God Tipped the Cup

9/15/1996

I thought that was the most profoundly simple and amazingly accurate description of what happened of anything that I had ever considered or heard—is that Jesus took the cup of what He endured for our sake to forgive our sins. What He endured in order to present us perfect, what He endured in order to teach us His ways, He took that cup that James and John said, “Hey, we want to sit at the Father’s left and right hand.” And He said, “Well, you do, do you? Well, can you drink My cup and undergo My baptism?”

And He kind of asked us that as He sent us on this mission that had nothing in common in many respects with any place we’d ever been ever before in terms of the power of the word of God, in terms of the openness and the supernatural transactions. People knocking on our door in the hotel room saying, “You told my coworker about Jesus. Will you tell me too?” Incredible stuff that was going on everywhere we went. The guy that frisked me checking out of Malawi, he said, “My name’s Michael like yours.” I said, “Well, Michael, do you know Jesus. Do you know about Jesus?” He said, “I know Jesus.” Great big grin on his face.

Everywhere we went. Everybody we talked to in the villages. There’s certainly battles there, but never before on any of the trips in any of the cities or countries have we ever encountered something that could revolutionize a nation of people with a hunger for the word of God in ways that we just never encountered before. There was something very, very real there where the scales were falling off of eyes at a rate and a pace and a depth that we never could have imagined was even possible.

We’ve done a lot of traveling over the years, as you know, and there’s always been good things, but there’s never been anything like this. And Jesus was saying, “Okay, if you want to participate in something that has My thumbprint on it, something that goes beyond the natural scope of human reasoning about the word of God right into the realm of the supernatural living word of God that eradicates the enemy’s ground in a particular place and draws them up into ekklesia, into heaven-life; if you want to participate in that with Me, well let Me show you what’s inside of My cup, what My baptism is like. Let me give you a little glimpse of something other than just ‘Waa, waa, waa, I didn’t have a good day today. Waa, waa, waa, somebody was mean to me. Waa, waa, waa, I have financial problems.’ Let me show you what’s inside of this cup. If you want supernatural life, if you want supernatural fruitfulness, let Me show you what supernatural opposition is all about. Let Me show you what it’s like to despair even of life, not because of your little waa waa problems because you don’t like how God has ordered your life; you don’t like this, you don’t like that. Let Me show you what it’s like to live sin-free and be blasted from all of hell’s forces that are just zeroed in on all of your emotions, all of your thoughts, all of your communication. Let Me just show you what’s inside of this cup where you have absolutely nothing left except the feeblest cry, ‘Jesus, help me. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Let me show you what’s in this cup. See if you still want to drink it. See if you want something other than “Waa-waa Christianity” where you do your good deeds and then go to heaven, something like that.”

Satan is furious. His time is short and getting shorter, and you just rest assured that he rages against the woman and her offspring. And her offspring are those that love Jesus and obey His commands and testify with the word of life that comes out of communion with Him and risk everything, even their own physical lives. And that’s what overcomes the enemy. He’s humiliated on a cross. He’s taken down, he’s stomped on, he’s crushed, humiliated, and rendered harmless by walking the way of the cross with one another. And taking on this cup and this baptism with a heart for it, not just a tolerance for it, “waa waa,” but a desire to fellowship in His sufferings.

And like I said, I thought I knew a little bit about spiritual things. I’m not trying to sound haughty, but I really honestly thought, to God’s glory, that He’s taken me down a little bit of a road here and there and showed me something of His heart and His face, but I realized I was as stupid as Job or worse. “My ears had heard of Him but my eyes had not seen Him.” I don’t know how much I have now either, but I know that I went through, as did everybody else on that trip, things that you cannot go through based on just circumstances of life and bad things and good things happening. But this was warfare and the raging supernatural enemy that wanted to just rip our eyes out, rip our hearts out, crush every emotion, destroy every loyalty and love, render us hopeless and harmless in every respect. It was a murderous cup that Jesus showed us that He encountered for our sake. And it did a few things for us.

One thing, it brought us to a deep, deep gratitude of what He encountered for us because if that’s just a peek into His cup, what in the world did He go through in order to buy us from our decrepit, degenerate situations? It showed us a little bit of a reason for gratitude and the awesome suffering that He went through. It gave us a little bit of courage to go forward and incentive to realize that though satan wants to perplex us, confuse us, and crush us and throw us into despair, that He that is in us is greater than the one that’s in the world and wants to destroy us. It gave us that kind of hope that there’s nothing that satan could throw at us that we can’t stand through, no matter how bad it seems. That God will draw us to the other side, washed and cleansed. Just like He did with Jesus in the wilderness, He’ll send angels to serve us, to minister to us, is how the translation goes, I guess. He’ll send angels to care for us and to feed us His bread if we make it to the other side, having turned our faces towards Him in the middle of it. It showed us that satan’s time is short. That’s more reason for incentive, too, to do His work. It showed us that satan hated what was happening in Malawi with a passion, which gave us more and more courage and motivation to be all the more excited about it and all the more committed to it, now and in the future.

So, there were a lot of good things that came of it. And hopefully one thing is that He’s drawing us, all of us, closer to Him that we could all have the kind of relationship together with the Father that Job was beginning to have after his theology was unraveled, his ecclesiology was unraveled, his eschatology was unraveled. After all that junk fell by the wayside and all that was left was a merciful, loving, all-wise, certainly sovereignly powerful God, after everything was said and done, that’s all he had was a face to turn towards a God that was far bigger than he ever imagined. I think that happened to us on this trip, too. And if to us, then to you.

So there’s a little bit about the trip. That’s not much of a travel log, is it? You want to hear about the mud huts? But this is the important stuff. Sometime real soon, we want to go through the book of Isaiah pretty carefully too with a view towards God’s sovereign authority and power, an unbelievably awesome God that we serve and bow in humble reverence before. I want to show you some of what we learned about that as described by our dear brother Isaiah, sometime before long, too. But we wanted to at least give you this most important glimpse of what this trip was about that isn’t exactly what we bargained for. We all kind of decided it was Kevin’s fault for reading those scriptures before we left ☺. Are there any questions of me or Laurel or Mariam, general things or specific things?

Were the struggles shared by Howard and Joshua? No, one of the scriptures is that we would carry around the death of Jesus that they could share in the life of Jesus. I think all they got was the life of Jesus out of it. But they were very aware of our death. I mean, they were watching. We took two days where we just bailed out on them. They couldn’t figure out what in the world we were doing, but we were there two days and already it was so heavy and so thick that we were just bleeding to death. And we just said, “I know you are going to have a hard time understanding this. I know you have plans for us for these days. You had a pretty rigorous schedule planned out for us, but we won’t be any good to you if we’re all dead. If we’re all just corpses just laying here bleeding to death, we’re not going to do you any good. So you’re going to have to give us a chance to find God and to find something of His remedy for what ails us because something here has gone really haywire. The enemy is attacking in an unbelievably vicious way, and you’re just going to have to trust that “as many are led by the Spirit are sons of God.” We believe the Spirit has led us into the wilderness to be tested and refined and you’re just going to have to give us a couple of days, maybe a couple of weeks, maybe this will be the last time we’ll see you. But we’ve got to do something here, and so sorry about the schedule.”

So they were very aware, very early on that something was very different, and that we weren’t just little “preachers” coming to give them “bible lessons” and then go home. They knew that we were fellow disciples, brothers and sisters, that were wrestling to present one another perfect as well as them, as well as to find the same God that they’re trying to find and letting God deal with us the same way He’s been and will deal with them. They realized that we were pilgrims on the journey with them and that we were encountering major, major opposition from satan. They knew all of that. They couldn’t really relate, I don’t think, very much to it. At one point the last day or two, they were kind of identifying a little bit with it when one of them said, “Well, we do have eyes to see. God has given us spiritual eyes. We could see this and this.” So I think they could identify with it, they could see it a little bit, but it was our death and their life that was probably the most evident in it all.

I’ll tell you what, I’ll never take those scriptures for granted again about carrying around the death of Jesus so that they could experience the life. I will never take that for granted again. It’s just shocking how real that can be. When you’re doing the same thing that Paul was doing, it only makes sense that you would encounter the same thing he experienced. He wasn’t talking about a little bit of depression from having too many cups of coffee in the morning or because somebody treated him bad. He was talking about something that was phenomenally, supernaturally oppressive that was happening, where he had to turn his face towards God and unravel in his mind and in his spirit what was happening, and what he was going to do about it. How was he going to respond to this unbelievably evil, dark, vicious, confusing thing that seemed so real, the valley of the shadow of death? There was great reason to fear evil, great reason to fear destruction and annihilation. I mean we could still be over there except we’d be in four different countries trying to figure out what we’re going to do. It really was amazing. And no, they don’t know the half of it, really. They didn’t really experience it, but what they did see was pretty shocking to them. They knew there was big stuff afoot. They just didn’t know quite what to think of it. I think it helped them identify a little bit with us. Like I said, we weren’t little bible class teachers. That there was really a war going on, and they could see that, and I think it gave them a little bit of gravity about how much was at stake.