We can’t have it both ways!

Have you ever heard this proverb: “You can’t have the cake and eat it too”?

I love it very much! And I use it almost every day because I live with teenagers.

Teenagers have this tendency where they want to watch movies every night and at the same time, they want to get straight A+ on their exams. I mean, how can anybody do that? We can’t have it both ways, period!


Well, truth be told, it is not only teenagers who have that tendency but in one way or the other, we all do as we desire and wish to have it both ways, whatever that “it” is.

We sometimes claim to be good followers of Jesus Christ while we are faithful consumers of MTV. How can we do that? How can that be ever possible to anyone unless we want to fool ourselves?

After we spend five hours before TV, we come to church and ask the teacher of the word who preached for one hour or so, “Why didn’t you explain your point a little further, I don’t understand what you tried to explain?” How can we understand it while our brain is too full to add anything else?

We can only live for one of these two worlds because as they say, “we can’t have the best of both worlds” and “we can’t have the cake and eat it too,” We have to choose one.

We can’t have the cake because we ate it; or we have the cake because we didn’t eat it. We have to CHOOSE between having the cake and eating it.

After we ate the cake, we can say with full confidence, “I don’t have the cake because I ate it” or after we cover our tasty chocolate cake nicely and put it in our fridge, we can proudly say, “I sure have the cake in my fridge because I didn’t eat.”

However we can’t say, “I have the cake and I ate it” unless of course we are out of our mind.

Jesus said, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.” Luke 9:62

Why did He say that? (Please read the whole chapter of Luke 9)

Jesus said that because He wanted them to know that none of them can be consumers of this world and at the same time be producers of the Kingdom of God. Think about it! ///