"are you drinking from a cistern?"

Do you know what a cistern is? I’m sure you’ve heard that term used before, it's simply a hole in the ground to store water. You have to put water in if you want to get water out, there is no spring that feeds it to keep it fresh and full.

I had an uncle that lived in the backwoods of Soddy Daisy many years ago who lived in a small little house that had a cistern. He actually had the gutters of his house running into that make-shift well.

My dad would take me to see uncle Sproul when I was a little kid, and he would let me squirrel hunt with my little JC Higgins 22 rifle in the woods behind Sproul's house. My uncle was a very unusual guy, he could build or fix about anything. He built a saw-mill once so he could cut the lumber to build a garage. He was a great mechanic and people would bring him their cars so he needed a place to work on them. You see, Sproul never had what you would call a regular job. He could fix about anything that was broke, except himself, because he was an alcoholic.

I remember drinking water from that old cistern and wondering what the little bitty black rocks where? I was still just a little kid, so I didn’t know and didn’t care, but looking back now I realize it was the little black rocks off the shingles of uncle Sproul’s roof. It’s a miracle I didn’t die from drinking that water. I guess you can live with a well like that if you keep putting water into it and Sproul figured out how to do that with his gutter.

Sproul could have had fresh water if he had just kept digging, but he wasn't interested in water unless it was 100 proof.

Jesus said, “seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you”. He was saying, fresh water is available to you, but you have to dig a little deeper. God’s love and grace are free, but the unfathomable treasures that are pure and clean and refreshing we have to seek by serious digging. God has called us to be rivers of living water, and we find that water in Christ. We need to drink deeply as we study the life of Christ. There is treasure to found there, but are we willing to give up our time to find it?