DEVOTION//We have it all

What was the first food to explode in a microwave oven?

In 1945, Percy Spence discovered the technology that led to microwave ovens.  The first food he deliberately cooked was popcorn. The second was an egg. The egg exploded in the face of one of the experimenters.

Microwave moderation

More than twenty year later (1967), the Amana Corporation marketed the first microwave ovens for commercial and residential kitchens. By then, microwave ovens had controls to moderate the amount of microwave radiation directed at  the food to be heated. But that has not stopped people from turning those dials too high and their detonating eggs.

Life has a facet similar to cooking in a microwave oven. Life requires moderation to keep it from blowing up in our faces.

Immoderation is meaningless

Isn't that a theme throughout Solomon's Book of Ecclesiastes? Abundantly intelligent, wealthy, and powerful, King Solomon pursued life with abandon. Pleasure-seeking was set on high. Building projects were set on high. Learning was set on high. 

But Solomon never found the banquet of success he sought. The egg-shrapnel across his face testified to his failure.

"I denied myself nothing my eyes desired," he confesses. "I refused my heart no pleasure. My heart took delight in all my labor, and this was the reward for all my toil. Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun" (2:10,11).

Easter has given us everything

People who are secure in the guarantees of Jesus' resurrection victory find they don't need to dial their life-goals to full-power. They recognize that immoderate pursuit of anything will never make them more successful, more honorable, more praise-worthy than Easter has already made them.

"Now we are the children of God," John exults (1 John 3:1). There is no position, no status, no honor that is higher. Because of Jesus, we have reached the pinnacle.

Which allows us -- transforms us -- to focus on the one thing that is truly important in life: to "grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ" (2 Peter 3:18).

Grace gives us self-control

For everything else, there is the Spirit's gift of self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). He points us to our abundance of grace in Jesus to empower us to self-mastery, to be satisfied with enough, to say no.

So dial everything else down. It's all meaningless, a chasing after the wind. Jesus has given you all that is important. Pursue that.