Consider the Mix

With summer winding down I always think about my own summer vacations so long ago. One of my happy memories were the days that I would take my mother’s Betty Crocker cookbook that she received as a wedding gift in 1963 and walk the block to my friend’s house. Michelle and I loved to bake delicious cakes with homemade icing, and we had gotten pretty good at it after some trial and error.

Then came the day when we pulled a warm chocolate cake from the oven; it looked funny and smelled even worse. Tracing our steps, we checked all of the ingredients. Everything was checking out… until we got to the flour jar. The flour’s texture looked different and it had a bit of a smell. We hadn’t thought much of it as we dumped several carefully measured cups into the batter, but now we wondered. That evening we found out exactly what had happened to our latest creation when Michelle’s mother told us that we had used a cornmeal and flour mixture meant for frying fish!

Life can be like that batter sometimes. We may be going along our way, making choices that seem a little off if not downright wrong, assuming that the finished product will still be “okay.” But this is a big gamble when it comes to sin.

King David’s story is one of many complicated choices, both good and very bad. When we hear his story retold, the focus tends to be on God’s great affection for him and the fact that he went from shepherd boy to king. This is a beautiful truth of God’s redemptive power that we can take comfort in for our own lives, but we must know the full story.

The house of David was plagued by sin for generations after he committed both adultery and murder. His wife and children suffered, and heartache was his constant companion. God’s love for him never wavered, but the consequences of his choices were not removed. David, like all of us, chose his own way by putting trust into his own thinking to try and cover one sin with another:

There is a way which seems right to a man and appears straight before him,
But its end is the way of death. Proverbs 14:12

Whatever ingredients we put into our life, whatever choices we make whether right or sinful, we will end up with the finished product of those choices. The bible says that David’s secret lasted for one year before all was revealed by an obedient prophet’s confrontation. With God’s help, we must consider what you choose to add into our lives, for it will mix in with everything else.