The Great Biblical Bake Off
More than just ingredients
Gavin Rodgers | Tue, 1st Jun 2021
I love cake. One of my favourite things about being part of Jubilee is that a lot of our church meetings involve cake! In fact, one of the best things in the world is coming to a church meeting, looking at the refreshments table and seeing a tray of JuJu’s cakes! - What a sight! Although I really do enjoy eating cake, I also enjoy baking cakes in my spare time, and like many of us, a lot of my lockdown was spent baking cakes with my daughter, Eden. It wasn’t until recently though that I reflected on the fact that there are a lot of similarities between our Christian walk and baking a cake.
When it comes to baking a cake, one of the most vital things we need to think about are the ingredients. At the risk of stating the obvious, without the correct ingredients we would not be having a cake! We need butter, sugar, flour and eggs. Although ingredients are vitally important for a cake, if all we had were ingredients, we wouldn’t have a cake either. We need to bake them. In order to produce our cake, we need both ingredients and baking. If we just had ingredients and no baking, we would end up with a soggy batter mixture; if we only had baking in the oven without ingredients we would just end up with a hot tray… none of those things produce a cake!
It’s similar to us on our Christian walk. We can look in the Bible and gain an understanding of all of the ‘ingredients’ involved in our walk with God. We can look at some of the statements written in God’s word and see these vital ingredients and celebrate. Amazing statements like:
For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will.’ - Ephesians 1:4-5
Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become Children of God’ - John 1:12
But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession.’ - 1 Peter 2:9
So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir Galatians 4:7
For we are God’s handiwork (masterpiece), created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do’. - Ephesians 2:10
Wow - Can I get an Amen?!
These amazing Biblical truths should help to form our identity, they should be constant reminders of who God has made us to be. Like the eggs, flour, butter and sugar they should be the very essence of our lives when we put our trust in Jesus and are born again.
God has been speaking to me a lot recently about identity, especially coming off the back of a crazy year with lockdown restrictions. It has helped me to re-evaluate who I actually am and come to God to form my identity - a very healthy habit to get into! Understanding who we are in Jesus will make huge differences in our day-to-day lives. Suddenly our circumstances don’t define us, we are defined by the unchanging truths that God says about us.
Now, going back to my cake analogy, we have a problem here. One of the things that we can easily do is read these statements in the Bible and think, ‘Yeah those sound nice.’ without really grasping and understanding them. We can have these ingredients in front of us, but no cake. Why? Because we have missed out a vital step.
The Holy Spirit brings the ‘baking’. He brings revelation that moves these truths from our head right into our heart. Reading these statements in the Bible is a really good thing to do, but it can only do so much, we need the Holy Spirit to really impress these things on our heart. In 1 Corinthians 2, we see a wonderful passage where Paul describes to us how God reveals things to us by his Holy Spirit.
What we have received is not the Spirit of the world, but the spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught to us by human wisdom but in words taught to us by the spirit, explaining spiritual realities with spirit taught words.’
As we see at the end of that passage, the Holy Spirit explains the realities of the truths that we read about in the Bible. Without the Holy Spirit, these can just be concepts and ideas rather than lived-out realities. We need to ask the spirit to come and give us constant reminders of these truths and the impact that they can have on our lives.
Reading passages in the Bible and learning can only do so much - the Holy Spirit is the one who moves these realities from our head to our heart. It is Him who takes these Biblical truths from being raw ingredients and bakes them so that they become something much deeper and true for us.
Of course, it is important to spend time in the scriptures, meditating in the word of God and understanding some of these truths, but let’s not do this without prayer and asking for the Holy Spirit to come and speak to us. Our walk with God can never become just another academic exercise, instead it needs to be full of life, life that comes from the dunamis power of God’s Holy Spirit, available to us every day!
How is your cake coming along?
