| 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 |
I remember teaching the conversational folk song:
There’s a hole in my bucket,
dear Liza, dear Liza.
There’s a hole in my bucket,
dear Liza, a hole.
This statement of the folk song is answered with these words:
Then, mend it, dear Henry,
dear Henry, dear Henry.
Then, mend it, dear Henry,
dear Henry, mend it
The song then goes through a long list of possible ways to mend the hole. Eventually, having exhausted every possible solution, the song comes back to the reality of the original problem: “There’s a hole in my bucket.”
As Christians, just like Liza and Henry, we often must realize that we are carrying water buckets full of holes and leaking the contents everywhere we go. Even with the best of intentions, we cannot live the Christian life and carry the Water of Life in our own faulty buckets.
In John 4:1-30, we read the story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well. Jesus asks her for a drink, knowing full well that her “bucket” is full of leaks and that she has never even tasted what He has to give her. She needs His Living Water. He explains in verse 14:
“Whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
What does that mean? In John 7:37, Jesus explains that on the last and greatest day of the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem:
“If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive.
We see plenty of people carrying around buckets that appear quite useful. But in fact, those buckets have leaks and the supply water will soon drain away. When we look at ourselves, even those of us who have tasted the Living Water, we must admit to God, like a Puritan prayer 1 expresses:
with no spiritual understanding,
no desire for the Lord’s Day,
ever learning but never reaching the truth,
always at the gospel well but never holding water.
My memory has no retention,
so I forget easily the lessons learned,
and Thy truths seep away.
Give me a broken heart
that yet carries home the water of grace.
May the Lord, have mercy. May He cause us to thirst for the Living Water that only He can give us. Then, may we carry that Living Water in solid, unspoiled buckets to others: God’s refreshment and new life.
| 1 Bennett, Arthur, Ed. The Valley of Vision. Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 1975. p. 72. |
