They have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.
Jer 2:13
What is the meaning of life itself? Go and ask your non-Christian thinker. Ask your non-Christian philosopher, the modern and those who have lived in past ages, and they don’t know. They really cannot tell you. It eludes them. It’s beyond them. They put up their theories, but they’re not satisfactory and they cancel one another out. They’re all so exclusively intellectual. They know nothing about the feelings and the sensibilities. These, you see, are things that can’t be analyzed. They can’t be docketed. There is something subtle about them and they don’t understand them, but they’re very real in life are they not?
In other words your human philosophies and your man-made ideas concerning men and his life in this world are never able to account for our deepest and our most valued experiences. We’re living in a scientific age aren’t we? and they’re trying to tell us that the whole of our lives should be scientific, that we must get rid of all these other aspects of life and that our lives must be planned, they must be rational, they must be thought out, we must be scientific they say, we’ve got all these discoveries, let’s apply them to the whole of life. They say man has been living in an irrational kind of manner. Well now, his whole life must be systematized and he must live according to his scientific knowledge.
Where do feelings come in? Where does love come in? Where do those feelings come in that I say you can’t even describe at times? “Oh,” says the poet, “to me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” What does your scientist know about that? He knows nothing about it. He doesn’t understand it. He can’t account for it. This is something to him irrational and yet these are the profoundest things in life. These are the things that make life, LIFE! Love. This deep emotion. This something which you can’t dissect and analyze. You’re aware of it, and you can’t always give reasons for it, but there it is, one of the most moving and glories experiences in life! And so on with all these finest and highest sensibilities.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Full Audio Sermon: https://www.mljtrust.org/sermons-online/jeremiah-2-13/fountain-of-living-waters/
