GRACE BLOGS COLLECTION
Have you ever wanted something that you were told you couldn’t have? For some reason, it always seems to make us want it even more. Some would call that human nature. But I wonder what it must have been like for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. They didn’t have a fallen, sinful nature. But they faced a very real and dangerous temptation.
I know for me that when I can’t have something, it seems that I want it all the more. I am working on my eating habits right now. I have been told to cut out salt, processed and fried food along with decreasing my intake of sugar. The problem: I like all these things. To be told that I can’t have them makes them all the more desirable.
If you have ever fasted, you know what I am talking about. When you can’t have food, you are all the more tempted by that food. When a child is told not to do something, it seems they become hell-bent on doing what they cannot do.
I call this forbidden fruit! We want the forbidden fruit. It seems that forbidden fruit seems so sweet.
When we look at the story of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (TKGE), we can come away with three lessons applicable to our lives today.
They bought into the lie that God was holding back on them and that what they needed would be provided by eating the forbidden fruit.
You and I do the same thing today. We often times feel that God is withholding something from us. We feel as if we need something that God is not providing. Maybe it’s love from a partner, a sense of value or worth, or we don’t feel accepted. We end up going to other people and things instead of trusting God. We end up eating forbidden fruit.
It looks good and tasty. It looks like what we need and what we are looking for, but in the end, it never accomplishes what we thought it would. Just ask someone who has gotten hooked on drugs, or gave their body away because they simply wanted to be loved. Ask someone who has gone after forbidden fruit. Better yet, take a look at your own life and examine every time you ate forbidden fruit. What was the outcome?
They believed that there would be no consequences to their eating the forbidden fruit.
God told them that if they ever ate from the TKGE that they would die. The serpent deceived Eve into believing that God was simply threatening them with death, but they would not really die. She bought the lie and ate the fruit.
They ended up dying that day. Not physically, that would come many, many years later. But they died to themselves, they died to each other. In dying, they died. Adam was willing to throw all the blame on God and Eve. Eve rightfully pointed to the serpent, but she wasn’t willing to accept her own responsibility. The cost was way higher than Eve could have imagined.
There are always consequences to our choices. Some choices have great consequences. Others, not so great. The problem we run into is when we think that our choices don’t have consequences. We think that it will never happen to us, that we are above it somehow. We think that we can handle whatever may come.
But we can’t.
We still fall for that same lie: “you really won’t suffer if you make this choice.” God just wants you happy. How many times, when someone eats the forbidden fruit, they justify it by saying, “God knows my heart.” They don’t believe they will suffer consequences because, after all, God must know that they are good in heart.
Even though Jesus has forgiven us of our sins, our sin still has consequences. The wages of sin is still death. Most of the time we are punished by our sin, not for our sin. Eating forbidden fruit always has negative consequences. God can, and does, bring good out of our faulty mistakes, but our mistakes still carry consequences.
Eating the forbidden fruit caused Adam and Eve to experience shame.
Every time I have eaten forbidden fruit I have experienced shame. I hated myself for making such a stupid decision. I had to battle being ashamed of myself for messing up. Thankfully, Jesus is all about taking shame off of people, but our choices often times still bring us to a place of shame.
When we are ashamed we tend to avoid others, it causes us to hide from those closest to us and from God. That’s what Adam and Eve did. They covered themselves, in essence, hiding from one another, and they hid from God. We do the same whenever we deal with shame.
God had provided them with a garden that had everything they needed to sustain their lives. Every tree in the garden was good to look at and was good for food. God wanted to be their source of wisdom and knowledge.
Eve fell for the deception of the serpent. She thought God was being stingy, holding back from her something that she needed. She didn’t think that the consequences would be what God said they would be. In the end, she suffered greatly because she trusted more in the serpent and in her own decision making than she did in the wisdom and love of God.
When we eat from forbidden fruit the same happens to us. We tend to think that God is holding back from us the things we think we need. So, we go looking for them in all the wrong places. We don’t believe that there will be negative consequences to our actions. In the end, when we eat from forbidden fruit, we end suffering and, most of the time will cause others around us to suffer as well.
Don’t fall for the lie! God has all that you need and will be all that you need. He is not stingy or holding back. He loves you more than you know and is generous and gracious to humanity.
What about you? Have you ever thought you needed something that God wasn’t supplying? Did you eat forbidden fruit? What was your experience like?
Over the years, I have built up walls around my heart. Because of things I have gone through in the past — hurts, rejections, disappointments — I have built these ramparts to protect myself. A lot of us have walls up to protect us from getting hurt. We somehow think that if we isolate our hearts — the center of our emotions and feelings — that we will not get hurt again.
Khotyn Fortress by Yarik Zinkof, Flickr, CC
Sometimes that’s true. Those of us that have fortified hearts don’t allow others into the inner sanctuary of our true selves. We allow people to come in only so far until they are subtly reminded that there is a wall there that says no entry. It’s a defense against getting hurt.
Sometimes, people even build up a wall to keep God out of their inner sanctuary.
But we were not meant to live in isolation. We were not meant to live without others. God created humanity to be interdependent upon one another. We are not meant to be co-dependent but interdependent. We need each other. We need the comfort of another human being during our times of distress, anxiousness, and sadness. We need the strength of another human being when we are struggling and are weak.
We need another human being to see our frailties, weaknesses and failings in order for us to realize that we are lovable and worth immense value despite our brokenness and imperfections. We need another human being to see the shambles of our lives and tell us that it’s going to be okay.
That cannot, and will not happen, if we keep people out of the innermost places of our hearts.
For those that have walls built, because of hurt, rejection, being let down, trauma, disappointment or betrayal by someone close to you, you have most likely stated, “that will never happen to me again.” To keep it from happening again, you build a wall.
Some of us not only have a wall, but we have also built a moat and have a drawbridge. We’ve “castled our heart” to keep the bad people out.
The problem is that in protecting ourselves from the bad people, we’ve also denied ourselves the good ones.
I know because this is how I have lived for a long time . . . with a fort around my heart because I don’t want to get hurt again. I don’t want to be betrayed again. I don’t want to allow myself to get too close to people. And it’s stopped me from receiving the very thing I long for, the very thing I need….love.
I know that people love me. Love is to be shared between two or more people. Love is like a dance. It’s an intimate movement between two people. Love is not supposed to be one sided. The hope of loving someone is for them to love you back. When you have walls up to keep people at a distance, it’s hard to dance the dance of love with them. It’s hard to share intimate moments because you have people at arms length.
Many of us are like two awkward twelve-year-olds at our first dance. We are simply facing each other with enough room to put someone else between us as we shuffle our feet back and forth. Love is meant to be intimate, two souls touching one another in the deepest recesses of the heart. Love is allowing someone else to see you in all your glory and all your weaknesses. Love is allowing someone to see your best and your worst, knowing that they are not going to leave you. Love is knowing that you are valuable to someone else not because of what you have done or not done, but simply because you are.
When you have walls around your heart, you cannot experience the depth of that love, either with another human being or with your Heavenly Father. We were created to have these deep connections with other human beings as well as our Father.
Because of the brokenness of humanity, we have all experienced pain, trauma, hurt and betrayal at the hands of someone who loved us. We have caused pain, trauma, hurt and betrayal to someone else ourselves. We may very well be the reason someone else has put up a wall.
I know that God has been dealing with me about my walls. I know that He has been asking me to let Him in past the protective layers of my fortress. I know that, like the walls of Jericho, He wants to demolish those walls so that He and I can dance the dance of love. As I allow Him to do that, He is also asking me to let others in. Jesus came that we might be free, but we will never be free as long as we have a wall up around our heart.
What about you? Do you have walls built up? Do you find it hard to “let people in?”