Beyond the Weekend: Spaces
Where does God meet us? Throughout Scripture, he meets his people in real places—mountains, deserts, seas, and the temple. Each place teaches us something about who he is. Join us for The Places Where God Meets Us, a six-week series exploring how these spaces point forward to Jesus, the one who meets us still.
Springs of Water
During the Spaces series, Beyond the Weekend will preview the coming Sunday's message rather than looking back at the one before—mirroring our group curriculum and helping to prepare our hearts for the upcoming sermon. This week, that means turning from our look at the Land of Promise to the upcoming message on Springs of Water.
Read: Jeremiah 2:13| Listen: Jeremiah 2
“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.” Jeremiah 2:13
Jeremiah is a prophet who ministers in the decades leading up to Jerusalem's collapse to the Babylonians, preaching a message of repentance for roughly four decades—though God's people largely ignore it. They turn to foreign idols, forgetting the God who sustains them and brings them into the land of promise. God then reminds them through Jeremiah that their folly is trading the true, living water found in God himself for the stagnant and dirty cistern water offered by foreign idols.
This same trade-off threatens our souls today. Rather than seeing God as the true treasure and source of living water, we can look to broken cisterns to meet our needs. These can be good things that function as counterfeit gods, such as a career, possessions, retirement accounts, or close relationships. Like those broken cisterns, these things may hold us for a season, but they were never designed to sustain us forever. They crack under pressure, run dry when we need them most, and leave us thirsty for something more. Gifts were never meant to be gods. Instead of allowing created things to claim the ultimate allegiance of our hearts, we are to see and seek God as the source of life that he really is.
TODAY: Consider where you might be seeking ultimate satisfaction or security outside of God. One way to assess this drift of your heart is to ask the question, “What most occupies my mind right now?” There is a good chance that whatever dominates your mind also directs your heart. Confess what you have been seeking and ask for God’s grace to treasure him above all.
