What Kind of Bread Are You Baking?

Scripture Reading

1 Corinthians 5:7

7 Get rid of the old yeast, so that you may be a new unleavened batch—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.

Devotional

If you’ve ever made bread from scratch, you may notice it doesn’t take much yeast to make the bread rise. Now we may typically enjoy the thought of a nice fluffy warm piece of bread, but in the case of this scripture, fluffy bread is not the goal. In fact, yeast in this scripture is analogous to sin. That is to say, that a small amount of sin is all you need to become a puffed-up sin-of-men roll, when God wants you to be more like a tortilla or piece of pita – spiritually-speaking of course. What’s also interesting is that once you add yeast to water and flour, you can never undo it. The only way to get unleavened bread is to scrap the old mixture and start again with a new batch. The same goes for sin. There are no takebacks, but praise God that all he wants us to do is acknowledge our sin, repent from it, and he wipes our slate clean through the blood of Jesus and we start over while retaining wisdom from that experience.

When we read this scripture, you may also be reminded of Exodus 12:19 that reads:

19 For seven days no yeast is to be found in your houses. And anyone, whether foreigner or native-born, who eats anything with yeast in it must be cut off from the community of Israel.

You may recall that this was when the Israelites were still held captive in Egypt. God instructs them to remove yeast from their households and sacrifice and eat a lamb, painting the outside of their doorways with its blood so that death will pass over their household when God strikes Egypt. So, 1 Corinthians 5:7 illustrates that our lives need to reflect that of unleavened bread because the blood of the permanent sacrifice, Jesus, has been shed for you. We are supposed to made new. That’s not to say that we will be perfect because that is impossible, but know that when sin enters our life, we need to come to God with a heart of repentance instead of allowing that sin to continue to balloon. I’ll leave you with one more interesting fact. When dough with yeast is allowed to continue to rise and reaches over double its size, eventually it collapses. It’s amazing how much that applies to life. Let’s pray.

Prayer

Thank you, God, for your sacrifice that continues to make us new. Thank you for being a God of mercy and forgiveness. I know that there are areas of my life right now where sin is dwelling. I pray that those areas of life will be made right with your help. Lord, I pray for a renewal of my mind and heart that they will be re-aligned with you. Lord today, I want to leave behind my former “fluffy bread” self and be made into a beautiful piece of pita anointed with your oil. In Jesus’s name, I claim victory over my sin. Amen.