On occasion, I will look up recipes online in the quest to find something new to fix for dinner. It is like having all the cook books you could ever need at your fingertips, searched immediately according to your desired parameters. The one big difference from the traditional cook book approach, however, is the opportunity for people to leave reviews and comments about those recipes. This can add an extremely helpful dimension to the search process as they provide feedback about ease (or difficulty) of preparation, whether people actually liked it, or even suggestions for other recipes. Yet the intriguing part of the comment section is when people start talking about how they loved the recipe, but then explained all of the modifications that they made to the original recipe to make their version so tasty. While I don’t doubt the added creativity, sometimes it seems like they have completely changed the intention of the initial recipe, resulting in a vastly different product.
As a pastor, I have had countless conversations with people who have tried a particular recipe for Christianity. Oftentimes, it is the old family recipe that they were raised with, and there was seemingly something in that recipe that was ultimately distasteful, spoiling the meal and putting a sudden halt to the effort to successfully produce a Christian life. Yet as I probe more deeply into the details of their particular recipe, what I typically find is that they have introduced various ingredients or modified the steps in a radical departure from the original recipe – the Bible. As they explain their experiences, it makes perfect sense to me why they were put off by what they had witnessed.
The purpose of the Bible isn’t to help us live our best lives here on Earth, or demonstrate how to live a life free of troubles, or even how to make people happy, yet those are the sorts of ingredients that many consumers (particularly in this nation) want to enhance as they tweak the Christian recipe to fit their particular tastes. What people fail to realize is that by trying to make the recipe more appealing in our culture, they fundamentally move away from the outcome that the original chef desired. The message of the Bible wasn’t intended to be the tastiest recipe for life, but it was meant to illustrate the pathway towards the most abundant life possible – a life that extends beyond this world, into God’s heavenly kingdom. If the abundant life that Jesus talked about is the objective, then it is best to stick to His recipe.
The unfortunate part for all of us is that there will be at least one part of the recipe that we will find distasteful, and that is the part that we would most like to change. For the recipe to be effective, those tend to be precisely the parts that we must not remove. In those cases, we simply need to trust the chef and follow the instructions, recognizing that there is much that we don’t know about this thing called life.
Therefore, when you are experimenting in the kitchen, feel free to tweak the recipes to your heart’s desire. However, when it comes to the Bible, trust the author and embrace all that it says, as it is written. You will never find a better recipe for life.
Peace and blessings – Pastor Aaron