The Spirit-Filled Life · Week 2 · Saturday Recap

You Can’t Fill Yourself

This week we watched five people stop trying to be the spring.

Five Empty Cups

A man running on empty who called the water table weakness, right up until the wheels came off in front of his kids.

A man filling the same cracked cup every single night and waking up dry every single morning, reaching for a cistern that was never built to hold what he needed.

A father who finally asked out loud, in front of his children, for help he did not have, and let them see him do it.

A mother whose son’s thirst for God woke her own thirst back up after years of running on fumes.

And a man who stopped hoarding the Spirit like a private ticket and let it spill out onto the people at his own table.

You are the cup, not the spring.

What I Keep Landing On

Here is where I keep ending up. I have four sons. And I cannot fill them.

I have tried. You cannot pour a real relationship with God into a kid by force, any more than you can pour it into yourself by trying harder. I am not their spring. I am a cup, exactly like they are, and the most useful thing I can do for them is let them watch me hold mine out and get filled, over and over, in the open.

The pastor I am learning from this season put it as two ditches, and I have spent time in both. In the first ditch, a man decides the water table is for the weak. He will grind it out on willpower and study and sheer effort. He runs the race dry and joyless and cannot figure out why he keeps snapping at the people he loves. In the second ditch, a man camps at the water table. The experience, the feeling, the splash, and he gets so wrapped up in it that he forgets there is a race to run at all.

Both of them miss it. You need the water, and you need to run.

Get filled, then go pour out. Drink, then run. That is the whole rhythm of the Spirit-filled life, and it never graduates into self-sufficient. Believe it is available. Ask for it. Receive it. Then get up tomorrow and do it again, because the cup does not stay full on its own, and it was never supposed to.

Let your lifesong sing. You were never the source.

The Spirit-Filled Life · Week 2 Complete · The series continues