I have in my recipe collection a category called “Family Favorites.” I think that many people do. Eating with those we love forms a bond between family members and passing down family recipes memorializes relationships even when family members have passed on. I tend to not play around with these recipes very much. I have learned that, when I do, the resulting dish is never the same as the original and I regret having toyed with it.
The whole purpose of writing down a recipe is to save what worked—what combination of ingredients produced a desirable result. And people use recipes so that they can duplicate that desirable result. It would be pretty foolish to obtain a recipe for a dish that you knew was amazing and then overhaul it with a bunch of changes. Of course, recipes do have some wiggle room. You can substitute a few things here and there. But every recipe has at least one ingredient that makes or breaks the dish and, most of the time, there is more than one. Make changes to those ingredients and you will no longer achieve anything close to what the original recipe was meant to produce. And this is to say nothing of the, perhaps, “less important” ingredients that affect other aspects of the food such as texture, flavor, density, moisture, nutrition, and appearance.
There are many things in life that require recipes and, unfortunately, we don’t even realize it. That is because both the recipes and the ingredients are difficult to come by. You have to work for both. Having tasted the result of another’s efforts, people take for granted what it cost to produce it and, consequently, think that they can substitute (or even omit) ingredients out of hand. Take “liberty”, for example. If you were to ask people if liberty was a good thing to have, most would answer in the affirmative. But, first, have them define “liberty”. Do they even know what they are trying to produce looks like? Then ask them how it is obtained. Ask them what “ingredients” are needed. Compare the answers you get from those people to the scriptures and to many of the nation’s founding documents. It is as if people think they can create liberty by reading from a recipe card that has been torn to shreds.
Take “salvation”. Ask someone to define it for you. See if their idea of what “salvation” is aligns with scripture. Then ask them how salvation is obtained. Ask them what ingredients go into that recipe. Compare that to the word of God and you will discover how many people are trying to obtain salvation without even bothering to pull out the recipe card. (Or, if they do pull it out, they conveniently omit/alter the ingredients that seem unpalatable to them without realizing that God puts them in there for a specific purpose.)
Satan’s greatest counterfeits to God’s tried-and-true recipes alter or omit the most important ingredients. He gets you to believe that these ingredients aren’t really necessary and that you can do without them. For example, he has convinced people that liberty can be had without morality. He has also convinced people to change their beliefs about what is and is not moral. When it comes to salvation, he has downplayed the need for a baptism of fire, true and continued repentance, and unwavering obedience to God’s commands. And, unfortunately, many people are oblivious to the disastrous consequences that come from these deceptively subtle changes.
When you change the recipes for liberty, salvation, health, life, happiness, prosperity, wisdom, or any other good thing (or worse, when you lack the recipe altogether), you can’t produce those things. All of the recipes for “good” things come from God. Our unwillingness to obtain those recipes and/or our willingness to alter them leads to undesirable results. Obtaining the recipes, following them, and partaking of the result creates a familial relationship between us and our Father and those who follow after us who would do the same.