“Thou anointest my head with oil. My cup runneth over.”

It’s something special when someone celebrates your life.  I’m not speaking of flattery or glad-handing or brown-nosing.  I’m talking about someone who walks with you through thick and thin and anoints you on occasion with honor.

Honor…Favor.

Anointing someone basically meant you were bestowing him or her with favor or crowning him or her with honor.  And for the recipient, it was a moment of sitting there and letting someone else tell you your worth, not you running around trying to prove it.  In my opinion, it would be as awkward as it was awesome.  I’m not good with letting others pour their love, honor, gratefulness, appreciation, affirmation, and favor onto/into me.  It’s almost strange when someone takes more than a moment to stop and celebrate your life with meaningful specifics, not superficial generalities.

But man, does our heart crave that kind of feedback, that kind of intimate prophecy.

The Shepherd pours it on at times.  There is a time for His rod to correct you and redirect you, but there is also a time where he speaks over you the oil of a Father’s blessing.  He tells you who you are.  He shows you the blessing you’ve been and the blessings that are all around you.  He showers you with words you’ve been dying to hear from someone.  He doesn’t make it up like someone speaking fabricated nonsense at a selfish person’s funeral.  No, the Shepherd draws from years of watching you, tending to your needs, noting your patterns, seeing your values, catching your character, picking up on unique attributes, reading your mood swings, and knowing your next move before you make it.  When he anoints you with oil, it’s not a shot in the arm to keep you going or a shot in the dark to temporarily make you feel special.  The oil of his anointing means something because is comes from a deep knowing.

And after he pours his love all over you and shows you all that you truly are and all that you truly possess in Him, the cup of your heart can’t contain the inlet of encouragement and it spills over the brim.  Tell me that isn’t the best feeling in the world, living with a full cup of happy gratitude instead of an empty cup of crappy attitude.

And here’s the thing, we all have so much to be thankful for.  We just need to be reminded on occasion.  We need to be reminding each other of the goodness that surrounds us and dwells within us.  We forget.  We simply lose sight of what’s true in the grind of gutting it out every day.  This anointing is essential to living with a full cup.

And though we can be used of God to be his instrument of anointing, most often we must get this directly from the Shepherd.  We must be near him, close enough to hear his voice, his words.  That is why reading the Bible isn’t just “devotions”, it’s “anointing”.  The more infrequently you interact with God’s Word, the dryer and dryer your cup gets, because the cup is filled from the oil cascading down from the head to the heart to the hand.  He keeps pouring anointing on your head until your cup is full and begins to overflow.

And when you begin to overflow, only then can you truly be a consistent blessing to others.  It’s hard to “be a blessing” when you are functioning out of an empty reservoir of strength and when you’re faking an anointing.  There is no spiritual abuse that compares to someone living out of a fake anointing.  It’s one of the saddest things to witness in all of Christianity.

Wouldn’t it be great to live with a spirit that when asked, “How are you?” could say, “My cup overflows” and really mean it.

I so long for God’s anointing so that I don’t have to “make up a full cup”.  The only think you’re full of when you do that is crap.