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In cooking, leaven or a leavening agent, is a substance utilized to cause doughs and batters to lighten and soften.  We like leavening agents (like baker’s yeast).  When someone is a baking nice, fresh loaf of homemade bread (yum!), often a cooking yeast is added to the dough.  This leavening agent consumes sugars and starches through fermentation.  This process produces and gives off carbon dioxide and alcohol (don’t worry...the alcohol evaporates & the carbon dioxide escapes).  What is left is the fluffy spots inside the bread where the carbon dioxide escaped (which makes it oh, so good).

We love leaven in our bread.  In fact, there aren’t many breads we enjoy that do not contain leaven – unless you’re visiting Azteca or Los Reyes.

God’s Word speaks of leaven several times.  In fact, the Bible mentions leaven or leavened around 40 times.  When one of these words is used in the Scriptures, sometimes it is merely referring to the state of a bread, but it is also utilized to symbolically / illustratively communicate a truth that goes beyond mere bread.  And as much as we love the stuff in our bread, God’s Word only uses the word “leaven” in a positive sense once.  The other instances are concerning the removal of leaven.

Over and over the LORD instructs the Israelites to remove the leaven from their breads [in grain offerings & in celebrations (like the “Feast of Unleavened Bread” and the “Passover)] to help communicate the pervasive nature of sin.  For our breads, adding just a small amount of leaven is more than sufficient to permeate the whole batch of dough.  God’s Word says this very thing:  (1 Cor. 5:6b) “...Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?”  And the context of this verse in 1 Corinthians is God, through Paul, instructing the church to no longer ignore an unrepentant sinner who claims to have been born-again, but to remove the unrepentant man from among them (excluding him for his unwillingness to repent).  God wants us to understand the pervasive, permeating power of sin.

Recently, we walked through Galatians 5, together, on a Sunday morning.  That chapter mentions this reality, too (Gal. 5:9, “A little leaven leavens the whole lump.”).  The context in this passage is listening to those who have twisted the truth of the gospel and added legalistic requirements to the truth.

Would you keep in mind 2 important truths from these teachings?

  • The sin of others can easily work through the whole group – do not get caught off guard and be influenced by the sin of others. Instead, in a spirit of gentleness, seek the restoration of brothers and sisters (Gal. 6:1) by speaking the truth in love.
  • Sin in your own life has the power to pervasively permeate – identify it, confess it, repent of it, and walk in step with the Spirit (Gal. 5:25)!

May this holiday season – when we remember the grace and mercy of Jesus being sent to be born the God-Man in order to go to the cross and die for our sins – may we see the seriousness of sin in our own lives and in the life of the church.  And may we respond as God’s Word teaches for His glory and our good.

May The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.  2 Cor. 13:14, ESV

 

Pastor loves you, church!