Cracked Cisterns And Living Water

Let me start with a confession.

I’m not much of a handyman. I try. I really do. I have a toolbox, I watch the YouTube videos, and I stand in the aisle at Lowe’s like I know what I’m doing, but often, I end up calling someone more competent to fix whatever I broke in the process of trying to fix it.

A few years ago, I noticed a little leak under the sink. Just a drip. So I thought, “How hard can it be?” I tightened a couple things, gave it a good wrench twist, and walked away proudly. The next morning? A puddle. I didn’t fix it. I made it worse. I ended up calling a plumber and paying for both the original repair and the damage I caused trying to go it alone.

Jeremiah 2 is kind of like that.

It’s God saying to Israel, “You had the real thing, you had Me. The fountain of living water! But instead of coming to Me, you went and dug your own wells. And not only that, your wells are cracked. They don’t even hold water!”

And friends, I don’t know about you, but that hits home.

Jeremiah paints a vivid picture: God is the “fountain of living water”, an image rich with meaning in the ancient world. In a land where drought was normal and fresh water was precious, a natural spring meant survival. It wasn’t a puddle or a pond, it was water that kept moving, bubbling up from the ground, clean and alive. That’s how God describes Himself. Not as a temple relic, not as a static idea or doctrine, but as a living, flowing, uncontainable source of life.

But here’s the problem. The people didn’t want something wild and flowing. They wanted something predictable. Contained. Easy to manage. So they said, in effect, “Let’s dig our own cisterns. Let’s build something we can control. Something that doesn’t move unless we move it.”

And don’t we do the same?

We take what was meant to be vibrant and dynamic (our relationship with God) and try to package it into something safe and manageable. We turn the wild Spirit of God into a weekly schedule. We confine our sense of God’s presence to a sanctuary or a hymnbook or a church committee. And before we know it, we’ve taken living water and tried to box it up in a stone jar of our own design.

Why do we do this? I think it’s because flowing water is messy. It floods when you least expect it. It carves new paths. It changes landscapes. And that can be scary.

It’s easier to build a system around God than to be swept up in what God is doing.

But Jeremiah reminds us: God isn’t asking to be preserved—He’s asking to be followed. And following the fountain means learning to live not with control, but with trust.

Let’s talk about Tupperware.

Now, I love Tupperware. I do. You can portion it out. Label it. Stack it neatly in the fridge. Leftovers? Handled. But here’s the thing: Tupperware theology doesn’t work with the living God. You can’t store the Holy Spirit like soup in the fridge.

You can’t label God’s power and grace and stick it in a drawer.

The moment you try to “contain” God, you’re no longer experiencing Him as living water. You’re experiencing Him as a memory of what once was.

And that’s what Jeremiah is calling out: “You’ve replaced Me with a system. A leaky one at that.”

And God doesn’t just say, “You built cisterns instead of trusting Me.” He adds, “And they’re cracked.” In other words, even the systems we build to replace God don’t work. They look secure. They feel productive. But slowly, quietly, they leak.

A cistern in ancient Israel was essentially a pit carved into limestone to store rainwater. Functional? Sure. But fragile. Over time, the stone would shift, cracks would form, and the water would seep into the ground. By the time you reached in with a bucket, it was half-empty or worse, stale and spoiled.

Now let’s think about what that looks like in our lives.

We build things to hold our peace: Our purpose, our identity. Sometimes it’s a career. Sometimes it’s a relationship. Sometimes it’s the illusion of control or the approval of others. And for a while, those cisterns seem to work. You get recognition at work. Your savings account grows. People tell you you’re doing great.

But life moves. Jobs change. Kids grow up. Health declines. Culture shifts. Churches go through transitions.

And the systems we’ve built, those neat little containers, start to crack. What used to work doesn’t anymore. What once gave you confidence now leaves you anxious. The bucket you used to draw from is coming up dry.