The Self-Made End up Broken But Jesus Saves

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

Early in Jeremiah's message to Judah, he speaks these words, on behalf of God to God's  wayward people.  These words speak to mankind's nature, because the people of Judah, like us, were decendants of Adam and Eve.  People need water, for sure, but so many questions follow from this verse.  Why would people who could partake of a spring of living water choose to forsake such a gift?  Why would someone prefer stagnant water over flowing water?  Why would someone take the time to build a cistern and then improperly build it properly so it fails to hold water?

Sadly there must be something about the human condition that causes us to turn our backs on the spring of living water, which comes from God the Father and his son Jesus.   But we cannot leave it at that because whatever the living water represents, we seek that water to survive.  So then we attempt to meet those basic needs with our own ability, with disastrous consequences.

The story doesn't end there, however, because Jesus, by giving believers the Holy Spirit causes them to become vessels of living water.  Through Jesus' work and his gift of the Holy Spirit, we are delivered from digging out our own failing cisterns to holding the living water we crave, to becoming vessels from which living water flows.

On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, "Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink.  Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.

John 4:37 - 38