Recipe for bad tasting cookies
My mom was a great baker. Her pies were delectable. At Christmas, the variety of cookies she would create was a delight, and they were all delicious. It was she who introduced me to Toll House chocolate chip cookies. They are my favorite. The balance of flavors in the dough merged with the semi-sweet chocolate chips and slightly crispy texture is heavenly. The only person I know who can create a better chocolate chip cookie is Val, my wife.
One day Val was visiting my mom. Mom mentioned that her latest batch of Toll House cookies hadn’t come out right and asked Val’s advice. They were not very tasty and paler than usual. The two of them figured out that my mom had left out the brown sugar that gives the dough its molasses-like sweetness. My mom had all the ingredients. She knew the recipe. But she got distracted and didn’t follow it.
Our journey through life is much like that. God has a plan for each of us. Jeremiah 29:11 is one of the popular expressions of this certainty. “For surely I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord, “plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.” God provides us all the ingredients we need to carry out his plan for us. He gives us resources. He gives us abilities. He gives us our very lives. And he gives us a plan, a recipe, for our lives through Holy Scripture and by directly inspiring our actions. But few of us follow God’s plan completely.
We may not be open to hearing God’s plan. Sometimes we just forget about God’s plan. Other times we decide our own plan is better. We, at times, get distracted and follow the diversion. Regardless of the cause, the result is like my mother’s failed batch of cookies. For some reason, most of us are convinced that we can get a good outcome for our lives without following God’s recipe.
One of the most common areas in which we do not follow God’s plan is finances. Our cultural obsession with always needing more creates an almost universal sense of scarcity. That sense leads to a reality as we over-commit and spend ourselves into scarcity.
God knows what we need and he provides it. When we follow his plan it is more than sufficient. When we don’t follow his plan we remove ourselves from that plan and frustrate God’s desires for us. Our lives surprise us by becoming bad tasting cookies.
God’s plan includes entrusting us with the resources to carry out the work of His son, Jesus Christ, in the world. He gives to us abundantly and asks that we set aside the first 10 percent of what he has provided us to do His work. That is a tithe. The remaining 90 percent is ours to use for our own needs.
When we choose to not follow God’s plan for us, we literally are creating a recipe for our lives to become bad tasting cookies. Is tithing part of your recipe yet?
