In our first post on this topic, we looked at the fact that eating at the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is making decisions based on what you think is good and evil without relying on God or building a relationship with Him based on submission and dependence.
Now I want you to think about Jesus, Jesus lived the perfect life, a life of abundance, a life where “the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do, those things He does” (John 5.19). Now when you live like that, your opposition will be similar to Jesus.
The people who came against Jesus Christ were not the wicked sinners who only did evil. No – the people who opposed Jesus and His ministry were the most successful religious leaders of their generation! Let me put it in a way that every pastor will understand: everyone who persecuted Jesus was a tither!
Everyone who persecuted Jesus tithed, fasted twice a week, prayed, and had an intense zeal for God. If you are a pastor, you would have loved to have them in your church. They were on fire, and did it all. But they ate from the fruit of their actions, their decisions, their commitment, their zeal and their works and therefore had no place in their life for the Lord Jesus Christ.
It wasn’t prostitutes and tax collectors betraying Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. It wasn’t thieves yelling “Crucify Him!”. It was people who had memorized Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy but could not recognize Jesus.
The religious leaders, the pastors of their day, the bishops of their day, the elders and deacons lied about what Jesus said and done, invented false charges and acted like He was evil and brought Him to the government for the death penalty!
If this is sobering to you, it is supposed to be. It is when we have been serving God for a long time that we are tempted to rely on our judgment, rely on our knowledge, and not spend the time developing a relationship with God. How easily we can serve God with zeal and not recognize Jesus in the midst of us!
Listen to me carefully and grasp what I am saying – if you have been raised Christian, if you have been serving God for a long time, you are at risk of eating at the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil rather than eating at the Tree of Life and depending fully on God. You presume you know it all, when Paul said we know in part this side of Heaven.
The tree of knowledge of good and evil brings us to a place where we miss what Jesus is doing right in front of us. Jesus knew this. He actually said that the sinners will get into the kingdom of God before the Pharisees (Matthew 21.31). What Jesus means is that it is easier for a out and out sinner to adapt to listening to God and relying on God than a religious person, because the religious person presumes they know it anyway.
You are not so smart, so experienced, so brilliant that you can rely on yourself and what you know! You can only rely on God! We have to spend time loving God and getting to know God. We have to dig into the Bible, we have to pray in tongues, we have to follow God, we have to listen to Him.
God is not a set of things you know, He is much more than that. He has a way to get you out of your current mess that you do not know yet. He is more than a million million million times smarter than you! You have to get to know Him and rely on Him!
If you do not realize how serious this information in this blog post is, consider church history. There are denominations in the United Kingdom that used to be rivers of life, flowing across our nation, obeying God fearlessly, seeing miracles, seeing salvations, seeing lives changed by the tens of thousands – and now those same denominations are now enemies of God. They oppose revival, oppose Biblical values, oppose the kingdom of God.
The power and life of the Reformation is not in most Reformed churches. The holiness and wisdom of the Methodists is not in most Methodist churches. The glory and miracles of the Pentecostals is not in most Pentecostal churches. The fire and unity of the early charismatics is not in most charismatic churches.
A few years ago, I took Tony Cooke to the John Wesley Museum in London. It is actually the house where John Wesley used to live. It is the account of the most powerful revival the UK has ever seen. It started because John Wesley, an Anglican minister, saw the Anglican church was cold and dead. Now, you can barely tell the difference between a Methodist and Anglican church. The revival that John Wesley brought to the UK is needed now – in the Methodist church.
Why? They stopped eating at the tree of life and started eating at the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they started making decisions based on what they knew they knew rather than seeking the Lord.
When people first get saved, we don’t need to tell them to rely on God fully, it’s instinctive because when you are a new Christians you know nothing. If you read it in the Bible, you do it. If God speaks it to your heart, you do it. You know you don’t know how to pray, so your prayer life is humble, dependent. You know you do not know how to read the Bible, so you read it humbly, asking God to help you.
But then just a year or two later, you feel you know everything. You have the keys to every door! You have now changed trees. You have made a deadly presumption – you can rely on you now and therefore you miss Jesus in the midst of you, and start to become a modern day Pharisee!
It is so easy to do this. Your knowledge is good – it came from walking with God but now it leads you away from God and into pride and barrenness.
You have to constantly rely on God, constantly spend time in prayer, you have to battle to renew your mind more and more. Stop relying on what you know and ask God to lead you with fresh revelations. Approach the Bible the way you used to – humbly asking God to help you and lead you. Stay intense, stay fresh, and above all stay humble.
I have seen ministers in our generation – pastors, evangelists, church planters – lean more and more on what they know, on the knowledge of good and evil – and there is no more life to them. They preach dull messages, they are lifeless and their churches are lifeless.
The best people in your churches should always be the people who have been their longest, you know them well, you trust them, you are at peace with them and they with you. But there are times when people who have been with you a long time stop relying on the Lord and start relying on the fact they have been around a long time. They are coasting, they are not seeking. They felt the church was better in the old days – but that is not the case.
They will say “This church has changed” – yes, it has, but what they failed to realize is that they should have changed too! They should have grown, and stayed close to the Lord so He could shape them and prepare them for the next phase too!
If you are reading this and feel stuck where you are – maybe you are full of knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. You can tell that you are full of it because you will despise and criticize anyone who doesn’t act according to your knowledge! You cannot get to where you are with what you know right now, you need to go to the tree of life, humble yourself before the Lord and ask Him what He is doing and learn from Him!
Perhaps it was right for you to be the only worship leader in a church, but now it is right for you to build a team. Perhaps it was right for you to be a lay pastor, but now it is right for you to get a salary. Perhaps it was right for you to be with another denomination, but now it is time to leave that group and join Tree of Life Family. Perhaps the way you spoke to your spouse was right but now it is right you speak in a kinder way, that you submit and obey their revelation.
You see what we do when we eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is we get so arrogant we actually think we can finish God’s sentences for Him. He starts to speak and we go – Oh I know this and off we go, but God is going another way and we are now in the wrong place! That’s a bad place to be. If you do not believe me, ask Samson!
Another issue that you need to know is that because so many people are eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that when you eat at the tree of life and fully rely on God and do whatever He tells you to do – many people will tell you that what you are doing is not good. Traditionalists will actually tell you that you are being evil, divisive, that you have missed God, that you are acting on ego, that you are arrogant and foolish. Do not turn away from what God has said to you in the Word and what God has told you to do for the sake of someone who isn’t even listening to God.
Really – that is the test of true obedience – will you obey God when others do not appreciate what you are doing. In the next post, I will show you how this pattern happens over and over in the Word of God – that our heroes of faith all had to do what God said in the face of a people who thought they knew what was good and what was evil.
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