Broken Cisterns: The Cisterns We Dig, and the Fountain We Leave

“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 (NASB)

Jeremiah had a hard assignment: to tell God’s own people they had wandered from Him. And in a single verse, God sums up the whole tragedy — two evils, laid side by side. The first was a sin of omission: they had forsaken Him. The second was a sin of commission: they’d traded the true God for idols of their own making. Then, to show them exactly what they’d done, God gives them a picture.

In that dry land, water was life — and where you got it mattered. The best source was a natural spring. Scripture even calls it “living water,” because it was always moving, always fresh, and never ran dry. You didn’t build a spring; you simply came and drank. A cistern was the opposite. It was man-made — a pit you cut out of solid rock by hand and sealed with plaster, all to catch whatever rain happened to fall. The water it held was stagnant and brackish, and in a dry season it could run out completely. Worse yet, if the plaster cracked, the whole thing leaked dry and held nothing at all. So picture the trade God is describing: turning your back on a spring that flows on its own, forever — to go break your back digging a hole that might not hold a single drop.

It made no sense. And yet — I’ve done the very same thing for most of my life. I didn’t understand that I was doing it until I started counseling, and that’s when this verse came alive to me and set me on a new course.

That’s when I began to see all the cisterns I’d been digging with my own hands. People-pleasing. Manipulation. Lying. Pretending to be something I wasn’t. Showing off. Every one of them was my own attempt to find satisfaction and life apart from God — and every one eventually cracked and leaked dry. I’d lower the bucket again and again, keep coming up empty, and still wonder why I was always thirsty.

Seeing it forced a reckoning. It was disruptive — but that disruption became the beginning of real growth. Here’s what took me longest to grasp: every cistern I dug was, at its core, a way of walking away from God — a way of leaning on myself instead of on Him. Self-sufficiency can be as natural as breathing, and it was for me. I didn’t come to faith until I was nearly twenty, so I’d had two decades of practice at running my own life.

But here’s the thing: those two evils were never really two. The forsaking and the digging were the same move. And once I finally saw what I was doing, I couldn’t unsee it. It forced me to choose — keep hewing empty cisterns, or abandon them and follow the Lord back to the Fountain of life.

Choosing the Fountain sounds simple, but retraining took time. Seeing the cisterns was only the first step — learning to trust God instead was the harder one. Trusting Him is rarely as cut-and-dry as digging a cistern. While digging is concrete and gives you something to show for it, trust can feel mysterious — even unproductive or counterintuitive. But that’s exactly where you learn to listen for the Lord, discern His voice, and seek Him and follow. You can’t skip the relationship part. It’s one thing to follow when it’s easy; it’s a whole new ball game when your daily life hangs on it. And still, again and again, He met me in those moments and showed me His way. The choosing was never effortless — but the more I chose, the easier it became.

And here’s the sad part — most people never reach that reckoning. Not because they love their cisterns, but because they don’t understand what they’re doing. They’re thirsty, digging, and they’ve never once stopped to ask why there’s no water. But the Fountain never moved. It’s still running, still free, still full. The only question is whether we’ll set down the shovel long enough to drink.

Big Idea

We all hew cisterns — people-pleasing, pretending, a hundred quiet ways of chasing life apart from God — and every one of them runs dry. The moment you truly see what you’re digging, you’re brought to a decision: the pit, or the Fountain. Friends, choose the Fountain.

Questions to Ponder

What are your go-to cisterns — the places you run for life and satisfaction instead of the Lord? What makes them so attractive? And be honest: how well do they actually hold water? Think of a recent time you trusted in something other than God. How did it work out, and how might it have gone if you’d trusted Him instead? Are you at that reckoning right now — finally seeing a cistern for what it is?

Application

With your journal in hand, start by asking the Lord to help you see where your cisterns are — and to show you the choice in front of you, the cistern or the Fountain, in real time. That’s the key: having the spiritual focus to recognize the moments when this choice is on the table. They can be hard to detect without the Lord’s prompting, so I ask Him to be a whisper in my ear — or a shout, if that’s what I need. Then, when you see the decision in front of you, you’ll have two options: trust yourself and dig your cisterns, or trust the Lord and move toward the Fountain of living water. Ask Him for the courage to choose Him — because it will almost certainly require you to do something that, at first, feels very hard. In fact — not to be dramatic — it can feel like death. I’ve faced a couple of those decisions where I was sure the path of trusting the Lord would be miserable. But it turned out to be the opposite. Not because what I did produced great results, but because I came away feeling more connected to Him through the whole thing. I’d jumped camps — and it felt good. It felt secure.

---

Before the Lord — a daily devotional by Blake S. Crawford. Read more and subscribe free at blakescrawford.com/before-the-lord.