Cakewalk
Published in the Omaha World Herald’s “From the Pulpit”
October 27, 2024
Reverend Eric L. Jay
“Cakewalk”
In a 2014 article published by Psychology Today, corporate marketing guru Drew Boyd recounted the story of how in the 1950s, General Mills launched a line of cake mixes under the famous Betty Crocker brand. The cake mixes included all the dry ingredients in the package, plus milk and eggs in powdered form. All you needed was to add water, mix it all together, and stick the pan in the oven. For busy homemakers, it saved time and effort, and the recipe was virtually error-free. General Mills had a sure winner on its hands. Or so it thought.
Why were consumers resisting it? The short answer: guilt. The psychologists concluded that average American housewives felt bad using the product despite its convenience. It saved so much time and effort when compared with the traditional cake baking routine that they felt they were deceiving their guests. In fact, the cake tasted so good that people thought women were spending hours baking. Women felt guilty about getting more credit than they deserved. So, they stopped using the product.
Against all marketing conventional wisdom, General Mills revised the product instead, making it less convenient. The housewife was charged with adding water and a real egg to the ingredients, creating the perception that the powdered egg had been subtracted. General Mills relaunched the new product with the slogan “Add an Egg.” Sales of Betty Crocker instant cake mix soared.
This true story elucidates a truth about our human nature: we know we need to do something, we feel obligated to do something, and we are compelled to do “enough” because we know we fall far short of even our own expectations. As a humanity, we know our guilt. We know we are not as we should be. We know we are not as we work so hard to appear to others. As the story about Betty Crocker’s instant cake mix reveals, in our sinfulness as a humanity we feel better about ourselves when we think we can do something for ourselves. Though this innate compulsion we have to be “good enough” is a good thing, it is not enough and is obviously impossible for us to do.
Contrary to the religions of men that teach you must do enough, be good enough, or earn enough piety points in order to be saved by God, Jesus taught very clearly that we are by nature sinful and depraved in our thoughts, words, and deeds, and are incapable of saving ourselves, but that God so loved us that He sent His Son Jesus to live the life we could not, die the death we deserve, and rise again to conquer the fatal consequence of sin and bring us back into fellowship with God. In its most basic message, the Gospel of Jesus Christ says, “You have not, and you cannot, but God has!”
The Apostle Paul was formerly known as Saul, the self-righteous and over-zealous Pharisee who killed Christians in his rage against the simplicity of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It was the message of complete grace that offended him and his insistence that he could somehow be “good enough” for God. However, after being confronted face-to-face by the resurrected Jesus Christ, Paul’s eyes were opened (literally and figuratively) and he now understood the truth about his sinful condition and the necessity that salvation be a free and unmerited gift of God through Jesus Christ. As Paul came to write in Romans 7, “I know that nothing good dwells in me. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
You cannot have your cake and eat it too. If you want to maintain possession of a cake, you can’t eat it. If we desire to take hold of eternal life and know the love and salvation of God, we must first let go and surrender to the Good News that there is nothing left to be done. Jesus has done it all. God sent His eternally begotten Son into the flesh to earn and merit salvation for us. If we reject the simplicity of the true Gospel of Jesus’ all sufficient life and sacrifice, there will be no sweetness of salvation for us to taste. But, if we receive all that has been freely and graciously done for us, even Christ’s dying of the death we deserve, and confess, in faith, Jesus to be the true and risen Son of God who takes away the sins of the world, then we will, as the Psalmist says (34:8), “Taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!”