Seeing through New Eyes

A new bride decided that she was going to bake a cake for her husband. A cake from scratch. He was all impressed because he had never had a cake baked from scratch before. His mother used mixes.

So she went in the kitchen and she started putting everything together. He followed her, and he was asking questions and getting in the way. You know how they do. So when she had everything done, the mix was in the pans and it was time to set it in the oven, she got out a roasting pan which they had been given for a wedding present, she filled it with water and set it in the oven beside the cake.

Her husband said, “Why do you do that?”

She said, “That’s how you make a cake.”

He said, “My mother doesn’t do that.”

She said, “Your mother doesn’t bake a cake from scratch.”

He said that that shouldn’t make any difference, and she tried to blow it off, but it kind of bothered her. Why did she put a pan of water in with the cake?

So she called her sister, and she asked, “When you bake a cake, do you put a pan of water in the oven with it?” Her sister said yes, and she said, “Why do you do that?”

And her sister said, “I don’t know, that’s the way Mom does it.”

So they get Mom on the three way calling, and they say “When you bake a cake do you put a pan of water in the oven with it?” Mom said yes, and they said why, and she said “I don’t know. That’s the way my mother does it.”

So they get rid of Mom, and they get Grandma on the phone, and they say “When you bake a cake, why do you put a pan of water in the oven?”

And she says, “Because my oven rack is warped, and if I don’t put a pan of water in there, the cake gets all lopsided.”

We do this as horsemen, too.

Before a race, we will sometimes have a horse stand in a bucket of ice water, a huge bucket up to his knees. It tightens the tendons and the suspensories, it relieves any achiness or stiffness and it opens the capillaries in the feet and floods them with nourishing blood.

I used to work for a man who had us holding horses on ice for three hours before races. It was a major headache. The horses hated it, the people holding them hated it. We showed him scientific evidence that three hours was a waste of time, that anything longer than 45 minutes is just making them cold. But his father kept horses on ice of three hours, so we were keeping horses on ice for three hours.

And we do this as Christians a lot.

We believe what we believe because we have always believed it.

We believe what we believe because we were raised that way.

We believe what we believe because someone told us that this is how it is.

Christianity is a journey. And as you travel on that journey, you become more sophisticated, more spiritual, you become a better Bible scholar, and as you journey, as you understand more and more, your beliefs should change, evolve, grow.

I thought about putting examples here. A verse that I had rethought after years of believing it meant one thing. Or things I had heard people say as if they were Biblical when they were in fact just tradition. But I didn‘t want this idea to be about a specific.

So let’s leave it like this. We may need to put a roasting pan full of water in our oven, but we need to know why.

You should never stop questioning, never stop learning, never stop reading, never stop praying,
never stop growing. Your spiritual life can be renewed over and over and over again. 

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

-- 2 Corinthians 5:17