Author: Bellissiwarriors

Maybe you’re familiar with the anti-bullying curriculum that encourages kids to be bucket fillers instead of bucket dippers. The idea is that our choices each day either add to the good things in someone else’s bucket, or they take away from them by our hurtful actions and unkind words. While I appreciate the character qualities, there’s just one problem – I don’t want to carry a bucket. The burdens of life are heavy enough. I don’t need anything else to lug around.

Carrying around a bucket makes it a lot more likely that I’m going to live with the expectation that life, and other people, owe me something. But you don’t have to live very long before you run smack into the reality that life feels very little obligation to you. Instead, life places a lot of demands on you. What if that’s actually the point? Not that life should fill us up, but that we should pour ourselves out into life.

There’s another problem with a bucket. Actually the problem is more me. More often than not my tendency is to peer into my bucket and decide that it’s not full enough. I feel a lack more often than I feel the fullness. There’s something about these buckets of ours that makes their emptiness weigh far more than that which fills them. So our blessings quickly become light as air, while the empty space weighs heavily on our hearts.

I’m afraid it’s also human nature to spend an awful lot of time peeking at other people’s buckets and deciding theirs are fuller than our own. And that just multiplies the weight of the emptiness and divides the joy we have in what our buckets already contain.

What if instead of trying to fill a bucket, we choose to live in the freedom of fullness? When you are filled to the brim with the enoughness of Christ, you are already full. There’s nothing to carry around in the hopes of filling it. There are no unmet needs, no unfilled obligations. Anything that is added simply causes to you overflow.

At the Cross, we can exchange our rusty buckets for the Cup. The Cross, where Christ gave us His everything and met our every need – past, present, and future. The Cup, which held His blood that was poured out as a confirmation that God’s love is an everlasting, do-whatever-it-takes kind of love.

Now when we come to the Cross, we come to the fountain of living water – Christ Himself – and we are cups. He fills us completely with His complete fullness. Then we offer the fullness that is in us to others – in the same way that Christ took the Cup and offered it to His disciples during the Last Supper.

Our capacity is tiny compared to the fullness of God. We can’t possibly hold all that He gives us. And still He pours into us continually, more than we can hold. The only way to relieve the pressure is to be poured out. We will never run empty because Christ is an eternal spring that will constantly renew, refill, and refresh us as we overflow His goodness into life around us.

I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. Matthew 25:35

 

When I read the Bible, I admit I tend to skim over the weights and measures. I have trouble with quarts and pints. I’m not sure my brain can handle a cubit.

But sometimes I need to step closer and read the fine print. Sometimes I need to sharpen my focus on the details so I can see more clearly. For example, I love how God reveals His heart with Jesus’ first miracle, turning water into wine at a wedding in Cana (John 2:1-11). Jesus’ mother learned that the host had run out of wine and she asked Jesus to do something about it. Jesus told the servants to fill six stone pots with water. The pots held 20-30 gallons each. So Jesus made at least 120 milk jugs worth of wine. The party was just about over. They didn’t need that much wine and at that point the quality wasn’t really important.

Except that it was. God’s love is lavish. Jesus loved the bride and bridegroom. He poured God’s love for them into those stone waterpots. He filled them up with gallons of the best because that is the only way that God expresses His heart. He doesn’t give half measures. He doesn’t give just a little. He doesn’t deal in mediocre.

About two years later we find Jesus on a hillside trying to get some rest with His disciples when a great crowd of people come looking for Him. “He had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd” (Mark 6:34). So He taught them and He healed their sick. Then it got late. Soon the shops would close. The disciples suggested that Jesus should send the crowds away so they would have time to buy food and find a place to sleep for the night.

Their hearts were in the right place. It was a desolate place. There was no delivery service, no food trucks. Just Jesus, His disciples, and a whole lot of hungry people. The thing is Jesus knew the crowd would have physical hunger. But He knew their spiritual hunger was even more critical. To send them away would be to leave them hungry for more. And that’s just not how Jesus operates. This is the man who told the Samaritan woman at the well that the water He gives “takes away thirst altogether. It becomes a perpetual spring within them” (John 4:14).

So Jesus took care of their physical and spiritual hunger in one fell swoop. He told the disciples, You feed them. The disciples took stock – they came up with five loaves of bread and two fish. That’s like five crackers and two anchovies. The disciples looked at the need, and they looked at what they had, and they did the math. Of course they came up short. They knew they didn’t have enough. But they had forgotten who they were working with.

Jesus stepped in. He turned their not enough into more than enough. What they had was plenty when it was put into Jesus’ hands. Jesus loved the multitudes with God’s lavish, compassionate, generous love.

Breaking the loaves into pieces, he kept giving the bread and fish to the disciples to give to the people. They all ate as much as they wanted, and they picked up twelve baskets of leftover bread and fish. Five thousand men had eaten from those five loaves! (Mark 6:41-44)

Five thousand men, not to mention the women and children. Twelve baskets of leftovers. Our God is an exceedingly abundant giver. He gives so much, we’re not left wanting more. When we partake of what He provides, we are satisfied. There are leftovers. What’s the best part about Thanksgiving leftovers?  You can take them out when you’re hungry and enjoy the good things all over again.  That’s our God – the one who gives so lavishly, He is a perpetual spring.