You Can’t Eat Your Cake and Have it Too!

 “and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.

Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

Matthew 10:38-39

 

When my son was a toddler I had a co-worker who was a masterful cake baker and so his birthdays included cakes that looked like Merry-Go-Rounds; Tigers and a number of others designed to delight a toddler. In a way, the hardest part of the birthday celebration came when it was time to cut into that beautiful cake.

It wasn’t baked just to be looked at.

It tasted good too but we never would have known that if all we did was enjoy how it looked. It gave meaning to the title of today’s blog since we really couldn’t eat our cake and simultaneously hold on to the creative beauty of it.

I suppose that’s what “Kodak moments” were made for!

Running Gods’ course can be a lot like that as well. We have fallen for a lie that we can have all the best in our life all the time and still fulfill Gods’ call on our life.

It sounds good.

It is very attractive and very appealing.

It really tickles our ears and draws us in.  

There is just one minor problem, its’ not true.

That’s not to say that God wants you miserable.

Not at all!

But the Gospel’s Good News is that we have been saved from the destruction that our sins deserved and demanded to an abundant life in Christ.

We interpret the abundant life to mean that it is all pleasure and satisfaction, all things meant to satisfy the longings of my flesh.  

In other words, we can eat our cake and have it too!

There are just too many passages in scripture to reference them all here but suffice to say that one sure thing you will face as a disciple of Jesus Christ is the choice to forgo immediate satisfaction for long term gain.

Remember this: “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?”

Sometimes the ‘desires’ of my life, and the course it would take me on, are in direct contradiction to the course God has laid out for me.    

It is at those moments, I (you too) must choose His course or mine.

It can’t be both!

You can’t eat your cake and have it too and, in surrendering your life to Jesus Christ, your life is not your own.