Author: Jonathan Dodson

If we do not know the gospel and continue in the gospel, we will be dragged away by the love of other things: “I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you… from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them” (Acts 20:29-30). These things, Paul says, are twisted.

Twisting Things

What happens when something is twisted? Its natural shape becomes misshapen, plied into an unnatural form. Men twist the natural order of things quite often. We take naturally good things and adjust them to suit our preference. We take things like a high quality of life, a great career and success, a family, or community and we bend them. We try to make them serve the wrong end–our ultimate happiness. When we bend quality of life, career, family, and community, pushing them to make us happy, we disfigure them. The quality of life has to get higher. The career has to be better. The family more present, never-failing. Our relationships are taken to the point of breaking, where they cannot offer us the love, acceptance, worth, and meaning we long for. Then, snap, they break and we decry their failure. Out with wealth, career, family, and community. But this is twisting! It is plying a ordinary thing into an extraordinary thing. It is placing the weight of the world on the wrong shoulders.

When we twist, we try to make good news out of ordinary news. When the news of movies, bands, food, family, promotions, homes, and personal freedom become our truly good news, what we get excited about, we twist those good things into ultimate things that they were never meant to be. We make them out into a kind of salvation, demanding they save us from our woes (even the greatest spouse cannot meet these demands), and eventually we twist them out of shape, where they are unable to bear the weight of our otherworldly, extraordinary longings.

Untwisting Things

The antidote to twisted things is the gospel of grace. When we replace things with Jesus, when we work his majesty, forgiveness, and grace back into them, they straighten out, and drop a step or two below God, assuming their proper place. When God takes the ultimate place, and his word of grace, the gospel, becomes our good news, we discover true happiness. Suddenly, we are able to lower our expectations for family and friends. Our career, while enjoyable, no longer becomes our source of worth. Quality of life, while desirable, settles in at a far second to the comfort that only Christ can provide, especially through suffering. The wonderful news of the gospel is that it untwists things, placing them back in their proper order. It announces to us that the weight of our longings can be forever held up by an un-pliable Jesus Christ. Jesus bears the weight of our twisted things at the cross, and emerges from the grave in order to bear the weight of our forever longings to be loved, accepted, forgiven, and known. The gospel untwists things.

“…remember that He who created you to be creative gave you the things with which to make beauty and gave you sensitivity to appreciate and respond to His creation. Creativity is His gift to you and the ‘raw materials’ to be put together in various ways are His gift to you as well.” –Edith Schaefer.

Baking Creatively

How cool is it that God can take a weeping willow tree, giant burning star millions of miles away, rolling green hills, the most marvelous shades of blushing reds, violets and blues, a wispy breeze, and order them ever so perfectly to create the most wonderful sunset you have ever seen? By God’s grace He does this day in and day out around the world, all to proclaim His glory. It is simply astonishing.

When I switch on my mixer, I find myself thinking of God proclaiming his glory through my creative hands and with His ingredients to bring about something truly delightful… COOKIES! By combining a pinch of salt, couple eggs, flour, sugar, etc. with the right technique, all in the right order I can create something delectably divine! This, I realize, is exactly what I was made to do, not specifically bake cookies…but to reflect my Creator through baking cookies.

Baking Imperfectly

In the process of baking cookies, it’s not perfection that I seek (I am extremely aware I fall completely short of that). Cookies will burn, look odd, or I will simply forget to add an entire ingredient because I got too wrapped up in a phone conversation (Now I almost never take calls while my mixer is going). Yes, I may get bummed a bit, but perfection is not the point.

Failure actually reminds me that I cannot rest on my ability to bake alone. My ability alone will always fail me, but I can rely on God’s grace by finding my identity and worth in Him through Christ’s work at the cross. This frees me to be more adventurous as I bake, more creative, and more at ease. Because my identity rests in Christ, I am not confined to the title “baker”, but able to cling to my identity as a child of God. This is a zillion times better than any compliment or label someone would tag onto my name.

Baking for His Glory

I love the verse our pastor, Jonathan Dodson, used in the latest sermon on work: Colossians 3:23 “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men”.

As Edith Schaefer puts it above, “Creativity is His gift to you and the ‘raw materials’ to be put together in various ways are His gift to you as well,” then God has certainly blessed me with edible raw materials and the gift to bake… which miraculously mix together to form a mouth-watering treat! What a wonderful gift to have! It is my job and JOY to “work heartily”, baking away, to glorify Him with what I have been given.

*Rachel is married to Taylor and they are both part of a South City Group. She turned her passion into a business and now bakes cookies professionally, shipping them across the country! You can check our her cookies at her ETSY shop Cookie Crowd. 

*This is a guest post by Tim Gillen, husband, father, City Group leader and lawyer.

Like any good, red-blooded American college student, I was all too familiar with the local Chinese food takeout places. For $5, I could get a Styrofoam container full of fried rice with some kind of fried meat and some barely recognizable vegetable drenched in a brown sauce. I saw Chinese food as a way to eat fried, salty food cheaply.

Sammy’s Flipped my World Upside-down

That all changed the first time I went to a place called “Sammy’s” in New York City. The first time I ate at Sammy’s I had just finished finals. and went out with classmates to celebrate. I walked in expecting Chinese food as I had always experienced it, but instead. my entire world was flipped upside down. The food was… good! Not just Chinese food good, but honest to goodness good.

At Sammy’s things were made from scratch. There was a care and craftsmanship that went into how the meat was sautéed and how the vegetables were crisp.  The best part was that Sammy’s wasn’t some gourmet Chinese place. It was just as cheap as those places I had always known, only better. To this day, I don’t know the nuts and bolts of how Sammy’s makes superior dishes, but I am incredibly grateful that they do. In fact, after moving away from walking distance to Sammy’s. I swore off Chinese food for a long time. Why? Because I knew no other place could compare to Sammy’s.

Why Cooking is my Passion

I love to cook. I’ve always had some aptitude for it, but over the last half dozen years or so it has evolved into a passion, my main hobby. I am hardly alone in this, and people love to cook for a variety of reasons. Some love to experiment and try new flavor combinations. Some love to experience different cultures through food.

What I love most about cooking is the cooking techniques and food science behind a great taste. I have a very ordinary palette. My passion lies in taking dishes people are familiar with, and by putting in time, love, and effort, with a dose of technical know-how, elevating the familiar to the superior.

This drives me to learn words like “chiffonads”and “Maillard reaction”, and it is why I buy most of my spices whole, heat them, and grind them. I love making brownies for people used to eating box-made brownies, or spaghetti for people used to eating dried pasta and jarred sauce, and having those people incredulous that my version can taste so much better than what they had accepted as normal or good.

When I cook, I pay close attention to each small detail that goes into elevating a dish, dispite the fact that who ever eats it will not be able to discern what I did to make it taste superior. If all goes according to plan, the diner will know the end product is good in totality, but won’t know and appreciate all the steps andspecial touches it required.

God the Cook

I think about God as all-knowing cook and myself as the unaware diner.

As I cook, I am often reminded of God’s character. I think about as the all-knowing cook and myself as the unaware diner. God acts, provides, and works for me in ways that I am often not aware of. When I am at my best, I have a vague awareness and appreciation for what God does for me. At no time, however, am I able to discern and give appropriate thanks and praise for the infinite number of small ways God cares for me.

The marvelous thing is that God knows this. He knows that I am blissfully unaware of His loving steps and touches, but He does them anyway. He does them because He loves me and not because he needs or requires my praise. Because of this, I am able to put my touches on a dish, not to be recognized and praised for my skill, but to joyfully reflect God.

When I elevate dishes from ordinary to extraordinary, I am reminded how God is always elevating us through the gospel. He takes a rough approximation of forgiveness and evaluates it to permanent, enduring forgiveness at the cross of Christ.

Just like I had no idea Chinese food could be truly good until I experienced Sammy’s, I now realize in-part that God is always at work in profound ways, one of which is elevating, redeeming, ordering and fullfilling my desires through the gospel of Christ.