Dig your own well

The desire of God’s heart is, and always has been, to have a personal relationship with each of His children – not to be a God who is far off, watching ‘from a distance’, but to be a Father who is intimately involved with his children, an integral part of their everyday lives. 

He started with His first children, Adam and Eve, walking and talking with them in the cool of the day in the Garden of Eden, until they turned away from Him and ate from the forbidden tree. His people turned away from Him again in the days of Noah, and time and time again after that, consistently rejecting Him, turning instead to their own devices and ways.

Again and again, God forgave His people, extending grace and mercy to them and teaching them His ways. He led them out of a life of bondage in Egypt, fighting the armies of Egypt on their behalf, protecting them and providing for them, as every good father does for his children. Moses explained to them, “For you are a holy people to the Lord your God, and the Lord has chosen you to be a people for himself, a special treasure above all the peoples who are on the face of the Earth.” (Deuteronomy 14:2)

Moses told the people to consecrate themselves because they were going to meet with God. This was a momentous occasion! It was huge! However, instead of accepting this invitation and walking towards their God, His children  ran from Him.

            “Now all the people witnessed the thunderings, the lightning flashes, the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they trembled and stood afar off. Then they said to Moses, ‘You speak with us, and we will hear; but let not God speak with us, lest we die.’” (Exodus 20:19)

They didn’t want to speak with God and they didn’t want to meet with Him. Instead, they wanted Moses to speak to Him and tell them what God said. Continuing with our analogy of water being our relationship with God, you might say that they didn’t want to dig their own well, they were happy just to drink from Moses’s well. 

Joshua succeeded Moses as Israel’s leader but, as soon as he died, the Israelites turned away from the Lord God and, once again, followed other heathen gods, like Baal and Ashtoreth. We see this same disastrous pattern repeated time and time again throughout the books of Judges, 1st and 2nd Kings.

Why did that happen? Why did they turn back to their old idolatrous ways as soon as their God-appointed leader died? I believe it is because they didn’t know God. He wasn’t their God, He was the God of Moses, and the God of Joshua, but not their God.

They had rejected His invitation to know Him personally.

As long as they could ‘drink from Moses or Joshua’s wells’, they were okay, but the minute those ‘wells’ were gone, the people didn’t know who to turn to and, in their

leaderless state, they turned to the easiest option; the option of drinking from the polluted, stagnant waters of the worship of manmade, false gods. Some of us have been blessed with believing parents who ‘dug their well’ with God and knew Him, and what a wonderful heritage that is. However, there comes a time when ‘the God of my father or mother’ has to become the God of me. My God. We have to have a personal encounter with Him that changes everything, where He becomes MY God.

We cannot ride on the coat tails of the fathers and mothers who have gone before us, (both biological parents and spiritual parents), drinking forever from their wells. We must dig our own well so God can bless us and give us a heritage to pass on to OUR descendants (both biological and spiritual) who, in turn, will drink from the well we have dug until the time when they are strong enough to dig their own well, which they will then pass on to their children …and so it goes on.

It stands to reason then, that, if each of us has a metaphorical well inside of us, going to someone else to get help or answers could be likened to drinking water from someone else’s well. It’s one of the blessings of being part of the family of God - being able to talk with and pray for each other, to fellowship with each other and drink from each other’s wells.

However, the drawback is that whenever you want to ‘drink of someone else’s well,’ you have to go and meet with them, go to a church, or wait for the next prayer meeting. And when you can’t do that, for instance, during the COVID-19 lockdowns, that becomes extremely problematic.

Continuing to unpack the well metaphor a little more, I believe there are three stages in our lives as believers.

The first one is drinking from other people’s wells. For most of us, that is how we came to know the Lord. We went to a church meeting, heard a message preached, or someone told us about Jesus. We drank from that person’s well as we listened to what they said, and we heard the good news of the gospel. That started us out on the journey of digging our own well, getting to know Jesus and discovering the spring of

living water that He placed within us. We drank from the wells of church and friends and, for a while, that was our life source.

Then we move onto the second stage: drinking from your own well. We learn over time how to dig down into the depths of our own relationship with the Father, how to talk to Him and hear His voice. Building a relationship with Him in that way is the most extraordinary blessing. Most Christians (and in fact, most non-Christians too!) know how to dig during hard times by praying for a miracle or for help when life is not going well. But the Father is looking for those who will spend time with Him and get to know Him personally on a minute by minute, hour by hour basis, not just when the going gets tough. He is inviting us to learn how to press into Him and know Him for ourselves. 

The third stage I see in our ‘well journey’ is having other people drink from your well. I believe that this is the place of maturity that Father wants us all to grow into; where our well becomes so deep that we have an overflow of living water which others can then drink from. When people come to you for help, advice or prayer, they drink of the overflow of your relationship with God, and you are able to bless them while still having plenty of water for yourself and your dear ones. It is an extraordinary privilege to be a vessel which Father can fill and flow out of, being able to offer living water to others who are in need of a spiritual drink.

So my encouragement to you is this: dig your well! Let the living waters flow until not only are you full to the brim with the life of God, but others too can drink and be filled!

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Until next time ….

Ask yourself:

·       How deep is the well of my relationship with God?

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Is the water overflowing, or is my well dry, or muddied by the filth of the world’s system?

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Are other people able to drink from the overflow of my well with Father God?

·       Whose life (or lives) am I pouring into and enriching?