What Do You Pray For . . . When You Pray?

            Welcome to the website of The Cup and the Glory. Please bear with us; we are a new work in progress and learning as we go. What you have before you is a skeleton sketch of the website. We will be adding to and updating this over the upcoming weeks and months. We wanted to go ahead and get this up and running and make it available to those interested.

            In its simplest form, The Cup and the Glory is a book about walking with Jesus in discipleship. As was true with the original disciples of Jesus, what this entails so often differs from what and how we think things should happen. We see this throughout the book as the Master Teacher patiently teaches and conforms His own into His own image and often uses trials and suffering to bring about His divine purpose. James and John asked that they may sit in His glory; Jesus responded with the requirement of a cup to be drunk and a baptism with which to be baptized (Mark 10:35-38). Nothing has changed for His true disciples over the centuries, including present day ones; the same is true for us.

            As you will see as you read related matters in this site and the workbook, Jesus used suffering to lead me into this study. As James and John did, I was asking about glory. Jesus unexpectedly answered my prayers—as He has and still does with so many others—by things that we do not want, expect, or desire. He calls us to The Cup, The Road, The Gift, The Fellowship. He calls us to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Him. It is a walk by faith, but by no means is it a walk alone, even though it may seem that way to us at times.

            And by all means, He calls us to His glory.

            I hope this will be a most fruitful study for you.

            To God be the Glory!

                                                                                    Greg Harris
The Master’s Seminary
March 2008