Recipe for Victory

Romans 8:28

By

Vicky Moots Pastor

Kingman, Kansas

“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” Romans 8:28

The Word of God is like a cookbook. In it we find many recipes for the nutrition of our spiritual man. What is a recipe? The 1942 Webster’s Dictionary defines it as “a list of materials and directions for preparing, mixing or cooking food to produce a particular dish.” However, the primary definition of “recipe” in this edition of Webster’s was “a physician’s formula for a medicine, also called a prescription.” In those days the physician would write out the formula and the pharmacist would mix up the medicine.  Today most medications are premanufactured.

Spiritually, this means that the Word of God is also a prescription for the healing of our soul. Rom. 8:28 is a recipe for victory in our lives which is personally prescribed for us, but we must be willing to believe it and to receive it and partake of it. We must do more than simply read this verse or memorize it.

Now I would like to use the natural example of cooking something from a recipe to help explain how that we can appropriate God’s Word for ourselves. Let us assume that you are going to try to cook something from a recipe that someone gave to you.

First of all, you must trust the person who wrote the recipe and have faith that the finished product will turn out good. The next thing that you do is to read the recipe and consider the ingredients. But just possessing the recipe and reading it does not result in a finished product. You must decide to personally act upon it and make it a reality for yourself. The same is true spiritually. We must lay hold of the truth of the Word and act upon it by faith.

It takes all of the ingredients in a recipe to make it come out right. Some of the ingredients by themselves don’t necessarily look good or taste good or smell good. Vanilla smells good, but it tastes bitter. Raw eggs and uncooked flour taste bad, but they are necessary. God has a plan, or recipe, for our lives, and we must trust that all things will work together, both the bitter and the sweet. At the time that we are “tasting” or experiencing the bitter things, we may not understand the reason for them. His thoughts are higher than ours. He knows the end from the beginning and how much bitter and sweet that we need.

Suppose in making your recipe that you tasted each ingredient separately and decided to just leave out the things that didn’t taste good. Suppose you felt that all ingredients should be equally represented, so you just used ¼ cup of everything. Or perhaps you got impatient and decided to speed up the process by doubling the heat and cooking it for half the time. Maybe you can’t stand the heat from the oven, so you decide to put the cake in the freezer instead!

 

Too often we try to rewrite the recipe of God’s Word to make it fit our lifestyle instead of patiently waiting for Him to work His will in our lives. God knows exactly what we need: how hot to make the oven of our trials and how long we need to stay in them to produce the desired outcome.

Paul stated in Rom. 8:28 that he knew that all things work together for good. How did he know that? He learned that by his own experience. He had tried the recipe and discovered that it worked good for him. He was able to count all of the “all things,” including the suffering and the imprisonment, as joy. And so, he passed the recipe on to us. It is our recipe for victory. Are you willing to try it?