Tree of Life Blog

A Biblical account nearly everyone knows, mainly because it is so shocking, is when Esau sells his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of stew. Now, listen carefully, all of us have a spiritual lineage – somewhere we came from. We have a spiritual family – people who have helped us, raised us up, taught us, encouraged us, forgiven us, walked with us. You were not born again into a vacuum – you had people around you, spiritual parentsn and siblings and cousins. That spiritual family gives you a spiritual inheritance. You know some things, you realize some things, you have some teachings because of your spiritual lineage. God puts us in families.

Everyone of us has a lineage. People we should be grateful for. People that shared the gospel with us, people who taught us about the Holy Spirit, people who taught us about faith, grace, prosperity, healing, holiness. Those people have been used by God to load things into our lives!

Now if we hate our lineage or try to deny it, because you think it is inferior or because you got offended at the people God brought into your life – you will not succeed in life. You will become like Esau, lost and without heritage. I have seen this happen time after time.

Once I was in a conference, and the speaker invited someone up to give a testimony, and it was a powerful testimony about how the speaker had prayed for this lady. and how she was healed. She shared the testimony and people applauded, it was a great testimony. Except it wasn’t totally true. The person was actually healed in one of our churches. Every detail about the miracle was there – every single detail, I know because I was there. Except for the one detail of who prayed for her. It wasn’t this guest speaker but rather one of our local pastors.

But this lady denied her lineage for the applause of a larger crowd. God put the Tree of Life into her life to teach her about healing and get healed, but she came to despise us. That’s sad. And she is now no longer in church and no longer walking with the Lord.

God chose your birthright to load things into your life. That doesn’t mean the church or ministry that you get saved in or taught first by is the one you have to stay in. I did not stay with the Baptists but that does not mean I do not honour them.

I have the heritage I have and it gives me abilities other people do not have. The Bible College I went to did not teach me grace as well as maybe other Bible Colleges and for a time that concerned me, but I learned grace from some cassette tapes, and the heritage I have from my Bible College – the vital importance of local church, the need for honour, the need for a heritage among many other things – had been invaluable in my ministry.

During my time at Bible College, I met people who were involved in revival in the United Kingdom, people who have raised the dead, people who have known things that I would never have learned everywhere else. I am very blessed by and happy for my heritage there, more grateful than I could ever express in words.

But Esau despised his birthright. Like the person who leaves his local church having been there for years to do a discipleship course or Bible College or work for a ministry, and suddenly they forget the only reason they were there was their heritage, Esau hated what God gave Him. Esau did not value his background. Born to the most blessed family on earth, Esau did not value it. He despised it.

When someone goes to Bible College the main indicator of whether they succeed in ministry afterwards is whether they honour the church that sent them there. Nothing else is more indicative than that in my experience.

I have seen people do that in the natural, wishing they were born in a different nation or to a different tribe, wishing they were whiter or blacker than they are. Do not despise your birthright. God has designed you for a particular reason and gave you the birthright to do what He called you to do. He is not a fool, He knows what family you need to get where you are going. He knows it in the spiritual too!

In church, you will never prosper if you despise your birthright. If you are always trying to introduce your pastor to “better” teachings, if you are always looking elsewhere for spiritual food, if you are always looking for the new fix, the new thing. then you will not respct and honour where you are, what God has given you and what God has taught you.

Genesis 28.7 says that Jacob obeyed his father and mother. That is one of the ways to get a blessing. Paul says in Ephesians that this is the first commandment with a blessing. When you obey your lineage, you honour your birthrate. Listen – let me say it like this – your ability to honour your spiritual lineage determines your future. Some people want everything around them to be different from their spiritual family and it will not work.

Esau was not like Jacob, if Esau found out that his parents liked one thing – he did the opposite. He thought that sort of immature rebellion was cool and mature. It isn’t. Jacob married a girl that made his parents happy – that was not too much for him. That’s a huge decision to make to honour your parents.

Most people fail at living the Christian life because they do not honour their spiritual lineage. It really is that simple. When you got saved, there were people pleased you were saved. When you started speaking in tongues, there were people so happy for you. When you grasped how to walk in victory, how to read your Bible for yourself, how to pray and get results, how to minister healing, there were people really excited and happy. That is your spiritual family. If you work on honouring them, you will do well. If not you will not.

What is your lineage, and how can you honour them today?

One of the criticisms of modern screen writing is when a writer TELLS us something rather than SHOWS us something. For example, if the main character is an excellent detective, someone might say they are an excellent detective, they may say it about themselves, but if in the film or TV show we never see them being a detective then we deep down struggle to believe it.

On the other hand, if the character works out something from a small, seemingly insignificant clue, and is SHOWN to be a great detective then not only did we enjoy finding out the person was a great detective we deep down believe it, because we know TELLING is easy, SHOWING means something is real.

Some people sadly do the same in real life. They TELL me that conference, that experience, that this encounter with God, that their time at Bible College, has made them a remarkable disciple of Jesus Christ. Other people may TELL me how wonderful they are as well.

But the truth is for anything to be authentic we need it SHOWN. Turn up an hour early for church and help set up, forgive quickly, do not gossip, honour people, serve, be consistent, be available, be sweet and kind. Then not only will we enjoy finding out that you are a great disciple of Christ, we will know it is real.

Nothing larger than three people can survive without the principle of delegated authority. Anyone in authority of anything growing must as the thing grows, be it a church or business or family, must learn how to delegate authority.

Now the purpose of this blog is to help you learn how to behave in church, because so many do not know. And this will help you – you cannot function in church if you do not know how to respond to delegated authority.

Most of us would love to deal with the CEO of the company and the lead pastor at the church, however as a church grows, it is not always possible to deal with the highest authority. If you cannot deal with delegated authority you are a mess waiting to manifest – a disaster waiting to happen – a collapse about to collapse.

God is ultimately the highest authority in the universe, but if God sends a pastor to a local church and you are in that church, make do with the pastor. If the pastor sends an associate pastor to visit you, or an elder, make do with the associate or elder. I am using stark language here, but it is so important you grasp this. So many Christians are too proud and arrogant to relate to delegated authority.

I know several people who will flow with me, but will not flow with one of my associates or elders. They cannot relate to delegated authorities. Some even failed to relate to my own wife! These people are not living in grace or wisdom! To walk in your destiny, you will have to deal with the people God has delegated, and the people that have been delegated by them and the people delegated by them and so on.

Abraham sent a servant to find a wife for Isaac. Would you be happy for one of your father’s employees to go find you a wife? Seriously? But Isaac submitted, and ended up one of the wealthiest men alive and had a better marriage than his father or son. Some people would allow their father to find a wife for them, but not the father’s delegate. Most people would feel like saying “how can a delegate choose correctly.”

Isaac had the humility and character to accept the wisdom and leading of delegated authority, and that led to the blessings of Abraham. He ended up in the lineage of Christ and became an awesome patriarch. Rejecting the authority of a delegate is possibly the most obvious sign of arrogance and the most common way the arrogant do not enter their destiny.

The most obvious example is those people who are born again but too arrogant to go to church. Another example is the people who will skip church if the lead pastor is away, another example is the people who only come when there is a big name guest speaker. It’s all arrogance and an unwillingness to accept delegated authority.

As Tree of Life grows, this skill may be one of the most important you learn. Selah.

There are some things the Bible is so explicit and clear on it amazes me when someone misunderstands them. We can argue about the antichrist and the events of the end, we can argue over certain other issues that the Bible can seem a little unclear on, but on some things, the Bible could not be any more specific and clear. For example, James 1.26:

“If anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless.” (NIV)

If you misuse your tongue, every other religious practise you do is worthless. All your praying giving, Bible reading, helping old ladies across the road is worth nothing if you are misusing your tongue. James goes on to inform us that the tongue is the bit that moves the whole horse, the rudder that moves the whole ship, the spark that starts the entire fire, and the poison that destroys your whole life. The tongue is tiny but can cause more pain than you could even imagine. You see once the forest burned, it will take decades to put the forest back again.

I have seen whole churches burned to ashes because of one spark from one tongue, and I will not let that happen to the Trees of Life that are sprouting up around the UK.

One of the sparks that seems to fly out of the mouth of Christians that can cause great destruction is gossip. Gossip is actually forbidden by the law of Moses – “Do not go about spreading slander among your people” (Lev. 19.16). Yet so many Christians do just that, they go around spreading slander, they tell stories about other people, lazy, idle, exaggerated, malicious, nasty stories. It call comes under the banner of gossip.

Something many people do not know is that the word “devil” in the Greek, diabolos, means a gossip and slanderer. The devil is a gossip, and gossip is the work of the devil. If you are a gossip, telling tales about how other people treated you and what they did, and how they are – and I say this wth all the love I have in my heart because I want you to win in life – you are doing satan’s work for him. You are an agent of satan in this earth. You have to be very careful not to be a gossip. It’s that important – you do not want to be an agent of satan. You want to be an agent of Jesus!

The flip side of this is that we must not just be careful not to be the giver of gossip, but we must be very careful not to be gossip receivers. The Bible – God’s Word – says “The words of a gossip are like choice morsels, they do down to a man’s inmost part” (Proverbs 18.8). This is sadly what people are like – they love to hear something bad about someone else, they love to see other people shown up in a bad light. There’s something about our flesh that rejoices in iniquity, but love never rejoices in iniquity.

So the gossip comes with words about someone else, instead of saying “Do not gossip about someone in my presence, be quiet”, we swallow the morsel – we eat it up and it goes right to our heart. If we are not careful, we will gulp down gossip and it will ruin your heart and mess up your faith. Gossips do not walk in theirs dreams because their hearts are clogged with all those morsels they ate! They are poisoned – they taste sweet but they give you heart failure. Do not eat them.

When someone comes to me and says “Did you know what this person did to me”, “Have you heard this about such-and-such”, even if it is wrapped up in religious language – “I am so concerned about such-and-such, and I love them so much in the Lord I need to tell you that…”, “Can we all pray for Such-and-such because I heard they have done this or that”. It’s all gossip. It’s all going to stop you dreaming big. Then you tell someone else and they tell someone else. And everyone’s hearts shrink and your gang think that’s the normal size of a heart!

We are told that “a gossip betrays a confidence, so avoid a man who talks too much” (Proverbs 20.19). Gossip is linked to excessive talking! It’s one of the ways in which you spot it. But it is a form of disloyalty. You find out something because someone thinks you are being loyal so they share a secret with you and you then share it – that is betrayal, that is disloyalty, that is dishonour.

Gossip is a sin. But if you listen to it, you become an accessory after the fact. You know the crime is committed, you heard the gossip, you know it was a crime, but you never told the person to stop, you never told them to go and speak to the person not about the person. You did not do that, so you joined them in their crime! You are as guilty as they are. You are turning the spark into a forest fire, not putting it out. You are taking the stolen goods of gossip and are now a handler of stolen words!

I want to dwell in the tent of the Lord, and according to Psalm 15, I can live in His tent if I do not slander with my tongue. We must not gossip. But Psalmist then says to live in His tent, we must not “receive a reproach against our friend”. How often have I thought someone was a friend until they ate the morsels of gossip about me? They call me up.

I got one call once from someone who said: “Hey, such and such called me and told me how you upset them, and they were on the phone for over an hour”. I replied “they called me last week to tell me how much you upset them, but the call only lasted two minutes because I won’t feed on that and I told them to speak to you”. I won’t eat the morsels, because i will not treat my friends like that.

We must not eat the gossip, it will poison us and cost us friends. How many friendships are destroyed by third-parties because someone did not have the courage to say “Do not say that about my friend. You can say it to his face, but do not say it behind his back to me, that is not Jesus, that is satan”. But rather people receive the gossip, feeling precious for knowing the secrets! That doesn’t just destroy the friendship, but you have failed to care for the gossip and help them see their action is wrong.

As a young Christian I gossiped about my pastor once to an elder in the church. She put me in my place and made sure I never did it again. That moment defined me as a young Christian and forced me to learn and grow. If she had listened to me, not only would it have hurt her, hurt her friendship with the pastor, it would have hurt me as I needed someone to refuse to eat my poisoned morsels and correct me.

It’s a sin that has plagued the church too long. Do not be a gossip! Do not receive stolen gossip and be a handler of gossipped words. Do not burn down something precious and wonderful.

Selah.

This morning Russia invaded Ukraine. It’s a statement reminiscent of when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. It seems like a strange thing to say in 2022. It seems like a strange thought to have. Hundreds of Ukrainian lives have already sadly been lost. I do not see this as starting a third world war, but if Putin does not stop, and keeps marching across Europe, where will this end? It is impossible to tell.

What should be our response? It should not be to pontificate or focus on this, it should not be to bring out the end-time charts and squeeze this somehow into Daniel or Revelation. Our response should certainly not be to be afraid and let fear enter our hearts. We are in Christ, and we are secure, and this world is not our home. Our hearts should be full of joy in His love and our redemption, no matter what is going on around us. Jesus Himself was so clear – wars and rumours of wars are not the end-times. In fact, Jesus said:

And the Good News about the Kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, so that all nations will hear it; and then the end will come. (Matthew 24.14 NLT)

If you really want to see the end to come and move into the new age, the millenium, stop looking at wars and panicking, and start getting the good news about the kingdom preached throughout the entire world! Preach the good news to your colleagues, family and neighbours. Give to those who are preaching good news across the world. Fund crusades, preach, share, be in church, be discipled, forgive others, love the church, pray in faith. Pray for the churches, pastors, missionaries in the Ukraine – one of the most Christian nations in that area.

Others may start a sermon series on wars, on end-times, others may panic, others may tell you that Christ is behind this rather than anti-Christ, others may turn their whole focus on this and be consumed with fear.

As for me and my househould, we will serve the Lord. We will continue to do everything we can to preach the good news about the kingdom throughout the whole world. Selah.

Hebrews 6.12 encourages every Christian to be a follower.

That ye be not slothful, but followers of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises.

The truth is the whole New Testament is filled with instructions to follow other people, but most people are not good at following others. They are too crazy and spooky and unreliable.

Paul told the Corinthian church “FOLLOW ME, as I FOLLOW CHRIST” (1 Cor. 11.1). If you want to get the best out of church, you need to follow your pastor.

Now firstly find a pastor that follows God – don’t follow a pastor that is following politicians, millionaires, bizarre doctrine, following money, following a reputation, following a career. Find a pastor who follows Christ, who reads the Bible more than they read biographies of billionaires and businessmen.

When you find a pastor who actually wants to follow Christ, follow them!

When you join a Facebook group, there are rules to that group, within nearly every group I am in, whether it is religious, for weight lifting or diet, or for science fiction, or whatever else, one of the very first rules is something about no promotion of your products.

It is considered both unethical and impolite to join a group that is established and slowly built and nurtured around something other than you, and then use that group as a platform to promote your own business, your talents, your name, your book, your course, your whatever.

Yet, people regularly turn up at churches – people who are supposed to be disciples of Jesus – and the very first week, start handing out pamphlets, manuscripts, inviting people to their church, their Bible College, selling their fibre, shampoo, their MLM insurance schemes! It’s just as unethical and just as impolite. It is a failure to respect why the people have come to church.

No-one came to church last weekend hoping to get a free copy of your book, an invite to your course or Bible College, a new insurance policy or a free sample of your amazing herbal shake.

They came to worship the Lord, fellowship with the saints, listen to the preacher (the one they came to hear, not your secret message in the car park) and have a nice cup of tea and coffee, and a biscuit. To interrupt that is to fail to understand that Jesus only has one mission on earth – to build His church, and it is a definite case of you thinking far, far, far, far, far more highly of yourself than you ought.

If you are somewhere as a guest, act like a guest. Selah.

I woke up this morning with some rather unusual verses on my heart. Deut. 28.58 and 59.

⁵⁸ “If you are not careful to do all the words of this law that are written in this book, to fear and honor with reverence this glorious and awesome name, the Lord your God, ⁵⁹ then the Lord will bring extraordinary plagues on you and your descendants, even severe and lasting plagues, and miserable and chronic sicknesses

Now the context of Deuteronomy 28.15 to 68 is a very comprehensive list of the effects of the curse of the law. We know in the New Covenant, because of the work of Jesus, that we are redeemed from tbe curse of the law. He became cursed for us so we could be rescued from all tbe elements of the curse of the law.

So when God laid those verses on my heart as I was praying this morning I got excited. This was a reminder from Heaven that:

* Severe and lasting plagues are part of the curse of the law

* Chronic sicknesses are part of the curse of the law

* Jesus has redeemed us from the curse of the law

I know that the will of God right now is to start seeing people across the Tree of Life Family healed from chronic long term sicknesses. Things that have been wrong in your body for years, even decades, it’s time for you to boldly claim your healing.

Those three sentences above, start declaring them over and over. Start speaking them out again and again until faith rises and start acting healed. It’s time for long term problems to disappear, to evaporate in the revelation of His love and His redemptive work.

Selah.

When Paul encountered the Lord on the road to Damascus he was blinded. He could not see. And immediately and without instruction he fasted.

⁷ The men traveling with Saul stood there speechless; they heard the sound but did not see anyone. ⁸ Saul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing. So they led him by the hand into Damascus. ⁹ For three days he was blind, and did not eat or drink anything. (Acts 9.7-9)

There are times in our lives when we are blind. We cannot see the right thing to do, we cannot see a way out of our sin, we cannot see a way to make a relationship work, we cannot see a way into business, into ministry, into victory. We cannot see the way ahead.

A great response to that sense of not being able to see, not being able to know the way forward, not being able to know what to do – is to fast. Fasting can help us when we don’t know what to do.

Now when Paul fasted, on the third day, God sent a certain disciple to him to get him baptized in the Holy Spirit and immediately Paul saw the way forward. No wonder when Paul was ministering in Antioch and wanted to know the next move in his ministry, he fasted again.

One of the reason so many Christians are blind and cannot see what God wants them to do, cannot see simple things, is a lack of fasting. Selah.