Shortly after Alicia and I got married she made a cake from scratch (after several years in a dorm room, she was glad to have a full kitchen in our Fort Worth apartment). I had never seen cocoa powder before, so I remember pulling it out of the grocery bag when she got home. I couldn’t believe it: a whole container filled with chocolate!
I tore open the package and grabbed a big pinch of the soft, dark powder, and put it straight in my mouth, expecting some sort of Hershey-esque ecstasy. That was the day I learned that cocoa powder is disgusting.
Why would something so bitter go into a delicious dessert? It doesn’t make the cake bitter; the sugar makes the powder sweet. It is when all the ingredients are combined that a tasty cake is born. When that happens, the sum is better than the parts.
That is how things are in the church. Paul famously compared the members of a church to a human body; some are the hands, some are the feet, etc. If I can tweak the apostle’s analogy, we could say the members of the church are like the ingredients in a cake; some are the sugar, some are the cocoa, some are the butter, some are the flour…
Individually we each serve a purpose, but when we are stirred together we become something so much better. Hebrews 10:24 says, “And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works.”
We need to be stirred up. That word is only used one other time in the Bible, and it is when Paul and Barnabas had such a sharp disagreement that they parted ways. So this word means we might need to sharply disagree with each other if someone is out of line. Maybe a believer has developed a bad habit, or a teacher has begun to teach something outside the bounds of sound doctrine. We need to stir them up through a loving confrontation. This can turn something bitter into something sweet.
But I think there is a positive element as well. We can stir each other up by being cheerleaders in the church. We should celebrate successes and encourage one another to keep up the good work.
We don’t just put the ingredients in a bowl and then straight into the oven. We have to stir it up to make it work. So grab your spoon when you head to church next week.
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