Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1222
“My cup runs o ver.” Psalm 23:5.
THE Psalm culminates in this expression. The poet can mount no higher. He has endeavored to express the blessedness of his condition, in having the Lord for his Shepherd, but after all his efforts, he is conscious of failure. His sonnet has not reached the height of the great argument, nor has his soul, though enlarged with gratitude, been able to compass the immeasurable gifts of Grace. And therefore, in holy wonder at the lavish superfluities of mercy, he cries, “My cup runs over.” In one short but most expressive sentence he does as good as say, “Not only have I enough, but more than enough! I possess not only all that I am capable of containing, but I inherit an excess ofjoy, a redundancy of blessing, an extravagance of favor, a prodigality of love—my cup runs over.”
We do not know when David wrote this Psalm. There seems, however, to be no period of his life in which he could have used this expression in reference purely to his temporal circumstances. In his youth he was a shepherd boy and kept his father’s flock. And in such an occupation there were many hardships and discomforts, in addition to which he appears to have been the object of the ill-will of his brothers. He was not rocked on the knee of luxury, nor pampered with indulgences. His was a hardy life abroad and a trying course at home. And unless he had been deeply spiritual, and therefore found contentment in his God, he could not have said, “My cup runs over.”
When he had come forth into public life and lived in the courts of Saul, and even had become the king’s son-in-law, his position was far too perilous to afford him joy. The king hated him and sought his life many times. If it were not that he spoke of Grace and not of outward circumstances, he could not have, then, said, “My cup runs over.” During the period of his exile, his haunts were in the dens and caves of the mountains and the lone places of the wilderness, to which he fled for his life like a hunted partridge. He had no rest for the soles of his feet—his thirst after the ordinances of God’s house was intense and his companions were not such as to afford him solace—surely it could only have been in reference to spiritual things that he could, then, have said, “My cup runs over.”
When he came to be king over Israel, his circumstances, though far superior to any which he may have expected to reach, were very troublous ones for a long season. The house of Saul warred against him and then the Philistines took up arms. He passed from war to war and marched from conflict to conflict. A king’s position is, in itself, a thorny place, but this king had been a man of war from his youth up, so that, apart from the Grace of God and the choice blessings of the Covenant, he could not even, on the throne, have been able to say, “My cup runs over.” In his later days, after his great sin with Bathsheba, his troubles were incessant and such as must have well near broken the old man’s heart.
You remember the cry, “O Absalom, my son, my son! Would God I had died for you, O Absalom, my son, my son”? That was the close of a long trial from his graceless favorite—a trial which had been preceded by many others—in which first one member of his family and then another departed from the paths of right. Nor did it close the chapter of his adversities, for the troubles of his heart were enlarged even to the last, and the good old man had to say upon his deathbed that, though he rejoiced in the sure Covenant of God, yet his house was not so with God as his heart could have desired.
We cannot, therefore, take the text and say, “This is the exclamation of a man in easy circumstances who was never tried. We cannot say this was the song of a favorite of Providence who never knew an ungratified wish.” Not so. David was a man of troubles. He bore the yoke in his youth and was chastened in all his old age. You have before you, not a King Croesus, whose long prosperity became, itself, a terror, nor an Alexander whose boundless conquests only excited new ambitions, nor even a Solomon whose reign was unbroken peace and commercial gain, but David, the man who cried, “Deep calls unto deep at the noise of the waterspouts; all Your waves and Your billows have gone over me.”
So did the spiritual outweigh the natural, that the consolations of the son of Jesse exceeded his tribulation, and even in his most troublous times there were bright seasons of fellowship with the Lord, in which he joyfully said, “My cup
runs over.” Let us think of some cups which never run over. And then consider, if ours runs over, why it does so. And then, thirdly, what then?
I. SOME MEN’S CUPS NEVER RUN OVER. Many even fail to be filled because taken to the wrong source. Such are the cups which are held beneath the drippings of the world’s leaky cistern. Men try to find full satisfaction in wealth, but they never do. Pactolus fills no man’s cup, that power belongs exclusively to the river whose streams make glad the city of God. As to money, every man will have enough when he has a little more, but contentment with his gains comes to no man. Wealth is not true riches, neither are men’s hearts the fuller because their purses are heavy. Men have thought to fill their cups out of the foul pools of what they call, “pleasure,” but all in vain, for appetite grows, passion becomes voracious and lust, like a horseleech, cries, “Give, give.”