All the Right Ingredients

Let’s bake a cake today. We’ll need sprinkles to make it look good. We could write a funny phrase in icing. We can use our brains to determine how many half teaspoons are in one tablespoon. And you can’t forget the sugar, to make it sweet. (You can’t have too much sugar!) There’s something else we need…a secret ingredient, maybe?…oh, it’s no secret. Most people don’t even believe we need to use this, but let’s use baking powder, ok? (Or is it soda…? Whatever makes bread rise, let’s dump it in.)
If we didn’t add that final ingredient, what would happen to our cake? It’d be more like a sugary tortilla. Not good. (Hmm…icing and guacamole…?) Baking powder/soda makes the cake rise. You COULD bake that cake without baking powder/soda, but it wouldn’t be very good. You’d probably end up giving it to the dog, if he’s willing to eat it, that is.
Ya know, that’s kind of like us, isn’t it? Not the dog, but the cake. We have all the great obvious ingredients – flour, water, oil, sugar, and a witty saying in icing – in us right now. We can be smart, funny, friendly, and good-looking, all in one great package. But the person who came up with that cake recipe designed it to be used with baking powder. Without it, the cake can’t rise.
We are the cake with all the great ingredients, but we are incomplete if we don’t have Jesus! With Jesus, we rise above everyone else. We become more than humans. We become amazing! We become beautiful (or handsome, for all you macho boys – I mean, men – out there)! We were designed to have all these great ingredients, but if you take Jesus away, we’ll just be flat. We won’t be useful. And, eventually, we’ll get tossed in the trash. Yet having that one ingredient, Jesus, makes us complete, makes us wonderful, makes us useful.
So you can have your twisted tortilla, I want the big cake. I want the real deal.