Broken Cisterns (Jeremiah 2.1-13)

Introduction

One Sunday afternoon in April 1739 a 35 year-old Church of England clergyman preached to an open-air gathering of miners in Bristol.

It was the first time he had ever preached outside a church building and he only did it because he had been refused permission to preach in any church by several displeased bishops. They didn’t approve of his enthusiastic delivery and his style of speech that appealed to the emotions.

The preacher was not happy with the idea of having to conduct open-air services. He felt it was undignified. But with church pulpits closed to him, he continued to preach in the open air for the next fifty-two years. He did speak in churches on the rare occasion he was invited to do so, but mostly he preached in fields, in streets and in town halls.

All his life from that April afternoon onwards he was seen as a threat. At times he was physically attacked by mobs. Clergy often denounced him in sermons and in print. He was criticised as a pedlar of false doctrines and religious extremism. He was branded as a fanatic, leading people astray. He was accused of spuriously claiming miraculous gifts and even trying to reinstate Catholicism as the established church in England.

He rode 250,000 miles by horse, travelling from town to town with the gospel. That’s the equivalent of going to Australia and back 13 times. It’s the distance from the earth to the moon! He preached more than 40,000 sermons, three a day on average. And of course his name was John Wesley. His open-air preaching changed our nation.

What many people don’t realise is that at the time Wesley preached the gospel in England, our country was in a desperate state.

Most children were denied an education, being forced into cheap labour in workhouses where they died in droves. Child hanging for petty crime was commonplace.

Crime was rife. Prisons were a national disgrace. Debtors were often tortured to death by jailors for money they did not have.

Alcoholism and premature death fuelled by cheap gin was endemic.

And while the country was in a terrible state, the church was ineffective. It was upper class and lifeless; part of the problem, not part of the answer.

Jeremiah’s first sermon was also in the open air, on the streets of Jerusalem, not to an appreciative congregation but to a hostile crowd. We heard a bit of it in our first reading.

Unlike Wesley, Jeremiah had no training and no experience. He would have been young, probably in his early twenties and, like Wesley, his preaching quickly got him excluded from official religious buildings because the establishment didn’t like the message.

Our God never has been and never will be confined to ecclesiastical buildings. If the church closes its doors to him, he just raises people up to speak his word somewhere else. Jesus spoke more in the open air and in homes than he ever did in so-called holy places.

Background

We had a little look at Jeremiah’s world last week, but in case you weren’t here I want to give a quick outline.

Jeremiah preached for a period of about 40 years, towards 600 BC in the last days of the nation of Judah.

Now remember, when King Solomon died about 350 years beforehand, there was power struggle. Two men staked rival claims for the throne and it led to a civil war.

In the end, they decided to separate and become two independent nations. 10 of the 12 tribes to the north kept the name “Israel.” The two remaining tribes to the south (Judah and Benjamin) called themselves “Judah” after the larger of the two.

Israel had a succession of kings, 19 in all, and the Bible says that every one of them, without exception, did evil in the eyes of the Lord. That northern kingdom was eventually carried off into exile to Assyria in 722 BC leaving just Judah.

Most of the kings of Judah did evil in the eyes of the Lord too but they did have some good ones.

And Jeremiah started his preaching during the reign of Judah’s very last good king, Josiah. Most of Jeremiah’s ministry therefore was during the reigns of kings who were irreversibly turning the nation away from God’s ways.

The people of Judah were wandering away from the living God down their own paths.

Let’s have a look at Jeremiah’s first sermon then.

An Unhappy Marriage (v1-8)

In v1-8, God compares his relationship with his people to an unhappy marriage. God speaks about his heartbreak over becoming estranged from the people he loves.

This is something we can all relate to. We all know people whose marriages have broken down. We all know couples who have gone through messy divorces. We might have suffered it ourselves.

A shattered marriage is like a death. Just like when somebody dies, in marriage breakdown there’s shock, there’s anger, there’s broken hearts, there’s tears.

There’s bewilderment. God says here “Have I broken any promise to you? Have I ever let you down? I feel so heartbroken.”

Those who look on at a divorce from the outside just feel powerless. All we feel able to say is that “it’s very sad” which sounds so lame but what else can you say?

In v2-3 God looks back nostalgically to the honeymoon when he and his bride were together alone. “I remember the devotion of your youth,” he says, “how as a bride you loved me and followed me through the wilderness…”

And God opens his heart about how protective he was of his bride, and how pure she was.

But then things started to go wrong. She started finding fault with him and flirting. God says “I brought you out of a barren wilderness into a fertile land.” He’s saying “Look, I provided for you, I gave you all you ever wanted, I treated you honourably, you wanted for nothing.”

History shows that God’s people drifted away from the temple and went after tacky, gaudy fertility rituals instead.

Coming out of an unpopulated desert they became distracted by sophisticated society. They became corrupted by perverted practices. They allowed themselves to experiment with rotten religion.

And v8 says this: they stopped asking “where is the Lord?” You see, you don’t need to do anything bad to get away from God. All it takes is to get distracted and forget what he’s done for you and you’re soon on the way to replacing him altogether.

“You came and defiled my land” says God in v7. In the context, he’s saying “Do you know what? It was like returning home to our beautiful house and finding you in bed with some stranger.”

Throughout the Bible God likes to talk about his relationship with us in terms of a romance and a marriage.

In Ephesians 5 Paul says that a marriage between a man and a woman is an acted drama of the relationship between Christ and the church. It’s about two incompatible partners becoming one. It’s about committed love and a binding promise to never leave or forsake one another.

But marriages go wrong. In Revelation 2 Jesus says to a church, his bride, “You have forgotten your first love.”

Have you ever been in love? For some of you this morning like myself, it has been some years but do you remember the first time you were in love? Think back to your first kiss – the softness of the lips, the racing of the heart, the passion, the excitement that your feelings are reciprocated.

Do you remember what it was like wanting to spend every moment of every day with that one person? Do you remember how slowly time went by when you were apart? And how quickly it went when you were together? You had never had feelings so exhilarating, so overwhelming. Nothing was too much to ask, no amount was too big to spend, and no distance was too far to go.

Do you remember first coming to faith? Do you remember a time in your life when you loved to be with the Lord? When there was an abundance of joy in his presence? Perhaps when you were baptized in the Holy Spirit or when you saw an amazing answer to prayer…

As the song says, “Where did the good times go?”

Have you forgotten the absolute thrill of knowing Jesus for the first time? Have you forgotten the amazing feeling you had at that moment of salvation when you realized God loves you so much? Have you forgotten the lifting of sin from your shoulders to be replaced by complete forgiveness? Have you forgotten the glorious freedom of the children of God that is yours in Christ?

I just wonder if anyone’s relationship with God here this morning has become stale, like a marriage that’s going through the motions.

Well, just as the flame between a husband and wife can be rekindled, the relationship between us and God can be reignited. That’s what God wants to do today.

2) A Leaking Container (v9-13)

If in v1-8 God compares his relationship to his people as an unhappy marriage, in v9-13 he compares his people to a broken cistern.

In our culture, a broken cistern means a busted flush on a toilet – which stinks. But a cistern in Bible times had nothing to do with toilets.

If you’ve ever lived in a dry country abroad, you’ll know that attitudes towards rain are completely different to what they are here.

In Britain, rain is usually an inconvenience and can even feel like a curse – especially when it is relentless as it has been this year.

But water is always welcome in the Middle East. It is never annoying, never an ordeal.

They would approve absolutely Benjamin Franklin’s comment on the blessing of what we call bad weather. This is what he said. “Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards. There it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine, a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.”

That’s a very civilised way of looking at a wet and miserable weekend isn’t it? Rain in Bible lands means God is showing us his favour. No rain means God is not blessing us for some reason.

Despite the fact that Israel has a long dry season, there are several constant springs there. You can find springs in Israel that have never been dry in living memory. But they are rare.

Almost all the hill country in Israel is limestone which is porous. It doesn’t hold the little water there is from rainfall, so they have to find ways of storing it so that there is a supply all year round.

In Jeremiah’s day, they used to make deep hollows into the ground, line them with clay and fill them with water collected in the brief rainy season. These were called cisterns and they could be the difference between life and death.

The problem is that Israel is a zone where there are frequent small earth tremors and they form hairline cracks in the lining of the cisterns, meaning the water leaks away and is lost. Broken cisterns.

God said through Jeremiah that the people of Judah had gone wrong on two points. Let’s look at v13, it’s one of the key verses in Jeremiah.

“My people have committed two sins: [1] they have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and [2, they] have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”

Imagine living in a dry and thirsty land, and moving away from a water source that has never, ever run dry and settling instead for a cracked underground water tank that turns the water muddy and constantly leaks.

God says that’s what it’s like whenever people replace a relationship with him for every latest fad.

In every age, there is a temptation to discard the fountain of living water and look elsewhere for something different to quench our spiritual thirst.

The people of Judah found that their cisterns were broken and could hold no refreshing water.

Trying to construct an artificial reservoir for spiritual water is foolish enough, but to turn and reject a supply from a never-failing spring is doubly stupid. All our man-made substitutes for spiritual fulfilment are doomed from the start.

I feel this is such a word for our nation which, in the last 100 years has forsaken the Lord, the spring of living water, and dug its own cisterns, broken cisterns that hold nothing.

Let me give you a few examples.

In 1910 around 85% of children in the UK attended Sunday school. They learned about Jesus, they heard the gospel about God’s love for them and they were familiar with the Bible. Not all of it was great probably, but a lot of it was and there was a healthy fear of God in the life of our nation.

As I mentioned last Sunday, political leaders and newspaper editors twice called the citizens of the UK to days of prayer in 1940. Most of the adults of our land had been to Sunday school and they knew about the God who saved Daniel from the lion’s den. They knew about the kid with a slingshot who defeated mighty Goliath. So they cried out to God and our country was twice delivered against overwhelming odds.

100 years on, only 5% of children in the UK attend Sunday school today. That’s one example of how our country has forsaken the spring of living water. There are many more. Lord, have mercy on us.

At the same time as forsaking the spring of living water, we have made our own cisterns by making secular humanism our default philosophy, by accepting political correctness, by embracing relationships that are light on commitment, and by becoming obsessed by trashy celebrities.

The former chief rabbi Jonathan Sachs had it right when he said “The idols of today are unmistakable - fame without achievement, sex without consequences and wealth without responsibility.”

Our broadcasters and printed media caricature the church, lampoon its leaders and rubbish the Bible.

Our political leaders pass legislation that is contrary to God’s revealed will and our police arrest people for public expressions of faith.

And we ask why Britain is top of the league in Europe for teenage pregnancy.

We wonder why teenage self-harm inpatient admissions increased by 68% between 2002 and 2012. That’s 1 in 12 young people in the UK. Soul Survivor has afternoon sessions that typically attract about 150 young people to each one. Last year a new seminar broke all records as 800 teenagers turned up for a seminar entitled “I hate myself.”

The most dangerous place for a child to be in 2012 Britain was in its mother’s womb, where over 200,000 lives were ended before being sent to the hospital incinerator. Over a quarter of those were repeat abortions for women under 25.

We hear of local councils banning prayer for healing on the streets, and of employers dismissing employees for wearing a cross at work or expressing a view on “same-sex marriage” on a private social media.

This is like the world Jeremiah lived in. We too have forsaken the source of living water and made for ourselves broken cisterns that hold no water.

Every summer, we are treated to broadcasts of the Last Night of the Proms where people wave flags and sing Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia.

It’s fun because it’s over the top and patriotic and we all like a party. But we all know it’s ironic. Since when has Britain ruled the waves? It did once. Since when can we sing “By Freedom gained, by truth maintained, thine Empire shall be strong”? What truth maintained? What empire?

These songs belong to an era when God gave us stewardship of much of the world, an empire upon which the sun never set.

Why, as a nation, do we never stop to ask why all this has happened? Why did Britain lose its empire?

No Prime Minister in my lifetime, 52 years, has ever asked why our nation has been so humbled over the course of the last century, a period where faith in Christ has become side-lined and replaced with broken cisterns. Lord, have mercy on us.

Ending

The Bible says "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news." I've had plenty of bad news this morning so let me finish with this. It is never too late to return to the spring of living water. Never. That's the good news.

You know, one hot afternoon, Jesus walked up to a well, a cistern if you like, and had a conversation about water with a woman who'd burned some bridges in her life. He said that he is that never ending spring that Jeremiah talked about.

Don’t refuse the water that Jesus offers you this morning.

So as I end, here are four things Jesus says about that bubbling, cool, fresh, living water that is himself.

1. Jesus said it’s the gift of God. You can’t buy it. You can’t earn it. But you have to receive it. Do you need to learn to receive?

2. Jesus said it’s living water. It’s the life you’ve always wanted. Don’t be fooled by the stagnant water of religion. Jesus is the way, the truth and the… life.

3. “If you drink it,” says Jesus, “you will never thirst again. That means Christ is always able to satisfy your weary soul when you are spiritually dry.

4. Jesus said the water becomes a spring. Here’s why you never get thirsty again; it’s not because one drink is all you need. It’s because one true drink produces a well inside your soul that supplies an eternity of drinks.

All who are thirsty, come and drink.

Let’s stand to pray…

 Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 2nd March 2014