Walking With Christ

Psalm 23:5 You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.(ESV)

If you are carrying a cup of coffee and someone bumps into you, why did you spill your coffee? It wasn’t because someone bumped into you. It wasn’t because you or they weren’t paying attention. It wasn’t even swamp gas refracting light from Venus off of a high altitude weather balloon.

You spilled your coffee because you had coffee in your cup.

In this life we are guaranteed to get bumped. No matter how careful and cautious we are we will get bumped hard enough to spill the contents of our cups. We don’t have control over that. We do have control over what is in our cups. If we fill our cups with poison then we will pour out poison when we get bumped.

I know that I’ve told a lot of people this analogy. Here’s the next part. Do you like what’s in your cup? How do you change what is in your cup? There are a lot of ways to replace what is in your cup with something new. You can simply add the new stuff. The problem is that your cup is already full and this process will be messy. You aren’t guaranteed to ever get the bad stuff completely out of your cup. The other end of the spectrum of options is completely pour out your cup and fill it with something new. You can empty your own cup and fill it with whatever you want, but there will still be remnants of what was before and stains that pollute what you put in there.

A word of warning here. The enemy is really quick to try to fill your cup for you. If your cup isn’t completely full then the enemy will try to “help” you out. Repenting and turning to Jesus will empty your cup, wash the cup, fix any cracks, and completely fill your cup with living water and a promise for a brand new cup one day that will never be empty again.

There are so many parts of the bible that begin with pouring out something. There is pouring out praise. There is pouring out grace. What about anger or pain? God will one day pour out His wrath on all who remain in sin after judgement. We can pour out anger and pain as well. We can either choose to pour out what is in our cups on those who are in our lives or we can give our cup to God and have Jesus give us a truly cleaned and full cup in return.