Fearing God the Spring of Living Water

Okay here's another thought on Fearing God...

Last week I was studying a passage that always convicts me. It is in Jeremiah 2:13 where God says that His people have committed two sins. He uses an analogy to paint this picture. One sin is that they have forsaken Him the spring of living water. The second is that they have dug for themselves cisterns that cannot hold water. It would be foolish enough to neglect a perfectly good spring, but can't you just see the foolishness of someone then going hewn out of stone a cistern. But what makes this crazier is that after all this hard work, these cisterns are broken and cannot even hold water.

I can relate. I like the old hymn says find myself prone to wander and prone to leave the God I love. Why on earth do I, like the Israelites, do I forsake the source of where all satisfaction is found? Why do I struggle to hewn out cisterns that cannot even hold water?

The Lord goes on to talk about how the Israelites have gone toEgypt to drink from a tributary of the Nile and Assyria to drink of the Euphrates. Its would be one thing that God would call these things foolish but he calls them sins. He calls it wickedness and backsliding. He says it is evil and bitter.

'Bitter' reminds me of a time in the summer of 1994 when I was on missions project in Mongolia. Every day we traveled to a new town to show the Jesus film and along the way had to pump water from whatever source we could find. One day we got to this one town and we heard of a spring. While the women on our team showed the film, Chad and I went looking for it thinking we would serve them by pumping water. The first thing we do when we get to the spring after bathing in it, is empty all of our teams' water bottles and starting pumping what we thought was fresh water. I will never forget the feeling of despondency when we drank our first swig. It was salty! We could do nothing but just continue to pump and for several days all we had to drink was this salty water. (There's another story to this that I will tell later.)

How does this relate to fearing Him? In verse 20, the Lord says that this forsaking of Him - the foundation of living water - is because they have no awe or fear of Him. If we were truly in awe of who He was, how grand He is and that He alone satisfies us, we would never forsake Him and go after worthless other sources.

Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing... Here's my heart. O take and seal it; Seal it for thy courts above.