Did you know that God has already given you everything that you need to be successful in life? It's like looking at a recipe in a cookbook. God has given you every ingredient that you need to make the resulting dish of your life. The key to finding peace in this information lies in understanding how dishes are made using a recipe. You have all the ingredients layed out before you. You know you have them, but you have a specific order in which you need to use them in order to be successful. Here's an example of a recipe:
Candy Bar Cake:
(please note all the ingredients are right here before you)
6 (2 ounce) chocolate-coated caramel and creamy nougat bars
1 cup butter softened and divided
2 cups sugar
4 large eggs
2.5 cups all-purpose flour
.25 teaspoons baking soda
1.25 coups buttermilk
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup chopped pecans
creamy chocolate glaze
Instructions:
(please note that the instructions are specific)
Step 1: Melt candy bars and .5 cup butter in a heavy saucepan over low heat, stirring until smooth.
Set aside
Step 2: Beat remaining .5 cups butter and sugar at medium speed with an electric mixer until fluffy. Add eggs (one at a time) beating mixture until blended after each addition.
Step 3: Combine flour and soda; add to sugar mixture alternately with buttermilk, beginning and ending with flour mixture. Beat at low speed after addition
Step 4:
Stir in candy mixture, vanilla and pecans. Pour into a greased and floured 12 cup Bundt or 10 inch tube pan.
Step 5: Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour and 15 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in the center comes out clean.
Step 6: Cool in pan on a wire rack for 10 minutes. Remove from pan. Cool completely on wire rack. Drizzle with creamy chocolate glaze. Yield 1 ten inch cake.
not actual candy bar cake
Picture taken from
The Village Bake Shoppe
Please note that I made a couple of statements bold in the recipe. In step 1, the words
Set aside; and in step 4 the words
stir in candy mixture. Think of the specific ingredients as the characteristics of yourself and the steps in the recipe as the years in your life. You will notice that in step 1, you mixed up some of the ingredients and set them to the side. That can be viewed as God giving you some gifts and talents, having you take some steps to use them, and then telling you to wait on using that gift or talent for a season. Here's a literal example: You can see a specific ministry that you would like to do. You have the talent to perform that ministry, but you don't have the time to launch that ministry right now due to other obligations. So you have to
set it to the side for right now.
Going back to our recipe... step 4 tells you to
stir the candy mixture into the ingredients that you mixed together in steps 2 and 3. That's just like our life. Steps 2 and 3 represent the things in life that God wants you to do before you can add gifts from step 1. The things that you set to the side cannot be effectively used until you get the things in step 2 and 3 together. But you can't step go to step 4 if you don't have the items that you put together in step 1 on the side waiting to be used. This represents God not only giving you all the ingredients that you need to complete the task; but the proper order of instructions to effectively use them.
If you follow the recipe that God sets before your life, you too can experience the sweet results like the cake at the end of the recipe. If you decide to skip a step(or not use all the ingredients), then your life's cake will resemble something horrible that looks nothing like the original picture that God planned for you. I pray that your life and your recipes turn out exactly the way that God plans them. Just remember to follow His directions to the letter.
Peace and Love,
Rev. Mike
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