Archive article 36

“. . . my cup overflows. . .”

                                                                                                 Psalm 23:5c

Even though I can’t exactly remember the name of the lovely park near Verona where I made the discovery, I’ll never forget the first time I ever saw a natural fountain! I was wandering round when park when I suddenly noticed a rivulet of water trickling slowly down the slope. I followed it upwards to its source. Water was literally emerging from a patch of earth and grass about half a metre wide. There wasn’t any hole in the ground – just a place where the grass had given way to a muddy patch of wet earth. It was from this unlikely looking scrap of land that water flowed and flowed. There was not way I could stop it even when I tried. And tried I did! I put stones over the top of the rivulet to stop the flow making a kind of dam, but that didn’t work. I tried to build a barrier in different ways, but there simply was no way of stopping the flow. It simply couldn’t be stopped!

I knelt there in amazement for quite a while. I’d never seen water flowing from out of the ground with no way of stopping it. It bubbled up from under the ground uncontrollably. It poured and poured out.

The joy of king David reflects the sort of fountain that I had stumbled on. As he discovered and enjoyed God’s blessings, he realised that here was something which would not be stopped in any way: “my cup overflows”!

But isn’t this the sort of thing that we find God promises in all the Bible? As God, can He ever promise anything less?

Just take the example of Jesus’ last promise to His disciples: “Lo, I am with you even to the end of the age” (New Testament, Gospel of Matthew 28:20). Is he promising something which with an expiry date, or maybe limited by space in some way?

Or take the example of what He told the woman at the well in Samaria in John’s Gospel chapter 4 verse 14: “. . .Whoever drinks of the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become a spring of water welling up to eternal life”. When He said this, was He speaking of something which had a tap on it which would one day be turned off or maybe dry up? Absolutely not!

Everywhere in our Bibles we read of God’s blessings as being things which are not said and then concluded: “Until the supply runs out”!

This is the privilege of everyone who comes to God. He, or she, will find Him as the God of all eternity, of all power, of all knowledge, without limits of time or space. From this fountain flow blessings which are inexhaustible. . . and this is exactly David’s point in this verse!

Dear reader, let’s learn to live from a fountain of life which will not run dry rather than by putting our own limits on His generosity!

   Paul Finch, pastore