I love to cook. My problem is that I hate to shop for the groceries required to cook. So, when I actually have the groceries, and my fridge is stocked, it makes me happy to turn on some music and start chopping some veggies.

Last night, I tried a couple of new recipes; one of them was a honey-mustard, Panko/pretzel-coated chicken, and the other was Brussels Sprouts with bacon and garlic. The chicken recipe had quite a few ingredients, when you factored in the sauce, and had more steps than the Brussels Sprouts, which only had three. As I stood over the stove, adding and stirring, I thought what I usually think when I cook…

“Who came up with this? Who thought about putting dijon and honey together with chicken? And pretzels? What about those?”

I served up that dinner with a steaming ear of fresh corn on the cob, and my man agreed that it was delicious.

“What’s on this chicken?…This sauce is really great!…I will always be amazed at how you can just combine some ingredients and come up with THIS.”

(He says that last one all the time, and it always tickles me because,”Hey buddy! Math and science!)

After dinner, I went in to clean up the kitchen carnage. I put away the pretzels and Panko, the dijon and honey. The recipe was broken back down to its original components, and I came back to my original question…

“Who came up with this?”

But not about the chicken; to answer that question, I always end up looking, well, UP. I considered the recipe of humanity, and its Creator. One by one, we hold our main ingredients; a woman here, a man there. One by one, we wear our labels; a teacher here, a business person there. One by one we offer up flavoring; a singer here, a painter there. One by one, we supply something unique; a good listener here; an encourager there. And the Creator opens His volume of age-old, very worn recipes and goes to work, combining each component on that tattered, splattered page with great care, to come up with AMAZING results.

“I will always be amazed at how you can just combine some ingredients and come up with THIS.” I always seem to say.

And He comes back with…

“It’s all in the recipe.”

“You can easily enough see how this kind of thing works by looking no further than your own body. Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body. It’s exactly the same with Christ. By means of his one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything. (This is what we proclaimed in word and action when we were baptized.) Each of us is now a part of his resurrection body, refreshed and sustained at one fountain—his Spirit—where we all come to drink. The old labels we once used to identify ourselves—labels like Jew or Greek, slave or free—are no longer useful. We need something larger, more comprehensive.

I want you to think about how all this makes you more significant, not less. A body isn’t just a single part blown up into something huge. It’s all the different-but-similar parts arranged and functioning together. If Foot said, “I’m not elegant like Hand, embellished with rings; I guess I don’t belong to this body,” would that make it so? If Ear said, “I’m not beautiful like Eye, limpid and expressive; I don’t deserve a place on the head,” would you want to remove it from the body? If the body was all eye, how could it hear? If all ear, how could it smell? As it is, we see that God has carefully placed each part of the body right where he wanted it.” 1 Corinthians 12:12-18 MSG

“For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” Hebrews 4:12 ESV