Identity & Worth
I check how many people liked what I posted and my mood follows the number. Why is it never enough?
“For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.”
Jeremiah accuses Judah of two things at once, leaving the spring and digging their own tanks, and then calls the tanks broken. In a dry country that is a devastating picture of wasted effort: enormous labour, and the water drains out anyway. It describes what happens when we go for something we need to a source that cannot hold it. The problem was never that they wanted water.
“For they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God.”
John is describing leaders who believed in Jesus privately but would not say so publicly, because their standing in the synagogue mattered more to them. His summary is quietly brutal: they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God. He treats the pull of approval as a genuine rival loyalty rather than a small weakness, which is fair to how strong it actually feels.
A path forward
Take the app off your phone for one week, not forever. You need to feel the absence to work out what you were using it for.
Begin the day with five minutes of prayer or scripture before you open anything carrying a notification. Whatever forms your sense of yourself first tends to hold.
Post nothing for a week, then notice what you were hoping somebody would say. That sentence is the one to bring to God.
Closing verse
“But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.”
- John 4:14
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