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Jesus Like Vanilla

Membership Level Guest

Author/Source: Doug Olson

Topic: Christian Life

Ingredients needed to live a christian life more like Jesus. A hands on cooking activity for 3-5 graders (Can also be done with any age above Kindergarten).
This morning I want to do some cooking with you. Chocolate Chip Cookies are my favorite. I hope you like them too. This recipe is pretty easy. It is a standard in the cookie business. Hmmmm I know that! SO what do you think about whipping up a batch of chocolate chip cookies with me? Are we all in? Okay so I went ahead and read through the recipe and gathered a few things for us. Let’s see….

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large eggs
2 cups (12-oz. pkg.)

Mix all dry ingredients in a small bowl. Combine sugar, brown sugar and vanilla. Add eggs one at a time while stirring. Slowly incorporate dry ingredient mixture. Add chocolate chips.

It looks like I need some help here. We need 2 teams of 2 people plus one person as my assistant. Is there anyone who has some cooking experience that might be able to help? Okay good.

We need a dry team and a wet team. Who would like to measure and who would like to stir? Perfect now follow me as we go through the recipe. Let’s see we need 2 ¼ cups of flour. Yea that is good. You know flour is like an important ingredient in being more like Jesus. Can anyone guess what that might be? I’ll give you a hint it is a key ingredient if you don’t have flour you don’t have cookies. If you don’t have this you won’t look like Jesus. It is like the bible. It is the most key ingredient to know what Jesus looks like. It gives us direction and stability just like flour does in the cookies. It makes a cookie a cookie and the Bible is our primary way to know what Jesus wants us to follow to be like him. Flour is like the Bible to us.

Next we need baking soda. 1 teaspoon. That is not very much…but oh it does so much for the cookies. It makes them poof up and be soft and delicate. Baking soda is like church for us. It is only once a week. It is usually a very small amount of our week but going to church is like adding baking soda to the cake. It makes our life much more full and special. Without baking soda our cookies would be flat and thick textured. Without church our life is flat and dull. Going to church adds a fullness to our life and helps us become more like Jesus because we are with others that know Jesus.

Salt. 1teaspoon. Just a pinch as they say. Salt is an ingredient that some people leave out. It is an ingredient that makes all the other ingredients come together to make the cookie taste that much better. Salt is like serving for us. Serving is a form of worship. It takes all the other things like prayer and bible and praise and prayer and uses them to build up the church or serve one another. It is important to have salt in cookies and very important to serve Jesus and the church.

Margarine. 2 sticks. That is a lot. It melts and coats all the ingredients so they stick together. Without margarine we would have really yucky tasting plies of cooked dust. Yummy! Margarine is like salvation for us. Salvation is Jesus covering us. Forgiving our sins and being the lord of our lives. Salvation is having Jesus as a forever friend you can’t take it away once you have it. Like margarine it is one of the very most important ingredients in our lives. Without salvation we can’t look like Jesus without margarine we would have tasteless pile of dust to eat.

What’s next oh yea sugar. ¾ cup of white and ¾ cup of brown sugar. Oh and let’s throw the vanilla in there too…lots of goodness right there! We have two kinds of sugar. The white sugar is simply a glue and sweetener to the cookie. The brown sugar does the same thing but adds flavor. It is important to have brown sugar in chocolate chip cookies. I like to think of these sugars as the people in our lives. The relationship we have with them. Some people are just sweeteners others add a ton of flavor to our party. We need people in our lives for so many important reasons. Without other people our lives would be meaningless and quite frankly BOOOORING. Cookie without sugar just isn’t right. Can you imagine a cookie without sugar. Me neither and I can’t imagine my life without people. Hey, what about that vanilla? That is the single most important ingredient in this recipe. I can not even imagine a chocolate chip cookie without it. It doesn’t take a lot but it is pretty powerful. It adds a special flavor to the cookie. I think of Vanilla as Jesus living inside me. You do not know it is there but it is and you just know that it is something special. Without vanilla it is still a cookie, but with it is an excellent cookie. Vanilla is like Jesus.

There are only two ingredients left eggs and what is the last ingredient…think about it as we add the eggs. 2 eggs. Eggs are the glue that holds all the ingredients of the cake together. Prayer is like eggs in our life. Prayer holds it all together. We depend on prayer to talk to God and seek him. Cookies would not be held together without eggs and our lives fall apart without daily prayer. Eggs are like prayer in our lives. Oh so important to talk to Jesus. You can say anything you want to him. He listens every time. He always answers. We could make a whole other recipe talking about prayer. BUT we won’t today.

Okay let’s see we need to combine the dry ingredient with the wet…slowly. Stirring. Getting think isn’t it? Man….maybe we need some reinforcement. Any like football playing sport stars out there who would like to stir this batter for us? Jump right in. Hey that looks good. Keep stirring while I add the chocolate chips. Now we have it yummy raw chocolate chip cookies. I know some of you would love to eat this like this but I am telling you you would get sick if you ate this or too much of it. Raw eggs are not good for you. Let’s see if we can get these cooked in a toasty oven.

Jesus like vanilla. With Him our lives reflect the joy of the eternal hope He brings. Our cookies would not be the same without vanilla and neither would our lives without Jesus!

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