“For unto us was the
gospel preached, as well as unto them: but the word preached did not profit
them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it.”- Hebrews 4:2
The action of cooking is
as much an art, as it is a science. Not
being a cook myself (I can basically make tea and that’s it), but being married
to one; I know enough to know that ingredients are important. Not only is the application of the
ingredients important; but also the quantity, when you put them in, and how you
mix them. They work together to produce
a desirable result, and if a critical ingredient is left out; you go from
trying to create one delicious something, to creating a whole lot of
nothing. In the end, what makes the
food desirable is the ingredients mixed together as instructed.
Americans love
food. We spend a great deal of time and
money feeding ourselves and enjoying the experiencing of dining; and there are
plenty of ways to dine these days. You have
restaurants, take out, fast food, home cooked, cafeterias, buffets…the list
goes on and on. People can pay through
the nose for fine dining (in fact, one restaurant in New York is so expensive,
you can’t get out the door for less than $1200); or you can scrape together
loose change and eat off the Dollar Menu at Miky D’s. We all have to eat, and someone has to “mix”
the meal; whether it be you or someone you know, or someone you pay. I don’t know about you, but I have never been
to the grocery store and had a bunch of ingredients in my basket that magically
transformed into a week’s worth of meals.
Wouldn’t that be great? You can
walk through the grocery store all day long, and buy every ingredient on the recipe,
but unless they are proper mixed you have no desirable meal. We have to mix the ingredients to create a
desirable meal. We have to mix the
ingredients together else there is no meal.
Take for example: chocolate cake.
You need milk, flour, eggs, sugar; these are your critical ingredients, without
any one of them, you have no cake.
Simply walking through the grocery store does not a cake make; or a
turkey dinner for that matter. It has to
be mixed. There must be an application
of the ingredients, else there is no profit; no meal to eat.
The gospel is
preached in this country. No doubt about
that. The Word of God goes out across
this land (whether in pretense or in truth), and for that we are a blessed
nation. That is something to be thankful
for. However, just as walking through
the grocery store does not a cake make, so walking in and out of church, or
listing to a podcast, watching a sermon on television, does not a Christian
make. You can sit in church every Sunday
from now until you die, but unless the word preached is mixed with faith; it
will profit nothing. The key ingredient
to salvation is not your intelligence, or strength, or how “in order” your life
is. The key ingredient is faith. “For by grace are you saved through faith and
not of yourself it is the gift of God.”
You don’t have to have your life together to come to Christ, you have to
have faith. When you hear the gospel:
the good news, that Jesus is the Son of God, he paid the debt that you could
not, and rose from the grave a Savior. A
Savior that will send the Holy Ghost into your repentant heart to live, and
dwell, and give you the ability to reign over sin in this life. Jesus can change your life. He can change you from sin to righteousness;
from darkness to life. When you hear the
gospel, when you walk down that aisle of the grocery store, don’t expect the
ingredients to just magically form a testimony in your heart; rather take them
to heart and mix it with faith. Believe
in Jesus, commit your life to him, and the Word will profit you! It will make a meal.
