"Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us." 1 Corinthians 5:6-7
As some of you may know, one of my favorite cuisines is Indian, and I have tried to learn more recipes over the years. One recipe that I spent a lot of time on was naan, because it was a great accompaniment to many dishes, alongside being a great bread to eat on its own.
Luckily, in this day and age, we have many videos on YouTube from which we can learn how to do so many things. I found a good video on how to make naan, and I would follow the recipe exactly. Except, after the first two or three times of doing it, I noticed that my bread wasn't doing much else than just being flatter than flat. I had the right amount of yeast and yogurt and flower and other ingredients, but the bread would never puff up into a ball like the video. My first solution: add more yeast. I'd learned that yeast is what makes bread rise, so it should have made everything better. The next time I made the bread, though, I saw that the lumps of dough became biscuits instead: alright in flavor, but way too far away from the correct fluffy texture.
Very frustrated, I decided to watch the video in full once more, but this time making sure that I paid attention to every detail. I learned that there were two things that I did not do. The first thing was making sure to activate the yeast in water before adding it to the dough. The second thing was making sure that I left the dough to rise on its own for a few hours. The next batch of naan I made was exactly what I'd had in the restaurants: fluffy, hollow, and delicious.
Whenever I come across passages from the bible about dough and leavening, they bring me back to my experience of learning how to make naan. It took me a while to learn that a very little bit of yeast can cause bread to puff up to such a great size. Paul warns that the same thing happens when we allow sin to grow within us. Sure, we can create anecdotes of people who live in so much sin that they no longer seem to be living life, such as the dough that has too much leavening in it. But, we can also start to look at our own lives, where we think that we can start ignoring our own problems. It's just a white lie. It's just a dollar from her pocket. It's just a fantasy. Then it grows. The small bit of leavening of sinful nature can overtake us until we are filled with so much sin that we are about to burst.
How do we fix this then? We first need try to think of ourselves as the ones who prepare the dough, for how else can we purge out the leavening of malice? Then we need to know that there are so many tempting ingredients in our pantry, but God is also there with us, offering to demonstrate what to do. The lumps of dough are our lives, but they do not have to be the final product. God gives us many chances to get it right, but it is only by our own efforts that we can truly receive what God wants to give us.
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