“For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.”–Jer. 2:13
I. A sinner’s life is laborious. Have your dreams of ease in sin been fulfilled? Have you not found the life of sin to be a toilsome, thankless drudgery? Be honest to your own heart if you cannot confess it to man. Has not sin been an universal deceiver, a cruel, remorseless taskmaster? Have not all the fairy visions of our fancy been converted into bushes of thorns and barren rocks of desolation?….
II. A sinner’s work is worthless..… Power, glory, fame, are but a broken cistern to the soul of man. You may get it by becoming a vestryman, an alderman, a popular novelist, a member of Parliament, a Cabinet minister, or a hundred other ways, but the end will be the same dissatisfaction and unrest which overwhelmed the great Napoleon. Ah, when will saints give as much diligence to their high and holy calling as the servants of pleasure give to theirs?
III. A sinner’s state is appalling. Shall we witness the blindness, madness of our own friends and neighbours, of our fellow citizens, and have no bowels of compassion for them? Let us fervently, kindly, personally appeal to them; lot us watch for their souls, invent wise contrivances, and lovingly use them till the scales fall from their eyes, and we bring them to the Fountain of living waters.
IV. A sinner’s condition is not hopeless. God is still the Fountain of living waters. In Him abides the fulness which alone can supply all the lawful and infinite longings which rise up within the mysterious nature of man. Do we want knowledge, wisdom, love, life, peace, rest, immortality? They are all in God. From Him is ever issuing a stream bearing upon its bosom the richest spiritual blessings His mercy can provide. The grace of God is wider, deeper, richer, than in the era when the prophet of lamentation poured forth his sorrowful strains over the folly of sinners.–W. A. Esscry.
