The Recipe
Don’t imitate others’ spiritual experiences by copying external forms. Seek genuine encounters with God through integrity and spiritual disciplines developed in secret.
Imagine you are dining at a fine restaurant and you have just tasted the most exquisite dish of your life. You tell the waiter how much you loved it, and a while later he comes back holding a slip of paper. “Sir, I managed to get the chef’s recipe for you.”
Thrilled, you head to the supermarket the next day to buy the ingredients. But the recipe is frustratingly vague. It says things like “3 tablespoons of Italian sauce,” with no mention of the brand, the quality, or whether it came from some specialty store. So it is no surprise that what you cook ends up tasting like a pale, disappointing version of what you enjoyed the night before.
The same thing often happens with our experiences of God. We go to a service, a conference, or a retreat where He gives us His presence in a way that marks us deeply. And because the impression is genuine and the longing is real, we later try to reproduce that experience using only the ingredients we could see from the outside.
That is why we wear out “anointed” songs. That is why so many preachers borrow someone else’s jokes, phrases, and even their posture in the pulpit. That is why, years ago, worship leaders in countless churches mimicked the accent and expressions they heard on Christian music CDs.
The intention is not necessarily wrong. It is good and right to want more of God in our lives and our churches. The problem is the ingredients. We copy the form, the part of the recipe the waiter wrote down, while ignoring the hidden things that made the original experience come from God in the first place.
How easy it is to sing a song written by someone filled with the Holy Spirit, yet skip the life of integrity, dedication, effort, and spiritual discipline that shaped that song in secret. Prayer, fasting, study of the Bible, giving, worship, obedience, humility: these are not decorations. They are the kitchen where God prepares what later blesses everyone else.
This has been a great lesson for me. My prayer is that God teaches us to treasure and crave the fresh things that come from Him, and to live honest lives that please the Holy Spirit.