Faith in Practice

I love pound cake.

I can't say it any more plainly than that.

Forget the icing. Don't bother with nuts or fruit or whipped cream.

Those things get in the way.

Just give me the fluffy, flaky-crust goodness of an old-fashioned, homemade pound cake.

My mother in-law makes a good one. (Truth be told, she makes a good everything. But I digress.)

Here's the point: How much pound cake love is too much pound cake love?

What would I be willing to give up or sacrifice or jeopardize so I could have pound cake?

You'd be surprised.

But what if my dad told me, in all earnestness, that it would literally break his heart for me to eat another bite of pound cake?

Obviously, I'd give up pound cake. Maybe my taste for pound cake would eventually go away, and it wouldn't be a problem anymore. Maybe it never goes away.

Regardless, pound cake comes off my menu for good. I love pound cake, but I love my dad and cherish our relationship more.

But what if scientists discovered a gene that gives certain people an uncommon desire for pound cake, and I test positive for that gene? It won't kill me if I don't get pound cake, but it's clinically provable that I have a physical and psychological weakness for it, and I can't help wanting it.

And what if, because of this rare gene, a law is passed making it OK for people like me to eat pound cake?

Do I now tell my dad that his broken heart is his problem, and that I get my genes from him, so my affection for pound cake is his fault anyway? Besides, it's legal to eat pound cake.

The answer is obvious. I love my dad. I don't break his heart.

God says in his word that there are things we do that break his heart — things he finds unacceptable, objectionable, even detestable.

Oftentimes, these are things we enjoy ... a lot. So much so that sometimes it even seems like our attraction to those things is out of our control. We might even accuse God of making us this way and argue that it's his fault.

But the Bible says: "Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?" (Romans 9:20)

Some people reason that God wouldn't punish us for doing something that makes us happy. Maybe your god wouldn't, but the God of the Bible will. God doesn't want us to just be happy. He wants us to be happy with being holy.

Our human, natural desires, regardless of how real and how strong they are, will never absolve us of our responsibility toward a sovereign and Almighty God.

Sin will never be acceptable to God.

In other words, we can't have our cake and please God, too.