Recently while reading the word, I was struck by a portion that seemed very relevant to most of us, as in the most innocent of ways, it makes us appear guilty.
Habakkuk 1: 16: Therefore he sacrifices to his net and burns incense to his dragnet,
for by his net he lives in luxury and enjoys the choicest food.
Wow! This was a bang on the head for me! Here the person is accused of worshipping his work, because he depends on it for good subsistence. Does this not sound familiar with respect to our own attitudes to work? Most of us today sacrifice readily to our work, we sacrifice our time, our energy, our families and even our comforts…all this ironically, to ensure that we provide well for our families and maintain our comforts. We worship our work by making it our first priority over everything else. How many of us willingly give up a church service if we are called in to work at the same time? But how many of us will willingly take leave from work to attend a church service or fellowship? And so the obvious worship we give to our work is also quite apparent.
The Word of God easily explains this devotion to our work, it’s clearly because we depend on our work to provide us the luxury and rich food we need. Our dependence therefore, is not on the Lord, but on our jobs! We often forget the verse
1 Corinthians 10: 26: for, "The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it."
And Psalm 112: 1-3: Praise the LORD. Blessed is the man who fears the LORD,
who finds great delight in his commands. His children will be mighty in the land;
the generation of the upright will be blessed. Wealth and riches are in his house,
and his righteousness endures forever.
Many many other verses indicate that the Lord is our source and everything we have is a blessing from him. And yet we so easily forget this while we give our blood and sweat as slaves to our jobs. A person who does this is categorized as ‘wicked’ according to the Word of God. We are also aware of how the Lord strongly condemns worshiping anyone or anything apart from him as we see in
Exodus 20: 3: You shall have no other gods before me.
With all this instruction from the Lord, how is it that we still manage to forget these important things and let our entire lives revolve around our jobs?
Let us pray and ask the Lord to forgive us for disobeying him so blatantly and prioritizing our jobs as the source of our blessings, when it is actually the Lord!
Another sweet recipe for today!
Recipe for Date and Walnut cake
Ingredients:
Plain Flour – 280gms
Eggs – 2
Dates (pitted and chopped) – 200gms
Chopped walnuts – 75gms
Ground almonds – 75gms
Soft Brown Sugar – 150gms
Ground Cinnamon – 1 teaspoon
Ground Cloves – ½ teaspoon
Ground Nutmeg – ½ teaspoon
Salt – a pinch
Vanilla essence – 1 teaspoon
Butter – 25gms
Soda Bicarbonate – 1 teaspoon
Baking Powder – 2 teaspoon
Water – 225ml
Icing (Optional)
Lemon rind – ½ lemon
Lemon Juice – 1 tablespoon
Icing sugar – 110 gms
Melted Butter- 10 gms
Cream – 1 Tablespoon
Instructions:
1.Preheat oven to 180 degrees. Boil water and pour into a bowl. To this add butter, dates and soda bicarbonate. Stir till butter melts and set aside to cool.
2.In another bowl, whip eggs and sugar, then add the cooled date mixture.
3.To this add flour, ground spices, salt, baking powder, followed by vanilla essence and the ground almonds as well as chopped walnuts.
4.Pour the batter into a well greased 8” or 9”springfoam cake pan and place into preheated oven to bake at 180 degrees for 35 minutes, then at 160 degrees for another 25 minutes. Stick a wet knife into the cake, if it comes out clean, the cake is done. Take out and set aside to cool. Remove frame from cake pan.
5.In a bowl, whip together lemon rind, lemon juice, icing sugar, melted butter and cream. Then pour this mixture over cooled cake and smooth over the cake. Let the icing set before serving.
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