Re-digging the Ancient Wells
Throughout the Bible, the Lord calls His people to remember what He has done in the past to create faith that will enable Him to do another mighty work in the present. We should be encouraged that the Lord has visited His people with revival many times before and He can do it again.
All of the major Christian denominations were either born out of awakenings or have experienced a revival at some time in their history. This means that our mainstream churches have a rich spiritual heritage they can draw on today. This doesn’t mean that we can turn back the clock and revisit those former times, but it does mean that we can rediscover spiritual resources that can be leveraged and applied by believers today. By exploring what the Lord has done in the past, we can rediscover those truths and dynamics that ignited revival and awakenings in previous generations.
I am convinced that the Lord wants to bring new life to old denominations and movements, which can happen when they rediscover and learn how to access God’s rich resources and blessings from the ancient wells. Previous generations were similarly powerless against the godlessness of their times but they learned how to leverage their weakness and tap into the spiritual resources that are the birth-right of all believers. This present generation needs to rediscover and access these hidden streams and unblock the ancient wells of living water.
I am convinced that the Lord wants to bring new life to old denominations and movements, which can happen when they rediscover and learn how to access God’s rich resources and blessings from the ancient wells.
In a conversation with a Samaritan woman, Jesus used a communal well as a signpost to point to what He called living water. This message resonates down through the ages and is just as relevant today as it was when Jesus first gave this teaching. Today’s secularist society emphasizes only the physical and material dimensions of existence, which can never satisfy the deep inner thirst of the human soul for spiritual truth. Only spiritual realities can quench the thirst for spiritual things that goes to the heart of our humanity. For this reason, Jesus’ teaching on living water is relevant for us today.
“Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.” ”
It is interesting that the well that was the backdrop to Jesus’ conversation was known as Jacob’s Well and is still there today. This well has existed since ancient times having been cut through solid rock one hundred feet (30.48 meters) deep. This well is substantial and permanent and isn’t going anywhere.
“Jesus answered and said to her, “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, “but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.””
Jacob’s Well is a powerful metaphor for the source of spiritual life in Jesus Christ. Just as physical water is necessary to sustain life in the Middle East’s arid desert areas, so too we need the living water of the Holy Spirit to sustain our spiritual life today. There was a severe drought in the time of Jacob’s father Isaac, so for his family to survive, he dug a well. It is a safe assumption that just as Isaac copied his father Abraham, so too did Jacob follow in his father Isaac’s footsteps. Jacob, after whom the well Jesus drank from was named, came from a family of well-diggers.
Jacob’s father Isaac made his living as a shepherd and, to keep his livestock alive, he couldn’t afford to play games or take risks. His sheep and indeed his family needed water to stay alive. And so it was that in a time of intense drought, when the situation was dire and the need for water was urgent, Isaac embraced what was tried and true and cleared out the wells that his father Abraham had dug. Everything Isaac cared about was at risk and the lives of both himself and his family were on the line in what was an existential crisis. This was not the time for speculation, adolescent dreaming, or warm-fuzzy aspiration—because time was running out.
Instead of prospecting in unexplored territory, Isaac chose the safe and practical option of re-digging the wells his father Abraham had dug in the previous generation. He reasoned that because his father Abraham had found water in that same location, it would be safe to assume that the subterranean water would still be there. The water was there and he only needed to access it by unstopping the wells so that he and his family could drink and stay alive.
“And Isaac dug again the wells of water which they had dug in the days of Abraham his father, for the Philistines had stopped them up after the death of Abraham. He called them by the names which his father had called them. Also, Isaac’s servants dug in the valley, and found a well of running water there.”
It is important to note that it was not by accident that the water from these wells wasn’t being utilized—the wells had been filled with rubbish. The Philistines, who were the traditional enemy and adversary of God’s people, had deliberately filled the wells to prevent Isaac’s family from accessing the water. This same enemy had also changed the names of the wells to confuse their origin and challenge the hereditary rights of Isaac to the water. In this battle for survival, the same Philistines who had stopped the wells by filling them in also claimed ownership. They put their names and identity on them even though they weren’t using them themselves. These wells were a part of his people’s rich heritage that they had inherited from their fathers, and it was these wells that Isaac re-dug and reclaimed.
In the Bible, wells sometimes symbolize blessings from the hand of the Lord. The Church keeps looking for something new when all we need is to dig again the old wells of spiritual life that God’s people have depended on from the beginning—the Word of God, prayer, worship, faith, the power of Spirit, sacrifice, and service—wells that we’ve allowed the enemy to fill up. Whenever there’s been a revival of spiritual power in the history of the church, it’s been because somebody has dug again the old wells so there God’s life-giving Spirit can be free to work.
Warren Wiersbe
