In Vietnam, they believe in coffee. Nearly every block in the city we are living in contains at least 4 or 5 coffee shops. Every single morning, each of these little holes-in-the-wall is packed out with people sipping on highly concentrated black coffee and ginger tea.
And I have been joining them. Every day I wake up and come to one of these shops where I do my Bible study and quiet time. It took me a while to acquire a taste for the syrupy tar that they call coffee, though.
The other day, as I was sitting in this shop watching thousands of mopeds pass by, I noticed something: it was a fly.
But that wasn’t all it was. It was also a way that God was choosing to speak to me that morning.
I had finished my coffee but there was still a small layer of liquid on the bottom of my glass. And this fly had made his way towards it. I watched him sit for a moment on the rim of the glass; it was almost as if he was contemplating whether or not to jump in. And then he did it. He plopped down into the glass and landed straight in the coffee. I watched him as he began to drink and drink the black liquid in search of the sugar he was sure he would find within it. This went on for a couple of minutes.
Eventually, though, he either decided that he had had his fill or that the meal had not been what he imagined it would be. Either way, he was now attempting to get out of the cup. I watched as he struggled to free his legs from the grips of the blackness that he had stepped into. Every now and then he would free up one leg and try to fly out but the other legs would sink even further as he put more weight on them.
He couldn’t move. No matter how hard he tried to pull himself out of that mess he had chosen to enter, he just couldn’t escape.
I saw him begin to give up. He just allowed himself to sink further down into the darkness. But then I decided to have a little mercy on him: I reached down and plucked him up out of the coffee. Immediately, he seemed to be reinvigorated and he took off, flying away from that glass as quickly as possible.
This short scene that played out in the span of less than five minutes has led me to many ponderings over the last few days.
You see, this fly is you; this fly is me.
Our sin is the black, sticky coffee at the bottom of that glass.
We fly towards these things that we think will give us pleasure. We think they will make us happy. We think they will taste good. We think they will give us satisfaction. We think they will fill us up.
But it’s all fleeting.
Because we realize eventually that the sugar at the bottom of the glass has run out. We come to see that it wasn’t at all as sweet as we had envisioned it would be. And so we try to get out of it. But by this time it is too late.
And we begin to panic. We struggle and fight, thinking we are strong enough to will ourselves out of the mess we’ve gotten into. But for all our pulling and yanking—all of our new habits and tactics—we just get ourselves more stuck.
And then we reach a point where we begin to lose hope: we give up. We accept our position. After all, isn’t it our fault that we are in this situation in the first place? Don’t we deserve this?
And the blackness—the sticky tar of sin that we have willingly walked into—begins to engulf us and pull us into its inescapable suffocation.
And we resort to just living in this sin. We know it won’t satisfy us but we also don’t know how to escape and so we just accept that this is our life now.
But then God reaches down and does what we can’t do for ourselves: he frees us.
God sent his own Son down as a way of freeing us from the sin that had ensnared us and trapped us with its empty promises of pleasure and fulfillment. We had no way of saving ourselves, so he made a way; Jesus set us free from the bondage of the sin that we were living in.
Sitting there in a Vietnamese café, God used a fly and a cup of coffee to show me the reality of the gospel: we all are dying in the hopeless blackness of the sin that we run to and no matter how hard we try to save ourselves the truth is that we all need a Savior to reach down and pull us out of the muck and give us a new life of freedom.
“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” —Romans 5:8
