Follow the Recipe

Last night, I made a pizza using homemade pizza dough. I had never realized how easy it could be, and the pizza was more delicious than any pizza I had ever made at home. After tasting it, I thought, I don't think I will ever use store-bought pizza dough again.

I enjoy cooking Italian meals because I have discovered that Italian cooking can be a surprisingly precise endeavor. Ingredients are introduced in a certain order, combined in particular ways, and sometimes cooked for very specific amounts of time.

If a traditional recipe calls for ricotta cheese, for example, you had best use ricotta cheese. You can certainly substitute something else, and you may even end up with something delicious, but it won't necessarily be the dish the recipe was designed to produce.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with personalizing a recipe. That's part of the joy of cooking. But the more ingredients we substitute and the more instructions we ignore, the further we move away from the original recipe.

As I thought about that, I realized there is a spiritual lesson here.

Sometimes we do the same thing with God's instructions.
God gives us His Word and shows us how He desires us to live. He teaches us to love, forgive, trust, serve, show mercy, walk humbly, and seek Him for direction. Yet sometimes, when His instructions don't fit what we want to do, we begin making substitutions.

We replace forgiveness with resentment. We replace patience with our own timetable. We replace prayer with worry. We replace God's wisdom with what seems reasonable to us. And then we wonder why things aren't turning out the way we expected.

Proverbs 3:5–6 gives us a wonderfully simple recipe for walking with God:
“Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.” -- Proverbs 3:5–6 (KJV)

There it is: Trust Him. Don't depend entirely on your own understanding. Acknowledge Him. Let Him direct you.

That doesn't mean that following God guarantees that everything in life will turn out exactly the way we want. Christianity isn't a recipe for a trouble-free life. Sometimes we can faithfully follow God and still encounter disappointment, loss, hardship, and circumstances we don't understand.

But following His Word keeps us aligned with the One who sees what we cannot see.

Perhaps that is why I enjoy the precision of Italian cooking so much. When I follow a well-tested recipe, I don't have to stand over the bowl wondering whether I should reinvent everything. Someone has already shown me the way.

There are times in my spiritual life when I need that same reminder.

I don't have to have everything figured out. I don't have to rewrite God's instructions. I don't have to substitute my wisdom for His. I simply need to trust the One who gave me the recipe.

So, the next time I'm standing in my kitchen making homemade pizza dough, I hope I'll remember something more important than how much flour, yeast, or olive oil to use.
I'll remember this:

When God gives the instructions, trust the recipe, and trust the One who wrote it.
​