Faith like a Recipe

I was contemplating adding a recipe for my newest homemade cooking endeavor when it hit me that our faith is like a recipe.  I remember asking my mom for her chili recipe and she told me all the ingredients but no proportions.  I asked her for some exact measurements and she said that you just put it in till it looks and tastes right.  I remember always wanting an exact recipe as I started out cooking and now I tend to throw different ingredients together until it tastes just right. 

When people ask what my secret ingredient is for a recipe, I like to joke that it is love.  Think of it this way:  love is to faith as warm water is to yeast.  Just as yeast can sit dormant for months and then become activated upon hitting warm water, so our faith can lie dormant until it is added to love.  The Bible tells us that our faith is activated through love.  We can have all the right ingredients. For example, we can know what the Bible says and we can say all the right “Christian” cliché sayings. However, our faith will not activate if we are not loving God and loving others.

When I think about faith, I find often we are looking for an exact recipe for a miracle.  The thing that I have found when talking to people who have a deep walk with the Lord and have experienced His hand move mightily on their behalf, they can give me the ingredients for faith but not the proportions.  Faith isn’t about how many hours a day you read your Bible or how long you pray or how many days you fast.  Faith is learning to trust in a loving God by knowing who He is and His character.  Of course, we cannot really know someone unless we have spent time with him or her.

One evening around midnight I was ready to fall into bed exhausted and Brittany told me, “I just remembered I have to bring brownies to school tomorrow.”  Off to the store we went for the necessary ingredients and as I began to make the brownies my eyelids grew very heavy.  As soon as I heard the timer go off, I pulled the pan out of the oven and went straight to bed.  I woke a few hours later to realize that the brownies were a gooey mess.  In my haste to get to bed, I forgot to check to see if they were really done.  I had all the right ingredients but I tried to rush the baking process.  If only I had left the brownies in the oven for 5 more minutes, the results would have been so different.  How often does that happen in our lives where we are tired and want to rush the faith process?  The result: our lives become a gooey mess!  Just because someone else received his or her miracle instantly doesn’t mean that you will receive yours in the same timing.  My husband received a miracle this past year that was 38 years in the making!  I want to encourage you today to not give up! 

As we go about our busy days, preparing our meals, may we have faith like a recipe!  Faith that tastes just right activated by love and not a gooey mess.