Sunday, 15th November 2015
Rev Bob Hamp
God has given each one of us a very different journey, and in order for us to go forward the journey God has planned for us, we need to receive from Jesus what Adam has lost in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were able to communicate with God freely and stay in His presence, but when they turned from the tree of life to the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they gave up their fully functioned souls and turned to the world.
But Jesus came and taught us to see the truth again. When we have the Spirit of God in us, we will see truth very differently. The world and materialism determine what is right and what is wrong, but it is the evil’s source of truth – knowledge of good and evil. Whereas when we receive and retain the breath of God, we see truth from God’s point of view.
The devil is terrified that we will know the truth and therefore he will lie to us about God, about ourselves, our past and future. He knows what lies will make us feel most true, and the things he is most afraid from us, he will try to steal them away from us. In order for us to prevent these lies, we need to guard our hearts as it is said in the Book of Proverbs. Guarding our hearts is not building walls around it, but to tend it like tending a garden.
True freedom is to become who God has created us to be, and the devil is making us a personal prison to prevent us becoming us. The lies make us trying to use our own strength to overcome our weaknesses, but this is not God’s design, because without God, we cannot overcome ourselves. We often think that we can glorify God through our strength, but actually God is glorified when we bring our problems to Him.
We may find ourselves in circumstances and feel uncomfortable to change our ways of thinking, but sometimes these circumstances and challenges push us to the way of freedom. Like Jesus, we can be freed in the midst of our difficult circumstances, and it’s not about trying harder, but to see more things we cannot see before, by receiving this tree of life.