You cannot pour from an empty cup. This is an often-used phrase in the self-care realm to make sure that we are prioritizing our health and mental wellness – putting on our own oxygen mask before attempting to help others. When we forget to allow time to recharge and fill our cup, we find ourselves short-tempered, exhausted, unable to move forward, and looking to the wrong things in an attempt to fill up. 

Fill Your Cup – But With The Right Things

Our children need us to pour into them every day. Love, affection, grace, mercy, fun – their tanks are needy and growing.

If we aren’t careful to fill our cups outside of time with our children, we might find ourselves trying to use them and our relationship to fill our cups. This won’t work for a number of reasons, but primarily, it’s not a role they were made to fill. We simply cannot place our significance in the hands of our children. Our significance belongs to God alone, and only He can fill us. 

As our children learn and grow, they watch what we do and model our behavior more than listening to the words or advice we give.

Our cups can be temporarily filled by our work, our spouses, our children, our friends – but the only lasting way to fill them is in Jesus. As we put this into practice, our kids see us looking to Him for what we need, and they learn to do the same. When we tell them that God is important over everything, but don’t trust Him for our needs, they’re learning a completely different message.

Fill Your Cup – Relationship over Rules

We have to fight everything in us to not be like the Pharisees.

The Pharisees were the religious leaders in Jesus’ time. They had it all together, with their checklists and rules. They had worked out the way to follow God into a regimented program. The problem was it was all steps and no heart. They missed the actual most important part of God – His salvation through Jesus, not ourselves. They walked the earth with Jesus and dismissed him completely. 

The Pharisees said they knew God with their words, but their actions proved differently. What they did showed their trust and dependence in themselves and their rules, how well they could check off the list and color within the lines.

But we were never meant to be able to deliver ourselves FROM ourselves. Because we can’t. We also were never meant to do it all.

With humility, when we lay ourselves before God and allow Him to work in and through us, our children see that. They learn what it looks like to walk a surrendered life of love, not a measured life of religion.

Allow Him to fill your cup and pour out from his abundance. We can trust his heart to always be enough.