Sermon Recap: Broken Cisterns

This past Sunday at Ember we continued our sermon series through Jeremiah with a sermon called Broken Cisterns. The text we looked at was Jeremiah 2:1-3:5. The sermon audio has been posted to the sermon player on this blog, which is where you'll be able to find all of our sermons until we get our podcast up and running.

The point of the message was this: Where you go when you're in trouble (or distress, or depressed, etc.) is the clearest indication of who you're trusting for salvation. The god of your heart is to whom you cry out in distress, "Save me!" The trials of our lives reveal the idols of our hearts.

TROUBLE REVEALS TRUST

Our idols are the things that we cherish and desire more than God. Tim Keller absolutely nailed it when he said:

[An idol] is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.…An idol is whatever you look at and say, in your heart of hearts, ‘If I have that, then I’ll feel my life has meaning, then I’ll know I have value, then I’ll feel significant and secure.’…If anything becomes more fundamental than God to your happiness, meaning in life, and identity, then it is an idol.

When trouble comes, we react to our circumstances based on what is in our hearts. If our hearts love money, sex, power, or any other false god, more than God himself, then that's where we'll look for rescue when we are in distress. Trouble reveals trust.

The only hope we have is that Jesus Christ would transform the desires of our hearts through the power of the gospel. All of our idols are broken cisterns--there is no life in them. But we have access to God, the spring of living water, through faith in his son Jesus Christ. And it is through faith in Jesus that we learn to desire the ever-present spring more than the empty and broken cisterns.