In this short devotional, the speaker (Pastor Harry Pitts) unpacks Jeremiah 2:13, focusing on the image of "broken cisterns" to illustrate Israel’s idolatry. He explains that an idol is not the object itself but the thing people ask that object to provide—something only God can give. The speaker emphasizes that human capacity for longing and love is intact and designed by God; the problem lies in where that longing is directed. By redefining idols as misplaced expectations of fulfillment, the message urges listeners to identify what they are asking from objects, practices, or desires that cannot satisfy the deepest spiritual need that only God can meet.
Chapters
Listen to this message by Pastor Pitts. Your phone or on your iPad or on your computer if you're watching, turn with me to Jeremiah chapter 2, because here's where God is speaking through the prophet, and he says something strange. He's not angry that Israel committed some isolated act of rebellion. He says they did something unprecedented, something even the pagan nations who didn't know him Wouldn't do. Listen to verse 13. For my people, for my people have committed 2 evils. 2 evils, he says. They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water. Hallelujah. I need you to pause and let that sit and marinate for a moment. Not statues, not incense, not bowing down in front of something. An idol is anything you ask to be the well when it was only ever a hole you dug, a cracked one on top of that. Here's the line I want you to Take home today, because I think it's the whole message in one sentence. The idol is never the thing. The idol is what you're asking the thing to give you that only God can give. Write that down because you need to. The idol is what you're asking this thing to do that only God can fulfill, only God can do. Think about it this way. Your capacity to long for something, to be moved by something, to give your whole self to something, that capacity isn't broken. It's actually working. If you think about it, it's working exactly as God designed it. The problem isn't that you long too much. The problem is where the longing is pointed. One of the early teachers in that tradition put it like this, and I'm going to say it in our language so that we can understand it better, not his. He said that the same capacity for love that pointed toward God produces life and peace when it gets pointed somewhere it was never meant to land.
