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.