Mark 1:9-11 tells us the story of Jesus being baptized. In verse 11, we hear the voice of God saying “You are My Son in whom I am well pleased.” The next verse says “Immediately, The Spirit drove Him into the wilderness to be tested.”
Those of you who know me know that I love to cook. It’s one of my favorite things. I’ve experimented with many different techniques and methods of seasoning and preparation. One of my favorite methods of cooking is called “injection cooking.” You may have seen the advertisements for these tools you can use to inject different things into meat for flavoring and seasoning.
The funny thing about this is that if you don’t cook the meat after you inject the seasoning into it, the seasoning will actually ruin the meat its been injected into.
The passage above reminds me of this. Jesus came to a place in His life when God placed something inside Him: “You are my Son in whom I am well pleased” and then immediately He was led by the Spirit into a time of testing. It was a time of testing the very thing that the Father had placed inside Him. Satan said to Jesus “If You are the Son of God….”
Jesus endured the testing and from that time operated with the power of God present in His life.
What has God placed inside you? What has He injected you with that makes you unique?
We don’t like it when testing comes to our lives. Most of the time, we blame it on some demon or something bad. But maybe it’s Gods way of seasoning and preparing us for our purpose.
Jeremiah 29:11 is a very popular scripture to us “Faith” people. We embrace the fact that God has a plan and future for us, but we fail to recognize the preceding verse in that passage “…after seventy years are completed, then I will visit you and perform my Word to you.”
Yes, God does have a plan and future for your life, but I’m afraid many of us have allowed the very thing that God placed inside us to season us and make us unique to rot and become unusable because we refuse to subject ourselves to the heat of Gods testing.
I want to hear Him say “WELL DONE, my good and faithful servant. Enter into My rest.”
“Father, help me today to recognize that You know me better than I know myself. Help me to trust that You know my end from my beginning just as a master chef knows the wonderful flavor that will be produced by the seasoning, cutting, pounding, and heating of the meat he is preparing. Help me to understand that You know the perfect temperature and the perfect time at which to “cook” my life, and when my time has come, I will come out with the perfect aroma and flavor that you had in your heart for me.”
Be Blessed!!