it interesting that he uses water as his metaphor. In the video she did an illustration with two vases: one she filled with things like Cheetos, toy cars, money, a picture, a little scarf, all to represent the things we try to stuff into our lives to satisfy us and make us happy. When it's all said and done, though, as she held up the vase, it's obvious that there are still empty spaces.

The second vase she simply fills with water. She points out how water is the only substance that will fill every crevice and space, how it reaches to the farthest place and can get into the tiniest hole. In the context of the Samaritan woman, broken as she was with five failed marriages, always searching to have her heart filled, Jesus was showing her exactly what she needed: Himself.

This lesson struck me so hard. How many times do I search for things other than Jesus to satisfy me? Jeremiah 2 gives God's lament about how we His 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."

What am I stuffing into the vase of my soul? What are you trying to shove into yours?

Entertainment?
A relationship?
Money, material things?
Your reputation?
Pornography?
A job?
Food?

What would it look like to forsake those broken cisterns and return to the Lord wholeheartedly? How many other lives would be changed in the process?

I pray that we all will have the courage to smash our idols and go back to the River of life, because He is the water that is truly alive and truly able to sastify our thirst. We can try everything else on this earth, but I know at my core that we were made for Jesus Christ and Him alone. I'm grateful that nothing else satisfies.