“Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life”” (John 4:13–14).
God wants to be our only source of life and that is what He promised. This is what He was having Jeremiah speak to the people in Jerusalem. “For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, The fountain of living waters, To hew for themselves cisterns, Broken cisterns That can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13).
We need to understand repentance as it is used from the Hebrew Scriptures. To repent is to return, and to sin is to miss the mark, miss the goal, miss the destination. The message of Jeremiah to the inhabitants of Jerusalem may be an answer for the church today, In so many ways we can tend to put our trust in the human institutions that are like broken cisterns that can hold no water. God is calling us to return to Him, to return to the Living Waters.
We have the Scriptures, we have especially the New Testament with practical applications for churches. A lot of the problems that we are facing today are addressed in the epistles of the New Testament. One of the things that happened to the church is that it lost the power of the Holy Spirit by the participation of every member of the church.
The same thing that happened to Israel during the time of Jeremiah can also be applied to the church in general. For us the same thing happened, and we need to return to the foundational teaching from the Scriptures. “Set up for yourself roadmarks, Place for yourself guideposts; Direct your mind to the highway, The way by which you went. Return, O virgin of Israel, Return to these your cities.” (Jeremiah 31:21).
I have been in search of the roadmarks and guideposts, looking where I lost track and where I allowed myself to get distracted. Where I started to trust the human structure instead of learning to follow the leading of the Spirit. In all of this I am not looking to blame anyone, but to trust God in all that He used to bring me to this point.
Colossians 2
Colossians 3:14-17
Ephesian 4:11-16
Ephesians 5:19-21
Jeremiah 7
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