BROKEN CISTERNS

In the Old Testament, we meet the prophet Jeremiah, a man called by God to speak to the nation of Israel during a time of deep crisis. Yet beneath the surface of political unrest and looming destruction was a far greater problem: hearts that had turned away from God. Babylon was rising as the instrument of God's judgment, and Jeremiah was sent to call the people back—to repentance and to the Lord.

God says through Jeremiah, “My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and dug out cisterns for themselves—broken cisterns that can hold no water.”

The fountain of living waters is God Himself—the only true source of life, hope, and sustenance. The broken cisterns represent the futile systems and idols humans construct in a desperate attempt to satisfy a soul-deep thirst for meaning, joy, and fulfillment. But these manmade wells cannot hold water. They leak. They fail.

And the tragedy is not ancient alone. To this day, many continue to commit these same two evils: abandoning the source of life and digging empty wells of their own. In turning from God, we try to take His place, fashioning gods in our own image—pleasure, success, self. But these substitutes cannot satisfy the eternal hunger within us.
Satan feeds this illusion. He whispers, “You will not surely die… You will be like God.” Just as he did with Judas, he dangles the silver before our eyes but hides the noose. He entices with the fruit that is pleasing to the eye, while concealing the truth: “In the day you eat of it, you will surely die.” Like a mirage in the desert, he promises a stream of life only for it to vanish when we arrive.

I grew up in East Alabama, in a house with four brothers. For most of our childhood, we didn’t own a riding lawnmower or a dishwasher. My dad used to say he had five boys for a reason, no need to buy a machine when you’ve got a built-in workforce. Why invest in a dishwasher when five pairs of hands could do the job? Why spend money on a riding mower when five healthy boys were fully capable of pushing one?
Now, I’m sure there are hotter places in the world, but as a kid pushing a lawnmower in the middle of July, East Alabama felt like a dry and weary land where there was no water.
After sweating it out in that blazing heat, our drink of choice was always sweet tea. Mom would hand us a giant mason jar filled with ice-cold tea—liquid gold to our parched lips. It was satisfying in the moment, like an oasis in the desert. But not long after the last sip, we were thirsty again—sometimes even thirstier. What seemed to refresh us left behind a deeper craving. What our bodies really needed was water.
That’s the thing. Sweet tea, and really, any sugary or caffeinated drink—might trick us into thinking we’re satisfied, but it can’t truly hydrate. Only water can give the body what it needs to survive.

A few years back, I came across a startling statistic: most Americans live in a state of mild dehydration. That might make sense in places where clean water is hard to come by. But here in the U.S., water is accessible almost everywhere. The issue isn’t access—it’s choice. We’ve traded what our bodies need for what tastes better in the moment. And what we choose robs us of what we truly require.

Spiritually, we do the same thing. We turn away from the soul-satisfying, life-giving water of Christ and dig our own wells, wells that hold nothing. We chase what feels good in the moment, what looks appealing, what promises relief. But it only leaves us emptier, more parched than before. We’re dehydrated in the soul, crawling through deserts filled with mirages, images of life that lead only to death.
Just as the body can’t survive without water, the soul cannot survive without God. Deprive the body of water long enough, and it will die. The same is true of the soul that rejects the living water of Christ, it dies, not just physically, but spiritually.
The broken cisterns we carve out for ourselves look different for each of us. For some, it's success. For others, religion. For some, its sex, drugs, or the next big thrill. I’ve often said, you can be lost in a crack house or lost in a church house. The symptoms may differ, but the diagnosis is the same: empty hearts searching for satisfaction apart from Christ.

In the words that follow, I hope to take you on a journey—an experiential dive into the broken cisterns we so often turn to, and a deeper look into the bottomless, all-satisfying well that is Christ Jesus.