I can remember that when I was a young boy in my father’s home that the family would have breakfast together as we began the day. It was always kind of intriguing to me that I would often see my father pour his hot coffee in his saucer, blow on it, and then drink his coffee from the saucer. I don’t know how many people do such a thing today but, in those days, it was a common practice especially among the mature men. I never saw a lady drink from the saucer. My father told me that he thought the coffee was better from the saucer than from the cup. I have never adopted this practice but I remember it well.
Many years later, as a Pastor, I would hear a certain well-known Evangelist say that when a person has been obedient to the Lord over the years, they have received many blessings that they knew nothing about. All the blessings of God upon our lives are not even noticed by us. They are taken for granted as something good that has happened to us and passed over with hardly any recognition. We often give ourselves credit for something that was really a blessing from God and we thought we were the genesis of it. We need to learn to be sensitive enough to begin to understand that there have been many, many blessings that God brought upon us and not we ourselves.
A great preacher from yesteryear, Charles Haddon Spurgeon from England, made this statement once in a sermon. He said that he once had a dream. It was a very realistic dream with all the proper interactions and events in it. It that dream, he was being given a tour of a place in heaven. The touring angel carried him into a huge room, vast in size. In that room there were many, many filing cabinets stuffed with forms. Spurgeon asked the angel what was the meaning of the filing cabinets stuffed with papers. The angel answered that all these papers filed away were actually prayers of Spurgeon’s that that the Lord had answered. He was then taken into an even larger room, filled with even more filing cabinets and papers. “What are all of these?” he asked the angel and he was told that these were the all the things that God wanted to do for him but that Spurgeon had never asked God for them. He had missed many blessings in life simply because he had not asked God for them. I am convinced that we are probably the same way.
But, I also think that most of our blessings from God are never even recognized. How many times have you been spared a devastating accident without even knowing it? How often have good things happened without being recognized as being from God. How often has the Doctor’s words been devastating but the situation turned our much better than you thought? How often do things happen and they are not recognized as blessings from God? I believe that we are receiving blessings every day and we would recognize more of them if we simply though about the fact that only God could have given them to us.
When God blesses us to the point that our cup runs over and fills up the saucer, then we can begin to enjoy His abundance and love as we start to “Drink From the Saucer.” Faithful people often find, especially later in life that they have been drinking from the saucer for a long time and just didn’t know it.
I was talking with a dear preacher friend of mine who is now retired. He is well known and appreciated for his preaching skills. He retired a number of years ago after serving the Lord as a Pastor for many, many years. After retirement, he has been very busy as pastors have kept him occupied by having him come to their churches to preach for one occasion or another. It occurred to me that, in his later years, he has ben touching more lives with his preaching than ever before. I told him recently that it he was now “Drinking From the Saucer.” Because of his faithfulness and obedience, the Lord blessed him tremendously in the years he was a pastor but now he was able to go and be used of the Lord without the every day struggles of the pastorate. He is “Drinking From the Saucer.”
All of us have a cup. All Christians have a Lord who fills our cups to overflowing if we are obedient and committed to Him. All of us have our saucer. The question is: “Will you, in the times to come, have a cup so filled with blessings that it will run over and fill up your saucer?” Will you be able to give a witness to God’s faithfulness by being a person who will be thanking Him for filling your cup to overflowing and then allowing you to be “Drinking from the Saucer?”
10-23-2025…Wm F. Harrell
