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 enjoyed it, and after a while he returns with a piece of paper. “Sir, I managed to get the chef’s recipe for you.”
Excited, you go to the supermarket the next day to buy the ingredients. But the recipe is vague. It says things like “3 tablespoons of Italian sauce” without telling you the brand, the quality, or whether the sauce came from a specialty store. It is no surprise that, in the end, what you cook tastes like a disappointing version of what you enjoyed the night before.
Sometimes the same thing happens with our experiences with God. We attend a service, conference, or retreat where God gives us His presence in a way that deeply marks us. Because the impression is genuine and the desire is real, we later try to reproduce that experience with the ingredients we noticed from the outside.
That is why we overuse “anointed” songs. That is why many preachers imitate someone else’s jokes, phrases, and even preaching posture. That is why, years ago, worship leaders in many churches copied the accent and expressions they heard on Christian music CDs.
The intention is not necessarily bad. It is good and valid to desire more of God in our lives and churches. The problem is in the ingredients. We imitate the form, the part of the recipe the waiter wrote down, while ignoring the hidden factors that made the original experience come from God.
How easy it is to repeat a song from someone filled with the Holy Spirit, but not live the life of integrity, dedication, effort, and spiritual discipline that shaped that song in secret. Prayer, fasting, studying the Bible, giving, worship, obedience, humility: these are not decorations. They are often the kitchen where God prepares what later blesses others.
This has been a great lesson for me. I pray that God teaches us to value and prefer the fresh things that come from Him, and to live honest lives that please the Holy Spirit.