Remember trying to give your kids liquid Tylenol or cough syrup or an antibiotic when they were little? Trying to get the syringe or cup past locked lips and a head shaking “NO!” back and forth?
You knew it was good for them and would make them better. All they understood was how awful it tasted.
Soon the fever would dissipate, the cough would reside or the pain would go away. The medicine had done its job. Mom and Dad knew best.
I have a friend who posted a video message today about drinking from the “cup” we’ve been given – circumstances, hardship, difficulty, etc. – as coming from a Father who only wants the best for us. A Father who knows what He’s giving us to drink. And though its taste might be bitter, its effects will be sweet. If He doesn’t take a cup away, she said, there is something good in that cup that He wants us to benefit from.
Jesus was asked to drink from a cup that the human part of Him was not excited to taste. “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done” were the words He prayed right before He went to die on a cross (Luke 22:42). The flavor would be bitter, but the result would be sweet: Salvation made possible to a lost world. The benefit of LIFE outweighed the cost of DEATH.
But God is the giver of many different kinds of drinks. He loves to give us cups that are full of cool refreshment, too.
About the time that we were force feeding our kids their “yucky medicine”, we were also hydrating them with their beloved drink boxes and the sweet taste of chocolate milk. Summer slushies after a hot day in the sun. Giant cups of ice water to quench their sweaty little thirsts.
In Psalm 23 David says that his “cup overflows”. Not only are his blessings enough. They are more than abundant. Too much for one person to take in. David said this. The same man who’d had his share of the taste of grief and fear and depression and anxiety. A man who KNEW what it was like to drink from a bitter cup. But He also recognized that he had learned more about God from that cup. His heart grew more like God’s as a result of that cup. And that cup made him appreciate all the more, the sweet flavor the the delicious cup that “overflows”.
There is one GIVER of both cups and only one purpose – GOOD. Whether bitter or sweet, we can trust the HAND that serves us and fills our cups with only His very best intentions….
