Tasty Life Wanted? Follow God's Ingredient List

It’s birthday time for one of our grandchildren. I so enjoy baking and decorating cakes for each one. Over the years I’ve made some interesting ones. From Barbie dresses to swimming pools to Angry birds. Some have been more challenging than others. 

This year’s cake for Caleb will be a dinosaur cake.  Not a hard project, but will require some steady handwork and hopefully the dinosaur will be recognized as one when Caleb sees it! The biggest problem with this cake has been ingredients! I keep forgetting one thing or another. When we go to the local discount shopping store to get ingredients there’s always a dozen or so people we have to talk to. I get sidetracked and then first thing you know, I’ve forgotten something.  Last night about 2am I laughed out loud and said, “Danny we forgot the eggs!” So first thing this morning we will have to go get eggs. Can’t make a cake without eggs and have it turn out the way we want it to be.

We all want a tasty life don’t we? We want things to turn out right, have pleasant days and for all to look good.   Asking Jesus to become Lord of our lives is the primary ingredient for a good life. Without Christ we are cooking on our own. No matter how you slice it, life will not turn out right without Christ’s touch on it.  But there’s more to the Christian life than just salvation. If we want things to flow smoothly and be rich and flavorful, we have to look to God’s Word for the ingredients. 

We’ve got to look to God’s Word and live by it.  Reading a recipe won’t do a thing will it? It’s the putting together of the ingredients that makes for a recipe turning out right. It’s living the Christian life and learning to pursue righteousness and live for God that turns things out right for us.  We begin with basic Christianity and then we add many ingredients throughout our lives: loving God, right living, fruits of the spirit, and more. There are the gifts that God gives each one of us. As cakes don’t all taste alike, lives aren’t all exactly alike. God gives different gifts, so that the Church (the body not the building) is flavorful and palatable. We all have gifts from speaking to teaching to art and poetry and writing and more. Those gifts, used in the right way, flavor our lives and the lives of those around us.

Oh beloved, maybe you’ve given your heart to Jesus, but you never knew there were ingredients involved in living a life as a completely committed follower of Him. Run to His Word this morning and see! Every Word of God is for you to take and ingest it spiritually so you can live it out physically.  He knows your life and He knows you intimately, so He wants to give you a more abundant life and to give you purpose for this day.  Let Him show you the ingredients and use them liberally for it’s in living for Jesus that we find our greatest creativity. This is how the ingredients of our lives make for a beautiful presentation to Him. He loves you beloved, so He hasn’t left you to your own devices. And He’s for you beloved, so He’s freely giving all ingredients for a blessed life to you – nothing costs, nothing has to be left out, all is freely given through Christ Himself.  Rejoice as you work the recipe of your life out for your good and His glory!

 Colossians 1:18 Christ is also the head of the church, which is His body. He is the beginning, supreme over all who rise from the dead.   So He is first in everything.

Psalm 16:11 You will show me the way of life, granting me the joy of Your presence and the pleasures of living with You forever.

2 Peter 1:5-7  In view of all this, make every effort to respond to God’s promises. Supplement your faith with a generous provision of moral excellence, and moral excellence with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with patient endurance, and patient endurance with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love for everyone.

Colossians 1:10 Then the way you live will always honor and please the Lord, and your lives will produce every kind of good fruit. All the while, you will grow as you learn to know God better and better.

Romans 8:28 And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.

Your Life is Valuable Enough to Bear Fruit!

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned before that my mother had a green thumb.  She could break off a branch from a bush and stick it in the soil and roots would appear and that stick would become a bountiful bush! It didn’t matter what the plant was, she could make it grow.  She could even make something out of plants that others throw away.  Take the horse apple. Now everyone knows you can’t eat bois d’arc apples, only squirrels find them edible. But mother would take those ugly knobby green blobs, slice them thinly, plop them in the oven and out would come interesting “flowers”.  I think the reason Mother was so talented at her gardening was that she loved it. It was more than a duty or a chore. It was something that gave her extreme pleasure. Sometimes she’d be burning hot in the summer sun with sweat streaming across her face. She’d whistle a little tune and keep working.  It never crossed her mind to quit because she loved it. She loved the outcome of what her efforts would accomplish in the lawn and the garden.  You could say she stayed rooted right there until she was done.

God loves to make something from nothing. We are like broken dead twigs in the garden of life and most of us, if truth be told, are throw-aways. We didn’t produce fruit or beautiful flowers. We just existed. But God came into our lives to make something that we never thought we could be.  As He prunes and replants us, we flourish. It never crosses God’s mind to throw us away. What He begins He will continue. He made a way to tend our lives throughout history by His sacrifice on the cross. If it were merely the cross, then death would be our answer. But He went beyond the cross to new life. He rose again, so that we too can rise to new life. He took our little bent, misshapen and unusable lives and caused them to bear much fruit for His Kingdom.

And He always tends to our needs with His loving hands, because we were rooted and established in His love.  Oh there will be times when we feel destined to be plucked up and placed on the burn pile, but God will have none of that.  He never tires of tending His garden of love, so that He is with us, his flourishing plants, forever.

Oh beloved, you may not realize how valuable you are to God. Others may have told you you had no value or given you the idea that you are not worthy of being regenerated, but you are! It doesn’t matter what type of soil your life was beforehand or whether you produced good things, it just matters that He is calling you out of your own mess into His loving care! He will show you wonderful things about your life as you learn to trust in and lean on His Word! He chose you specifically to bloom where you are planted, to produce where you are set and to live a flourishing life of abundance in Him! He loves you, He will tend to your life needs and He will watch over so that the weeds of life will not take root anymore.  And His love and care are all that really matter!

Proverbs 12:12  Thieves are jealous of each other’s loot, but the godly are well rooted and bear their own fruit.

Colossians 2:7  having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith, just as you were instructed, and overflowing with gratitude. (NAS)

Ephesians 6:17-19 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God. (NAS)

John 15:5 Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing.