Will You Drink This Cup?
Christ holds out His cup for us.
“The cup of sorrow, inconceivable as it seems, is also the cup of joy. Only when we discover this in our own life can we consider drinking it.”
She was so afraid, more afraid then she had ever been in her life. She wanted to take the three children and run. Let her husband finish the contract, but life had just gotten too dangerous, and she was being asked to stay and live through a 9-month lock down for security reasons.
The threats were loud and constant - looking for foreigners to kidnap and kill, especially if they are Christ-followers.
The government was not denouncing the threats, but adding fuel to the fires of hostility and xenophobia.
She was a liberated woman.
She had agency.
She had credit cards, and could purchase the tickets if she wanted to.
She wasn’t leaving their marriage, just leaving living with him for awhile.
In the middle of morning devotions, the Lord gave her a vision. In the vision, his nail-scarred hands held a cup out to her.
The cup, in Scripture, is mentioned throughout the Old and New Testaments. It is a cup of wrath, a cup of covenant, a cup of sorrow, a cup of persecution.
As she tried to peer into the cup He held out to her, she could not see the bottom, and could not see what was in it.
It was a cup of she knew not what.
It was a cup of no clarity of what the future held.
It was a cup holding only the promise He would be with her.
It was a cup that held the potential of either bitterness or joy, but that choice was up to her.
By drinking the cup, she would be accepting His gentle invitation
to stay;
to stay with her husband;
to stay with her children
to stay and battle for joy - even when the outcome looked like only heartbreak, heartache, martyrdom.
Her eyes moved to the nail scars, and what He was asking paled in comparison to what He had gone through for her, for those in the culture who did not know Him.
She drank the cup.
to the full
and
battled for joy
for nine months
Supernatural peace descended, but not the moment before it was needed, and only on a daily basis, like the manna of old. It couldn’t be gathered up for the next day, only just what was needed in each frightening moment.
Will you drink the cup He is holding for you?
