I am sure we’ve all had or have that special someone in our lives whose cooking we’ve felt was 2nd to none. Perhaps I’m slightly biased, but my late Grandma Thelma’s cooking must top the chart of the best of all time. I’m talking about some food that was so good you’d slap yourself and moan while eating it. Although her recipes, ingredients, and directions have helped me become a pretty good cook in my own right, the older I get, the more I find a wealth of spiritual knowledge and profound wisdom from my late Grandma Thelma’s kitchen. As you know, every cookbook has three essential things: the recipe, the ingredients, and the directions.
The recipe is a set of instructions for preparing a particular dish, including the ingredients, which are the combined substances added to the dish. The directions are the how-to, or a course along which something moves. For example, preheat the oven to 350 degrees, cook for 45 minutes, allow it to cool, etc.
I want you to know that is why every baker needs a cookbook, and every Christ follower needs the word of God. Like the cookbook, God’s word contains the recipe, ingredients, and directions that guarantee success. Grandma Thelma would often say, “Boy, if you want this entrée to taste as good as mine, you make sure you follow my every direction, and then you’ll have a successful dish.”
I discovered God’s Recipe: This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth; God’s Ingredients: but you shall meditate on it (think deeply about it and focus your mind on it) day and night. His Directions: Observe to do according to everything written in it. Then, you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.
While vacationing, I had the opportunity to watch the potter working at his wheel. Fascinated by his creation, I asked, “How can you create that masterpiece out of a ball of clay?” He said, “I saw a picture in my head of what I wanted to create before I put my clay on the wheel, and after that, I just keep working at it because I know what I saw is in there somewhere.”
Let me encourage you not only to dream and think about it but also to dream and think about it in pictures and see your masterpiece, your destiny, your finished product, yourself graduating, that relationship reconciled, and then, like the potter, keep working at it so that it becomes a part of you because what you see is in there somewhere. Don’t forget the Proverb says, “As you think in your heart, so are you.” Be victorious today!
