Yesterday, the Lord gave me a picture of His kitchen. He had two pots on the stove. One held butter, the other sugar. We were making No-Bake Cookies. Yum!!! He brought the flame under the sugar pot to a steady flicker. (We’re dealing with the gas stove of the Holy Spirit here; ie, Romans 12:11, II Timothy 1:6.) J
The butter the Lord said represented the respect we give one another as fellow believers. Our respect for the work of the Holy Spirit melts our hearts and keeps us soft and sensitive, responding to His grace and power at work in our lives through the ministry of the Church.
The sugar He said represented His love, the extravagant sweetness He places in our lives that make our cookies (the deeds we do for His Kingdom) so scrumptious!
To my curiosity, the burner under the pot of butter began to act up. The flame shot high, burning too fast, then too low, leaving the butter cold. The Holy Spirit said, “Place the butter with the sugar, so they are in one pot.” Respect and love work best when melted together. A good illustration of this is the reciprocation between spouses (Ephesians 5:21-33). Another is submission within a body of believers, where we respect one another’s free will and individual choices yet remain united through the love of the Spirit poured into our hearts (Romans 15:1-2; Philippians 2:1-2).
Then Jesus did something that shocked me. After I combined the two ingredients in one pot, He took the five-pound bag of sugar on the counter and dumped the whole thing into the pot. The sugar filled the pot and overflowed, making a mess all over the stove and floor. I stared. Was it an accident?
Jesus smiled. “My love is extravagant.”
I studied the mess and decided that if Jesus had that much love to give, I needed to get a bigger pot. So I switched the pot for a big kettle, but Jesus just can’t be outdone. He walked in with a twenty-pound bag of sugar, hefted it onto His shoulder, and poured…and poured…and poured.
Laughter bubbled up. “Jesus, You win! No matter how big the pot I find, Your love overflows the brim.” I sat cross-legged in the mountains of sugar on the floor and gazed up with a smile brimful of delighted adoration. “So what am I supposed to do?”
He smiled. “Cook. And let the little children dip their fingers in the sugar that has overflowed the pot. My love cannot be restricted to boundaries. I give My Spirit without measure.” (Luke 6:38, John 3:34)
Eugene Peterson expresses it this way in the Message Bible: “Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn’t love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that.” (Ephesians 5:2)Jesus isn’t interested in measuring cups or the human boundaries we set on loving people. He said, “Melt the sugar in the pot and get more butter. Make an even bigger batch.” What we do for others, we do for Him (Matthew 25:40). He desires the condition of our hearts and souls to be incredibly soft and pliable—more than pliable, liquid gold—for Him to pour out His love, and even our lives, in any fashion He desires (I Thessalonians 2:8, II Timothy 4:6).
Yet, even as melted butter and sugar are not easy for anyone to handle except the Lord—they’re too hot and drip all over the place—so the Lord adds our humanity to the mix of our melted hearts, allowing others to "handle" us in the interface of common, everyday life. Our humanity is like the oatmeal flakes added to the No-Bake Cookies recipe. Once the ingredients set up with the oatmeal, anyone can pick them up and “taste and see” the work and love of God in our lives—prayerfully and hopefully experiencing it in a fresh, mouth-watering way, exclaiming with delight, “The Lord is good!” (Psalm 34:8)
PS. We often here of the "milk of human kindness" and people's personalities are sometimes referred to in terms of "chocolate" or "vanilla". It seems fitting that in this recipe of loving others that friendship and personality get melted into the mix!
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