“My Cup is Running Over”
God’s blessings are always a superabundance.
When the “LORD is my shepherd,” “my cup runs over” in
superabundance.
We do not have to wait until we get to heaven to experience
God’s banquet house. His overflowing grace is something we experience as
Christians in this life. Jesus said, “I came that they might have life, and might
have it abundantly” (John 10:10b). That is a cup running over with God’s grace.
He does not just give us the gift of eternal life when we first believed, but He
keeps on giving eternal life. The life He gives us is perisson, meaning,
“to have a surplus,” “superabundance,” “till it overflows.”
Jesus gives us Himself (John 14:6). He is this abundant
life. It is God’s kind of life. “My cup overflows,” means it is not just full;
it is “running over,’ filled to the brim and overflowing.
God’s saving and sustaining grace is always like that. His
grace is always in fullness, abundance and all-sufficiency.
The woman of Samaria met Jesus at Jacob’s well on a hot
day. Jesus did not have a rope and a bucket to draw the water from the well so
He asked the woman for a drink of water to quench His thirst. In the course of
the conversation with the woman Jesus said, “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’” (John 4:10).
Jesus was ready to give this woman, who was a slave to sin,
running water. “Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never
thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall become in him a well of water
springing up to eternal life” (v. 14).
Jesus is the source of a spring of living water that is
always bubbling up, unfailing source, ever fresh. The idea is of water leaping,
springing up. It is full of action, not a stagnant pool of water, but water
gushing up with energy.
Jesus puts the well within us. The well springs up, and it
goes on springing up from within into everlasting life.
Jesus a few chapters later tells us, “If any man is
thirsty, let Him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scriptures
said, ‘from his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water” (John
7:37-38). These are rivers from the inside depths of one’s being. Jesus did not
say just a trickle now and then, but rivers gushing forth from within you. In
the next verse Jesus tells us this is the work of the Holy Spirit.
God has made every provision for the believer to live a
life that overflows with God’s grace. The Holy Spirit baptized every true
believer into the body of Christ the moment he or she first believed on Christ
as his Savior. We receive one baptism, but many fillings of the Holy Spirit.
God’s desire is that we be continually under the control of His Spirit.
The apostle Paul is a good example of a believer who made
himself available to God without reservation. That is all God asks of us. The
grace of God was available to him to “preach to the Gentiles the unfathomable
riches of Christ” (Eph. 3:8). He prays for the Ephesian believers that Christ
may be permitted to settle down and to dwell at home in a permanent place in
their hearts (v. 17). Paul is saying there is no limit to what God can do in and
through you if you will yield your life to Him. His fullness is limitless,
endless, and eternal. “That you maybe fitted with all the fullness of God” (v.
19).
My cup runs over because He “is able to do exceedingly
abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works
within us” (v. 20). That is the believer who has received the fullness of God,
and grace upon grace. It is the superabundance of life that we receive through
the Spirit in Christ Jesus. This is the fullness of life Jesus gives and it
causes our cups to run over with the fullness of joy. No Christian is poor while
Christ is rich. Because of our intimate vital union with Christ we enjoy all His
riches of His glory. We can never be poor spiritually when we enjoy “the
unsearchable riches of Christ.” “My cup runs over!”
One of the great principles of the Christian life is the
more you receive, the more you want. If your cup is overflowing, you want more
of Him, and the wonderful thing is it will never run dry. All you have to do is
come and drink. This superabounding life in Christ is ever growing, expanding
and increasing as we are “changed from glory into glory” (2 Cor. 3:18). Our cup
overflows by drinking a life that changes us “from glory to glory.”
Another great principle is the more you give away the more
you get. There is no more effective way of serving Christ than when your cup is
running over. When you serve Him from the overflow you have a ministry that will
impact eternity. Oh, Lord cleanse, and fill me until I run out all over the
place with the fullness of your grace.
Selah!
Message by Wil Pounds (c) 2006
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