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Chapter Seven
- TREES
(Chapter not
written fully, but here is a video response to this topic.)
(Transcript
from the Audio)
The first thing
you need to understand for this chapter is that there is NOT a battle
between good and evil.
This was quite a
revelation for me one day when the Lord dropped it on me through a
sister who really prayed and sought the Lord on this and the Lord has
really confirmed it to me and helped me to understand that there is
not a battle between good and evil.
In the Garden of
Eden, things were perfect and God was fully in charge. So long
as they didn't eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,
everything was going to remain perfect. Satan, of course,
wanted Adam and Eve to eat from that tree. He told them,
"Eat of the tree and you will be like God." - Part of
Genesis 3:5.
One thing he meant
by this is that Adam and Eve would be able to access the natural
(physical, fleshly) realms, whereas in the beginning, they were
totally in the Spirit. Adam and Eve were so focused on the
spiritual realms and their spiritual relationship with God that they
were totally unaware that they were naked physically. What the
snake did by getting them to focus on good and evil, and to get them
to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is this;
It didn't make
them aware of good, it restricted them down to evil and good only.
That little range between good and evil was all they could see after
eating from the forbidden fruit. Prior to that, Adam and Eve were
separated from the spiritual realms where there was so much more
available, and their focus was reduced to that comparatively small
range between good and evil. They were stuck focusing on the
range between really, really bad, and not quite so bad.
All of a sudden,
they were disconnected from the spiritual and aware of the
natural. They realized they were naked and they were stuck in
this planet earth, a mud ball, and they were severed from that
spiritual relationship with God.
Now, you say,
"But Doug! God is good! Satan is evil! There
absolutely IS a battle between good and evil!" But that
brings to me to my point, "There is NOT a battle between good
and evil; however, there ARE two trees, the Tree of the
Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Tree of Life.
There IS "good
and evil" and there is "LIFE". There is NOT a
war between good and evil, there IS a war between "good and
evil" and PERFECT. Here in the natural we are always
arguing about how we are good and another group is evil.
(Americans are the good guys, Nazis and Al Qaeda are bad guys)
One group is more evil than another group, and we are better than
those people and so on.
These are of the
things of mud, flesh, law, and knowledge, but not of the
perfect. Contrasting the things of the fleshly realm of
"good and evil" and the perfect realm you would see that
those who are in the perfect spiritual realm of God are more likely
beckoning us to leave the debate of relative morality or "good
and evil" and come to the perfect.
It doesn't matter
if you are 0.1% better than another group of people when you are not
perfect when you are held to a perfect standard, only when you look
through the standard of the "good and evil" flesh standard.
The difference is
night and day, the difference is light years (light eons or greater
units may apply) between good and perfect.
God wants His
children to manifest their son-ship and manifest their
inheritance. What is our inheritance?
Our inheritance is
the Tree of Life! PERFECT! SINLESS! PURE! WHOLE! CHRIST IN
US! US CRUCIFIED! That is our inheritance! Is it
possible to get there? Yes, otherwise Christ would not tell us
to be perfect in Matthew 5:48 "You, therefore, must be perfect
[growing into complete maturity of godliness in mind and character,
having reached the proper height of virtue and integrity], as your
heavenly Father is perfect." (Amplified)
Be ye therefore
perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. (King James)
Peter reiterates
this in his writings 1 Peter 1:15-16
15 But as he which
hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation;
16 Because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy. (King James)
Many professing
Christian people maintain, despite scriptures like this that is not
possible to stop sinning while we are in this fleshly realm of the earth.
Is it possible to
stop sinning? If you don't think so, then you're in big trouble
biblically, I think. It's clear from Romans 7 that we are a new
creation and we are to be DEAD to sin. That means that it has
no grip on us anymore. That we are over comers in every sense and
that we have beaten what used to come against us and what WILL in the
future come against us.
There are repeated
commands to go and sin no more, to be perfect as He is perfect and to
live a sinless life. I John 3:9 says that the man that is one
of Gods no longer sins.
Are we seeing
anything like that on any kind of decent scale? In fact, aren't
we preaching that those are lies and exaggerations and don't mean
what they say? That can't be good.
It IS possible to
stop sinning. There, I've said it. And I'll prove it. Get your
watch out. Now look at the second hand. For thirty seconds, I'm going
to ask you to pray without ceasing and just focus on Jesus and the
Father and His holiness and your gratitude and praise for Him being
so merciful to you. Maybe repent for something - that'd be
nice. Just for thirty seconds, let's just try that together, OK?
Did you do
it? Aw, c'mon! I'm serious now. It's not too much to ask,
is it?! Be a sport. Thirty, little, seconds. Please?
Don't just read this - participate with me here. This is
interactive. Please? Could you just give Dad your full
attention for 30 seconds? I'll wait for you to catch up.
--------
OK, during that
time you were praying, did you sin? I didn't. No lusts,
no anger, no evil schemes - I just kept my eyes on Him and worshiped
(and I prayed for you, hope you don't mind). How about
you? So maybe it IS possible to stop sinning sometimes, right?
I mean you aren't sinning EVERY single second, are you? (That
would be bad.) If you can do it for thirty seconds, maybe you
could practice and by keeping your focus entirely on Him, you could
do it for a minute or two. Maybe if you beat your flesh into
submission, and you take captive every thought and bring it into
obedience with Christ, and you resist the enemy and He flees, and you
keep your cup all the way full of Jesus, and you let Him be your
defender - maybe you could go for a couple of hours at a time after
awhile. Maybe someday you could get to the end of ONE
twenty-four hour day and you could hear God say, "Well done, my
good and faithful servant." That would sure be something. I've
heard Him say it. And it's worth all the effort! Maybe
you could, too. We're not supposed to worry about tomorrow, just take
care of today and see what you can do with it.
Maybe you could
string a couple of those days in a row. Maybe you could learn
to live there. That would be COOL, wouldn't it?! But maybe
you're just not believing you can, so you're not trying. Maybe you've
settled for some sin and by doing so, haven't needed to strive for
holiness and righteousness. (More here: http://www.fellowshipofthemartyrs.com/manifest_sons_of.htm)
So, If I can stop sinning for 10 seconds, and string that into
another 10 seconds and so on, practicing this really hard, focusing
on God, holding his hand, getting my cup so full of Jesus nothing
else can fit even up to an hour, and then up to a day. And at
the end of the day (remember Jesus says not to worry about tomorrow)
I want to hear "Well done good and faithful servant."
I don't want to
wait until the end of my life to hear that, I want to hear it every
day, perhaps around midnight. I've seen it happen before, I've
felt him say it before and it is SO AMAZING! IT IS SO
BEAUTIFUL! And if you try really hard, and if you let Him run
your day and you let Him and stay out of His way and you obey, maybe
you can string a couple of days in a row like that. And if you
fast and pray and you give everything up, you know, yea, some day,
one of these days maybe something will go wrong and you will have to
repent, you may fall, but, tomorrow, it is washed clean and you START OVER.
All you have to
worry about is TODAY. So, am I ever going to sin again, well, I
probably am. Am I going to sin today? I'm trying really
hard not to sin today; tomorrow will take care of itself.
TODAY, I believe
that I can go without sinning. Why? Because I believe
that I am not trapped in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and
Evil. I have access to Perfect; I have access to the Tree of Life;
Now, if that is
true (it is) and I have His nature in me, and it is Christ in me that
lives and He lives in the Perfect, and He doesn't have to sin and He
doesn't sin, and He isn't addicted to anything. If I can reach
that point where my nature is changed and I am transformed by the
renewing of my mind and I am no longer magnetically attracted to good
and evil, then I now run to the Tree of Life and I live at the base
of the Tree of Life, and I settle and nap in the Perfect then I can
probably get through my day and hear Him say, "Well done my good
and faithful servant." at the end of it.
THAT is what we
need. This is simplified a lot, but I want you to understand
that the systems and structures of this world, Satan and all his
demons will try to get you to run after the Tree of the Knowledge of
Good and Evil. Some of these systems of man will even tell you
to do something good like, "go feed the homeless, go be a
missionary, etc." (Remember the picture of Matthew 7 and 25,
works alone do not save you, only Christ saves you) It will
look good, it will sound good, it will make sense, it might even have
some scriptures to back it up, but if it is not what God wanted you
to do, then it is not PERFECT, it is not going to be a blessing and
you are not really going to be free. You are going to be doing
good works, which is commendable and nice, but it is still the wrong
tree until you come from relative goodness to Perfect.
Take it to the
Lord; ask Him what you are going to have to do to be perfectly and
magnetically attracted to the Tree of Life so that all connections
are severed to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the
systems of man and the structures of this world. Ask Him what
you are going to do to break the curses of Adam and Eve in your life
and they won't apply to you anymore.
We want you
free. We want you hanging out at the bottom of the Tree of Life
instead of standing under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil
with everyone else arguing about how good you are relative to how
evil they are. We want you to come home to Perfect. That
is where Christ is. And understand, it is not me that is
perfect; it is Christ in me that is Perfect. And if I crucify
enough of the me, and He sits on the me like an elephant on a flea,
and if my cup is so full of Him that I have become like a fleck
somewhere down at the bottom of the cup that can't even get in His
way. So if you can do that and walk that way, and like Paul you
can honestly say, "Be like me, because I was like
Christ." Why, because it was Christ that lived in Paul
instead of Saul getting in Christ's way, and because Paul ran to the
Tree of Life instead of relying on law, knowledge and "good and
evil" all the time and settling for the mud of this world
instead of the glory of God on the Tree of Life.
Copyright, FOTM 2007. All rights reserved.
Copies may be made provided no
changes are made,
attribution removed or done for
profit. http://www.fellowshipofthemartyrs.com
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site is meant to be just
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badly we
- the
Christians in
the West - have
mismanaged the massive gifts which God has entrusted to
us. Maybe we can change
directions if we try something different. Maybe if we started
listening to God really well and obeying radically, no matter what
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Although
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