In our new series tonight (‘The Wells of Salvation’), we looked at Isaiah 12:3 which tells us ‘with joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.’ Joy is promised to us by Jesus (see John 15:11) and is the source of strength in God (Neh 8:10), but so often, we struggle because we don’t like to admit our spiritual thirst and we don’t like to admit that God’s ways are the only ways we can know true and lasting satisfaction. Jeremiah pinpointed the problem when he prophesied, ‘My 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.’ (Jer 2:13)

God is the source of living water (Jer 17:13). Water is essential to life, but the question remains whether we draw water from wells or from cisterns. In Israel at the time Isaiah and Jeremiah were writing, there were four main sources of water for settlements. There was obviously fresh surface water (the Sea of Galilee, for example) and there were springs and wells as well as cisterns which were used to collect rain so that the water could be used in dry periods. Springs and wells tap into the same source of water, but springs are natural, and wells are dug by people from the surface. Rain could be collected in cisterns, which were at that time large holes dug into the ground, usually in bedrock, but they differed from wells in that they could only hold captured rainwater. They were, in effect, like a storage tank, a bit like a reservoir. A well actually tapped into an underground water source; it had access to living water.[1]

We need to be drawing water from a well of water which has access to life-giving rivers instead of simply dipping into a storage container which can easily leak and which has finite resources. Eventually, we will reach the end of our resources, the end of the satisfaction that worldly things can bring. That may well take a long time: there is much pleasure to be found in the world and we can live for many years in contentment, thinking we have found all we need in family, friends, homes, material possessions, successful careers and so on. But one day we will find that even if we have everything we have always believed was vital to a successful life, we feel lifeless and restless. The cistern will have run dry.

It’s tempting at this point to simply dig another cistern: to find another job, to swap partners, to buy more stuff, to move house. But God wants us to learn that satisfaction ultimately comes from Him and not from these other things. There is an abundance in God which satisfies all our needs and all our desires (see Ps 87:7, Song of Songs 4:15) There is no problem with supply; the wells of salvation will never run dry. We simply need, as Casting Crowns sing, to come to the well. (The Well’, Casting Crowns)

[1] http://funjoelsisrael.com/2010/09/what-is-a-cistern/