Skip to main content

Stirred Up

 

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. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

To Save a Life

(Like my blog about the peace symbol, this blog was written as a default response to all the parents, students, and other people who are asking my opinion of To Save a Life.) By now you have probably heard of the movie To Save a Life, which opened nation-wide in theaters on January 22nd. The movie deals with so many issues that teens face today, like suicide, cutting, drinking, drugs, premarital sex, teen pregnancy, and abortion. At first glance this movie looks like an awesome resource that we should recommend for our teens, parents, youth pastors, and youth workers. But a closer look at the movie reveals a few disturbing things. For starters, according to pluggedin.com, there are 2 uses of the “A” word, 5 uses of hell (used as a curse word), and once the “D” word is used. There are other crude terms used to describe a girl, and crude terms for referring to sexual activity. There is also a bedroom scene that shows a girl removing a boy’s shirt, then afterwards the girl putting he...
38 comments
Read more

Catechism #15

Q. By what sin did our first parents fall from their original condition? 
A. Our first parents’ sin was eating the forbidden fruit. The first sin we see in the Bible was in the eating of the forbidden fruit by Adam and Eve. But as we saw last week, there are sins of commission and omission. The eating of the fruit was an act of commission—a sin that was committed in the Garden of Eden. But before Eve ever took her first bite, a few sins of omission occurred that led up to the sin of commission. First, notice that it was Eve, not Adam, that did all the talking with the serpent in Genesis 3. Yet it was Adam, not Eve, who was created as the spiritual leader of the family. For whatever reason Adam abdicated his role as the spiritual leader and stood silently by as Eve ate the fruit. After Eve’s bite, she gave it to Adam, and he ate it too. Not only did Adam omit his role as leader, Eve omitted her trust in the goodness of God. Not only did she misquote God ...
Post a Comment
Read more

All Things To All Men

One of our favorite verses to use in our evangelism methods is where Paul said that he “becomes all things to all men” so that he might “by all means save some (I Corinthians 9:22).” This is certainly a good idea if we keep it in its proper context and application. For example, I remember a time in high school where I knew a kid that loved skateboarding. Being the chicken that I am, I was never a skateboarder. All he would talk about was skating, and I knew none of his lingo. But to help develop a relationship with him (he was new to our church and didn’t know many people), I brushed up on my skating lingo so I could ask if he had done any sick ollies lately (impressed?). This would be like Paul saying “to the skateboarder, I became a skateboarder.” This is effective and necessary. But then there are the people that use this verse to justify doing sinful things in the name of evangelism. The first one that comes to mind is about drinking. Some people will go into the bars to evan...
23 comments
Read more