Isaiah 55:1 “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters.”
I’ve visited a number of friends’ lavatories in the UK and found a plaque on the wall announcing that it has been twinned with a loo in Rutana Province, Burundi! It’s an innovative and fun way of raising money for a sanitation project, but beyond that it provides a constant reminder to the hundreds of generous people who have twinned their loos, not to take for granted clean water and good sanitation.
Jesus spoke of another type of water – spiritual water. He talked about it welling up inside of us, and that it quenches our thirst. This water is seriously good for you – refreshing, cleansing, renewing and life-giving. We all have it available to us through Jesus – we just have to come, we just have to drink.
So why is it, then, that we so often turn from it and drink out of puddles of dirty water that the world offers? Jeremiah prophesied long ago in 2:13: “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.”
Ouch! I’m guilty as charged – but why do I do it, when the living water is so much better?
What constitutes a dirty puddle? Anything you turn to to meet your deep needs rather than God isn’t going to be good for you. It could be anything from shopping, booze, and food to trashy TV, the wrong sort of web sites or an unhealthy fantasy life. Some things are obviously poisonous and damaging whilst others won’t seem so bad to us, but we all know when we’re going elsewhere than to God to quench our thirst.
So let’s choose daily to turn to the spring of living water and drink deeply, and regularly, as though our life depended on it. Because it does.
Lord, I choose to quench my thirst in you today. And in so doing may streams of living water flow out from me to bless others too. Amen!
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