Recently, I made two cheesecakes to take to a party. No, I couldn’t have chosen the easy way out and simply bought a couple of cheesecakes. I had to make them myself.
The actual recipe isn’t too hard, and I’ve used it before. The whole experience went pretty well, except for a minor glitch that had to do with my brand-new Springform pans.
I had never used that kind of pan before; previously, I had always bought prepared crusts. This time, I wanted to make my own. So I made the first cheesecake, then had to remove it from the bottom of the pan to slide it onto a serving tray so I could reuse the pan for the second cheesecake.
Everything went fine with the transfer of Cheesecake #1 to Platter #1. Mostly fine, that is. With all that jostling of the crust, some of the crumbs somehow—I still can’t remember how—wound up on top of the cheesecake.
“How am I going to get those crumbs off?” I asked my friend Rea, who was going to the party with me. “I can’t just blow them off.”
Rea came up with the idea of using my basting brush to gently brush the crumbs from the top of the cheesecake. That worked. Until I stepped in.
As Rea gently brushed the crumbs from the dessert, some of them fell onto the platter. I used my fingers to scoop the crumbs into my other palm, and then, for some inexplicable reason that still eludes me, I dumped them right back on the cheesecake.
There was a moment of confused silence before Rea said, “What did you do that for?”
“I don’t know,” I said, as puzzled as she was. And this devotion was born.
You see, what I did with those crumbs is just like what we sometimes do with sin. We realize there’s a problem, we get the sin brushed off of our lives, then we add it right back in.
What in the world was I thinking? we wonder, just as I wondered that day in my kitchen.
I hadn’t stopped to consider the options of where I could put the crumbs. I simply didn’t think about the ramifications of what I was about to do, and I dumped them right back where they came from.
Yep. That’s definitely what we do with sin. We just. Don’t. Think.
Whether we put the crumbs back on the cheesecake on purpose isn’t really the point. The point is that there they are, back where they shouldn’t be. Whatever our motives, we still messed up, undoing all the work that had just been done.
Have you ever been in that place, in terms of sin in your life? Where you got rid of it for a time, then found yourself right back in it?
Sure you have. We all have. That’s part of the insidious nature of sin. It can have a hold on us without our even realizing it.
So what do we do to make sure that we don’t sin without thinking? That we don’t just let the words come out of our mouth that shouldn’t have been said, or fail to do something we should have done, without even thinking about our actions?
We ask God to help us, and we ask regularly. We ask Him to warn us when we’re about to do something wrong. We take those areas in which we know we are prone to sin, and we put those areas to death by establishing plans for dealing with our wrongdoing and preventing further sin.
It’s hard. Believe me, I know. But I don’t want to put the crumbs right back on my cheesecake. You don’t either.
We want that cheesecake to look like it was supposed to.
Psalm 139:23-24—Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting! (ESV)