Lifting Up the Cup of Salvation | David Wilkerson

David Wilkerson reveals that the godliest people, those who pray, fast, and pursue God with everything in them, can still be seized by sin they never chose and never wanted, and shows through Psalm 116 that the way out is not gritted-teeth willpower but lifting up the cup of every promise God has already sworn to keep.

Preached: November 18, 2001

Main Points:

• A praying, fasting, God-seeking man cries out that the sorrows of death compassed him, that the snares of hell seized his heart without warning. This is not a description of a backslidden person. It is the honest confession of someone who never went looking for sin and got trapped anyway.

• David Wilkerson names it directly: godly husbands, godly pastors, godly wives are being ensnared by pornography, by bitterness, by adultery they never intended, and it is happening all over the world, in mailbags from thousands of ministers who all say the same thing, "I don't know how this got hold of me."

• The word translated "simple" in Psalm 116:6 comes from a Hebrew root meaning seducible. The man isn't claiming innocence of desire; he's confessing he was drawn away by his own lust or the enemy or both, and it brings him nothing but tears, yet God did not cast him away.

• Multitudes in the church today are exactly here: not God-hating, not running to bars, just utterly unable to break free despite fasting, praying, pleading, and hearing tape after tape from one evangelist after another. Their real problem isn't lust. It's unbelief, a loss of confidence that God's Word actually works.

• Old Covenant religion demands gritted teeth, willpower, and a list of do's and don'ts, and it cannot free anyone. When it fails, people conclude in their haste that all men are liars, that the gospel doesn't work for them specifically, when the real issue is that they were never taught the New Covenant secret in the first place.

• The bronze serpent in Numbers 21 asked nothing of the dying Israelites but to look and believe. That serpent represented the sin and venom itself, and Jesus drank the same cup at Gethsemane, not fearing physical pain but absorbing the full wrath against every sin ever committed. That first drop of blood cleansed and refilled the cup with pure promise.

• The godly man in Psalm 116 finds the secret: not one more day of trying harder, but lifting the cup of salvation and drinking every "I will" promise God has sworn—I will put my fear in your heart, I will take away your heart of stone, I will cause you to walk in my ways—until the sorrow breaks and he walks again in the land of the living.

https://wcmin.us/SS260726c