The Recipe for Success…

Phillipians 4.10 “I’ve found the recipe for being happy whether full or hungry, hands full or hands empty. Whatever I have, wherever I am, I can make it through anything in the One who makes me who I am.”

As the famous sporting cliché goes, “it was a game of two halves.”

This was truly a, “meal of two halves.”

Dinner last night.

It was the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde dinner.

Let me explain.

Last night, attempted a bit of cooking. Was starving and decided I would try and be creative and put together a gourmet meal.

I scrawled through my Jamie Oliver recipe book and came across Linguini pasta with cherry tomatoes and chilli prawns!

Sounded delicious!

This was the one for me.

So I copied down the ingredients I needed and headed off to the supermarket. I walked up and down the isle picking up my basil, garlic, prawns, grabbing everything I needed for the recipe and was feeling quite the chef!

With my new added cooking confidence I decided that a spot of garlic bread would just complete the meal and make it perfect.

Only problem was I had no idea how to put together a bit of garlic bread. No recipe. Now you may read this and shake your head at my lack of cooking ability but I decided to just ‘wing it’ with the garlic bread, no recipe, no talent, no clue and just hope for the best.

So back at home I set off making my pasta, followed the recipe strictly adding the chopped ingredients at the correct time, cooking the pasta correctly and then bringing the whole dish together to produce, if I don’t say so myself, a pretty delicious tea. The recipe was so simple and set everything out step by step for me to follow with the end result proving to be deliciously successful.

This is in stark contrast to the garlic bread. Now you may ask, Paddy, how can you get a piece of garlic bread so wrong? Well first big mistake was I used English Cheddar cheese to sprinkle over the top instead of the usual traditional mozzarella cheese and to be honest it just didn’t have that authentic taste. However even worse, I burnt the bread. I bunged the bread into the oven, completely forgot about it, and pulled it out to of the oven to find my bread looking like two pieces of charcoal and to make matters worse the smoke and heat from the oven set my smoke alarm off in the kitchen ringing around the apartment block.

My garlic bread = massive fail.

As I sat eating my dinner it dawned on me that being a Christian is very similar to cooking a bit of dinner. With my pasta meal I followed the recipe very strictly, had all the correct ingredients, followed how to correctly prepare my ingredients and followed the correct cooking times for the food so as to cook each individual element correctly and produce a tasty meal.

This is the same as living a life for God. When we follow God’s plan for us and strive to learn more about God’s plan for us through reading the bible and praying to God we end up living a life that has planned for us and is delighted for us.

This is in stark contrast to the burnt garlic bread. No recipe, no ingredients, no thought, no hope. This is exactly the same as life. When you stray away from God’s recipe for your life you may often find you struggle to follow God’s plan for you because you are not following his recipe for your life.

So the question is would you rather follow God’s recipe for your life or try and go it alone?

All I can say is look how my garlic bread turned out with no recipe!!!

 

 

 

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