My wife bakes the best dadgum cookies. Ever. She makes these incredible chocolate chip cookies that are to die for, and she made a batch just a couple of days ago. Although she has made these particular cookies about a thousand times, she always refers to the recipe and very carefully measures out the ingredients.

Flour, shortening, sugar, salt, baking powder, baking soda, eggs, vanilla and chocolate chips are all carefully measured and mixed together in their proper order and baked according to the recipe. From a distance it all seems pretty simple to me, so I have tried to bake them.

For me, though, it seems like a general waste of time to do things in any particular order with respect to these cookies. Does it really matter if the eggs are beaten before being used? Why is it necessary to mix the shortening and sugar together before other ingredients? Sure seems like a lot of wasted energy to me.

Being very conscious of the preservation of heartbeats, I once decided to make the cookies using the same recipe but with a twist. Instead of following the recipe, I simply put everything together in the mixer and let ‘er rip. Voila!

Sure, they looked funny, but Mount Rushmore started out as an ugly outcropping of rock at first, and now look at it.

Continuing on with this theme, I believed that it would be even more economical to bake the cookies faster than the recipe called for, because why wait 12 minutes when I could have cookies in six minutes? All it would take was a little higher baking temperature and the wonderful cookies would be ready. I had it all figured out. Six minutes at 450 degrees and they would bake in a hurry. Oops.

As you may imagine, these cookies were not nearly as yummy as I had envisioned. Not even close. Imagine to yourself what warm cow pies on a cookie sheet might look like, and that is what the result was. Yuck.

Cookies, believe it or not, are something of a parallel with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Our scriptures serve as our faithful cookbook passed on from generation to generation. Open the pages and there are any number of “recipes” inside that can lead us to eternal life. However, we can’t just pick and choose from them and hope to achieve everlasting salvation without doing some things in the proper order.

We have to follow the recipe: faith, repentance, baptism, the Holy Spirit and obeying the commandments to the end. They really need to follow in that order, too, or we get from salvation what I got from my cookies. Ick.

Paying careful attention to the Word of God, like a recipe, is imperative if we want to have eternal life, and we can’t just go about things however we want. Putting the right ingredients together in the right way and at the right time yields something very “delicious,” indeed.

Gerard Geis

Member, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints