When my brother and I were kids we used to fight over it.

Whenever my mom would mix cake or cookie batter, Cheyenne and I would jockey for the premier clean up position. Whoever got there first would get to scrape the bottom of the mixing bowl, while the other poor fool would be relegated to licking the batter off of the arms of the egg beaters.

Either way it was awesome!

There’s something about tasting cake batter that is so exciting and hopeful. It’s not that the sample of batter is satisfying in and of itself it’s that it points toward something more. A spoonful of cake batter assures you that there is a warm piece of delicious cake on the way.

That’s exactly what the Apostle Paul was talking about in 2 Corinthians 1:21-22 when he wrote, “Now it is God who makes both us and you stand firm in Christ. He anointed us, set His seal of ownership on us, and put His Spirit in our hearts as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.”

Our current experience with God is both our foretaste and our guarantee. It’s a deposit, guaranteeing that we will never lose our place in line, and it’s a sample of what is yet to be experienced.

Just as my mom’s cake batter was a foretaste of the completed cake, so the sense of God’s Spirit within us is a preview of coming attractions. We don’t have the full experience yet, but we do have the foretaste and the guarantee.

“For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face” (1 Corinthians 13:12).