Weekly Devotional • BBCC
Freezers, Fountains, and the Role
No One Can Fill
When I lived in New York, my car was a freezer. I’m not joking. Twenty degrees outside, groceries in the trunk overnight. Chicken, eggs, drinks. Everything stayed perfectly cold. Free portable freezer. Then I moved to Florida, tried the same move, and an hour later I had warm milk, questionable chicken, and a trunk that smelled like a decision I couldn’t take back. I actually got mad at the car. But the car wasn’t broken. It was a great car. It just was never a refrigerator.
I think we do the same thing with people. We take a good thing, a genuinely good thing, and quietly ask it to be a God thing. We hand our spouse, our friend group, our community the job description for the Almighty, and then feel betrayed when they can’t hold it. We walk into relationships looking for security, identity, and approval. Those are real needs. But we’re drawing from a well that was never built to carry that weight. And we end up soul-tired, wondering what’s wrong with us.
God is painfully direct about this in Jeremiah 2. This isn’t gentle-shepherd territory. This is God as prosecuting attorney:
“For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.”
Jeremiah 2:13
Two evils, not one. And the order matters. The first evil isn’t running to the wrong thing. It’s walking away from the right One. God takes the leaving personally. A fountain (a maqor in Hebrew) is a natural spring. Cold. Clean. Full. You don’t dig for it. It just flows. A cistern is the opposite: a hole you carve, line with plaster, fill with runoff. On a good day you’ve got stagnant water that tastes like limestone. But God doesn’t even say functional cisterns. He says broken ones. Even the bad water leaks out. Idolatry isn’t just sinful. It’s exhausting. You’re working harder for less water.
So where’s the fountain? Jeremiah raises the question but doesn’t resolve it. For that you jump seven hundred years to John 4, where Jesus meets a woman who’s been to five husbands. Five cisterns, all cracked. And He doesn’t shame her. He just says:
“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again. But whoever drinks of the water that I give will never be thirsty. The water I give will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
John 4:13–14
The Fountain showed up in person. “You don’t have to dig anymore. I’m here. And I don’t run dry.”
People were never designed to be your fountain.
They were designed to be your companion at the fountain.
We all deeply need three things. Security: knowing someone won’t leave. “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5). Identity: knowing who we are, not rising and falling on someone else’s mood. And approval: hearing “you’re okay” and not having to re-earn it every day. “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). No human being can carry all three for you without cracking. But when God holds them, when they’re settled before you walk into a room, everything changes.
You love people better. Lighter. Freer. Not as gods but as companions. Good, flawed, beautiful people who were never meant to be your freezer. They were meant to ride in the car with you.
◆ One Thing This Week
Take those three words: security, identity, approval. Ask yourself honestly where you’re getting those right now. Not where should you. Where are you? Because wherever your answer lands, that’s your functional god. That’s your fountain or your cistern. You don’t have to fix every relationship this week. You just have to go back to the Fountain. He’s still flowing. Still full. And He’s not mad that you left.