Jeremiah 2:13: “Do so because My people have committed a double wrong. They have rejected Me, the fountain of life‑giving water, and they have dug cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that cannot even hold water.”

I hope this is not me, and I hope this is not you. But a lot of times we do not know that we are not really dependent on God. We are not really prioritizing His kingdom. We do not know the ways in which we are actually loving the world and the things in the world, and the love of the Father is not in us.

We do not know how much we want to please men, how much our sense of valuation is shaped by the things of this world, and how the love of the Father is not in us. According to 1 John 2:15–17, we are told, “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”

God is saying, “These people have forsaken Me. They have rejected Me.” We may not know the ways in which, though we are Christians, we have actually rejected God, rejected His judgment. We do not really know the power of how we have been shaped by the world itself, shaped by the world’s valuation, the kind of conclusions we have come to, how we really, really want to be patterned after this world, and how we do not really understand how our life is being patterned after this world—how we are seeking the things of this world rather than the things in heaven (Colossians 3:1–2).

And that does not mean God is rejecting us, but this is a call for us to know that maybe we have not arrived. Maybe our sense of judgment and valuation is still shaped by this world. And you know, we can come up with reasoning, come up with arguments why whatever we are doing is correct, why whatever we are pursuing is the correct thing.

But really, a lot of the things we are doing are because we do not want to be judged by people—not because we are seeking God, but because we do not want to be judged by people. “Let them not say anything bad about me. Let me just do it because that is what everybody wants.” But is that what God wants? Is that how He wants us to be—shaped by His word, by His ways, by His reasoning about things—or have we adopted the worldly way of thinking, the worldly way of judging?

I am not talking about “the church” in the abstract. I am talking about our personal life. Me as a person: have I been shaped by the world? Have I sought my identity from being like the people around me, being like that person, being like this other person?

That is such a challenge. When Jesus Christ told someone, “Follow Me,” he said, “I will follow You, but I need to bury my dad first.” Jesus said, “Follow Me, and let the dead bury their own dead” (Luke 9:59–60). You might say to yourself, “How can you begrudge the man for trying to bury his dead? That is what everybody does. That is the way things are. That is how things are just logical. Is he doing the wrong thing?” No, he is not doing the wrong thing—objectively. But when you compare that with the divine demand, we begin to conclude that maybe he was doing the wrong thing.

“He has rejected Me.” I do not know in which ways we are rejecting God, rejecting His pattern for our life, rejecting the reality of His call, rejecting the divine demand. Paul had to say that in view of the mercies of God, we should “offer [our] bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” (Romans 12:1). That is what we are talking about here. He has been reasoning with them from chapter 1, and in chapter 12 he says, “In view of the mercies of God, offer yourselves a living sacrifice.”

That is what I am talking about—that reasoning. What kind of reasoning has been roaming about within us that made us come to specific conclusions that are actually patterned after this world? And He is telling you: it is not going to satisfy you. “I am the satisfaction.” That is what we are hearing here. “I am the fountain of life‑giving water.” But whatever alternative you have, whatever conclusions you have come to, He is saying it is like you have dug cisterns for yourselves—cracked cisterns that cannot even hold water.

It is counter‑productive. Anything apart from God, anything apart from the way of God, is going to lead to suffering, even though you do not think of it like that. You are thinking of it as, “This is how I am going to make it.” And I am not saying those things in themselves are wrong, objectively speaking, but I am talking about the divine demand, what God represents.

This word is coming to the Israelites—people of God. The words of Paul in Romans 12 are coming to the people of God: in view of the mercies of God, how should you now be patterned? He says later in that chapter, “Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought to think” (Romans 12:3).

It is about how you think of yourself; it is about the kind of love that is embedded in us—the love of this world that is embedded in us, that is driving us, that we are not even aware of. God is calling us to repentance, to come back to Him, the fountain of living water.

God bless you. See you later.