Drink from the Only Pure Source

Photo: Beth Kingery

“Because [Christians] daily hunger and thirst for righteousness, they long for the redeeming Word again and again. It can only come from the outside. In themselves they are destitute and dead. Help must come from the outside; and it has come and comes daily and anew in the Word of Jesus Christ, bringing us redemption, righteousness, innocence, and blessedness.” –Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Many of us are drinking from the wrong hose in an attempt to quench our thirst for righteousness.

Some of us drink from the performance hose, saying we teach Sunday school, help the poor, take short-term mission trips and visit the widow or imprisoned. But actions don’t quench the thirst. Some of us drink from our piety hose. We get up at 5:00 a.m. every day to spend time with God, spend 30 minutes in prayer and we raise our hands in worship. But piety doesn’t quench the thirst either. All our righteous deeds are but filthy rags, as the prophet calls them in Isaiah 64:6.

I like the way Matthew Henry describes our attempts at righteousness: “Our performances, though they be ever so plausible, if we depend upon them as our righteousness and think to merit by them at God’s hand, are as filthy rags ... Our best duties are so defective, and so far short of the rule, that they are as rags, and so full of sin and corruption cleaving to them that they are as filthy rags. When we would do good evil is present with us; and the iniquity of our holy things would be our ruin if we were under the law.”

Rather than drinking from the performance or piety hose, we should drink from the only pure water source – the Word. Only it can quench our thirst for righteousness.