Judging based on the Tree of Life

In light of the past couple of posts related to judging and the two named trees in the Garden of Eden, I want to conclude this topic by touching on the issue of how we exercise judgment based on Jesus (the Tree of Life) rather than on the law (the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil).

To start with, I want to recommend some readings that may be helpful in this:
1. "Judging" by Derek Prince
2. "My Utmost for His Highest" (June 22) by Oswald Chambers
3. "Release of the Spirit" by Watchman Nee (the book I'll be going through starting next week)

Jesus' call to "Come to me, all who are weary and heavy-laden" (Matt. 11:28) is, among other things, the invitation to exercise our God-given drive to judge/govern with Him under His yoke (which implies trust and dependence on Him rather than on our own independent ways - Prov. 3:5). The truth is that operating out of the tree of knowledge is very wearisome; it makes us think we have to have an opinion about everything (Derek Prince does a good job of pointing out the areas of life in which we do have and do not have jurisdiction for judging); and in the areas where we should exercise judgment, the tree of knowledge drives us to draw conclusions based on our own subjective ways of seeing things. After awhile of living and ministering in this way, we get burned out, because we are not meant to bear the heavy part of the yoke but to come alongside Him who can bear it and simply add our trust and faithfulness and love to the equation.

So how do we live and function out of the tree of life (Jesus)? How do we trust in Him with all our heart rather than trust in our own subjective understanding (which, by the way, is shaped by our upbringing, our personality, our culture, our race, our gender, our environment, our preferences, our life experiences, etc.)?

Jesus Himself answers this over and over again, using different pictures and metaphors, such as being branches of a vine, taking up a light yoke that He's bearing the weight of, drinking from a well of water, etc.

I'll use the one from Matthew 11:28-30:

• First Jesus says, "Come to Me" - this is simply an acknowledgement that I need Him and that my way of judging is burning me out. It's taking a conscious step away from living and acting compulsively from my own ideas of what is right and wrong (i.e., knowledge of good and evil) to surrender to His understanding of what is right and wrong. Though this first step may appear simple and easy, it is devastating and disorienting to the mindset that we have developed by living consistently from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. "Coming to Jesus" will take us to ways of seeing and thinking that we had previously judged as "wrong". His promise is to give rest, but don't be surprised if at first you feel lack of peace and rest while you transition into a lifestyle of thinking and feeling and acting based on the tree of Life. (It's the discomfort and disorientation that we all experience when breaking a bad habit or ceasing to use a coping mechanism that has held us together for a long time.)
  
• Secondly, Jesus says, "Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me for I am meek and lowly of heart" - it's not enough to cease from my own judging. He wants me to learn from Him how and when to exercise judgment that is life-giving, possible only IN HIM. He wants a partner with Him in "bringing many sons into glory", and that process of discipling others into His likeness will always include the need for discernment and judgment (both negative and positive). So He invites us to deliberately place ourselves under His yoke; in other words, as I remove myself from under my own hard yoke of subjective judging, I must place myself under His easy yoke of judging which implies that I do it His way. Again, at first this doesn't feel easy but the more we stay with Him under His burden, the more we realize how life-giving and restful it is.

Now how this looks in each of our lives is up to Him to determine. If I were to impose on you how He makes this work in my life, I would be back to trying to run things through the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He is well able to lead those who come to Him humbly and ask to be taught of Him. And we discover that because He is, at His core, a meek and lowly Person, He will transform us into meek and lowly people = able to let things go, overlook much, and focus on the small areas of government that He has given us grace to operate in with Him.

The Hard Yoke of Judging and the Trees of the Garden

As those created in the image of God, part of our humanness is to judge. This is part of what it means to "govern" or "have dominion", as mandated by God when He created Adam and Eve.

But when the first humans took the bait of the tempter and ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they opted for an alternative way of judging from the way God had set up for them, which was to make judgments and to govern by eating from the tree of life. The tree of knowledge was attractive to them for various reasons, one of which is that it would save them time, and they could do the job of governing more efficiently. All they would have to do is to trust in their own thoughts and feelings and desires (i.e., their own limited and subjective knowledge and wisdom), and not have to spend the time and effort to go to a Source outside of themselves for knowledge and wisdom; that requires intimacy with Him which requires time and effort...; not that they didn't want God in their lives, but they saw this as a way of doing God's work and will more efficiently.

The entire world system, the flesh, and the devil all agree that this is the way to govern and judge. As those who have given up personal independence to live and operate under the Lordship of God the Creator in Christ, we are faced many times a day with the choice to live and operate from one of these two trees - the tree of the knowledge of good and evil or the tree of life. (Those who are not in Christ don't have a choice, but we have been given grace in Him to empower us to live daily in His system of governing and judging.) The flesh - that which declares itself independent of God - continually clamors for dominion in us followers of Jesus, and when we give in to its demands, we end up judging according to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Most of us are unaware of how much emotional and intellectual energy is spent on fleshly judgments being made in a day. (Much of this happens in our hidden thought life and it seeps out into the open at times and is expressed in negative judgments of others; in common everyday language, you could call this "giving your personal opinion on people and situations and preferences, etc".) Greg Boyd says, "Of all the sinful burdens that we place upon ourselves in our fallen state, none is weightier than the presumption that we can judge others."

The tricky part of this is that when we descend into fleshly judging (tree of knowledge), it can feel so right, and sometimes we may be technically "right", but life for the hearer doesn't come from being "right"; it only comes from Jesus' life being released from within us out to others. At times abstaining from fleshly judgment and opinion-giving actually feels "wrong", and that's because the Lord's ways run cross grain with how we've been raised and programmed by the world's mind and systems.

Proverbs 3:5 is an amazing summation of the two ways of judging and governing: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart (tree of life), and do not lean on your own understanding (tree of the knowledge of good and evil)." Trusting our own wisdom and understanding is in direct opposition to trusting in the Lord and will produce evil fruit, as per James 3:13-18.

Last week I applied this to earthly/fleshly judgments of political leaders and issues. God's ways always transcend the best human ways which is why we dare not trust any political party. Their source of knowing what is right and wrong is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, even when they may sound like they're aligned with Scripture. We must know, not only the written Word, but have an intimate walk with the Living Word so that we sense His nudges and hear His whispers throughout the day and, like Jesus, judge by and through the Father, not by what our natural eyes see and ears hear. (Beyond the realm of politics, this truth, of course, applies in all areas of our lives.)

God bless you this week as you walk in His ways and strengthen you with might in your inner being to trust Him with all your heart and therein experience His easy yoke of not having to have an opinion about everything, and when we do need to judge/evaluate/govern in our sphere of influence, leaning heavily on Him...

Judging and the Trees of the Garden

It seems to me that the harder things get in our culture, the more prone we fallen humans are to make judgments about all kinds of things. Perhaps the corrosion and undoing of our systems, at least in the Western culture, is revealing how little control we have over our lives; and being creatures who desperately need to be in control, we are angered by the fact that we aren't in control. And our anger expresses itself in judgment of whoever and whatever we think might be getting in the way. In present days, this is manifesting itself in the political arena in a dramatic way.

There is a place for correct judging but life-giving judgment is only possible in Jesus. The Scripture says prophetically of Him: "He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide disputes by what his ears hear, but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth..." (Isaiah 11:3,4)

Jesus said of Himself more than once when speaking of His dependence on the Father: "I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me." (John 5:30)

We can expect that those who are not in Jesus will engage in destructive judgments. My concern is for the people of God because we can be easily sucked into the spirit of the age if we are not alert and awake. We can quickly descend from our place of spiritual authority in Jesus into making judgments about political leaders merely by "what our eyes see and what our ears hear". When we do this, we lose our ability to speak prophetically into situations because we are now participating in the unfruitful ways of the world and are no longer "set apart" as those who are to manifest the values of a Kingdom that are utterly different from those of this world's kingdoms.

In order to judge and discern in a life-giving way, we must be in continual dependence on the Lord and alert to the spirit of the age. We must live out of the Tree of Life as our Source, rather than the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. At times the external fruit or action coming from these two trees can be so similar that they are easily confused, but at the heart, they are radically different.

Next week I'll share a little more on this theme. God bless you with His grace and peace in the Lord Jesus!

Grateful for a Kingdom that Cannot be Shaken - Part 4

One more thought on the topic of the unshakeable kingdom and it's about the cross as the solid foundation of this Kingdom and the ground on which we find solid footing.

As I listen to and watch followers of Jesus these days, I'm observing increased insecurity and confusion about a variety of topics related to God and final judgment and the age to come, etc. Some of this insecurity is related to the proliferation of doctrinal views and opinions that are so easily accessed now through technology. We need solid ground on which to stand, and that ground is the cross of Jesus. There we see the true nature of the Father which is the nature of this unshakeable Kingdom.

I have a wonderful children's Bible story book that starts out saying something to this effect: "Most people think the Bible is a book of rules...about what people should do or not do; and while it does show the way life works best, it's not mainly about what we do or don't do but about what GOD has done!"

The cross is the full expression of all that God is and has done, and only there can we see and understand what His kingdom is built on, and it is in looking to that great work and living by faith in it that we find alignment with His kingdom. How this looks practically in our lives is a whole other topic, but here I simply want to point us to the cross as the sure and unchanging reference point in these days when so much is swirling around us.

Thank You, Father, for giving Your Son unselfishly; thank You, Jesus, for loving and obeying to the point of death; thank You, Holy Spirit, for raising Jesus from the dead and therein making a way for many sons and daughters to be raised in Him! Thank You that You haven't left us to be tossed about by the many winds of human opinions and that the foundation of Your unshakeable Kingdom is the solid ground on which we stand by faith. We are grateful for a kingdom that cannot be shaken...all praise to You!

Grateful for a Kingdom that Cannot be Shaken - part 3

I'm increasingly convinced that the cross of Jesus is the only solid ground on which we can stand. It is that on which this unshakeable Kingdom is established. I may share more next week on the cross but this week, I'm going to pass on to you something I read recently that I believe is a great start at exploring the benefits of Jesus' death. This comes from Darrin Patrick's book, "Church Planter." This would be wonderful material to meditate on. (The remainder of this posting is quoted from Patrick's book):

"Through His cross-work, Christ has provided:

1. Reconciliation to God (2 Cor 5:19).
2. Forgiveness of sins (Col. 2:13).
3. Propitiation (Rom. 3:25).
4. Ability to live for God (2 Cor. 5:15).
5. Eternal life (John 3:16).
6. Justification (Rom 4:25).
7. Inheritance in heaven (Eph. 1:11).
8. Righteousness (Phil 3:9-10).
9. Healing (1 Peter 2:24).
10. Bodlily resurrection (1 Cor. 15:22).
11. Intercession for the weak (Heb 7:25).
12. Peace (Isa 53:5).
13. Freedom (Gal 5:1).
14. Unity among believers (Eph 2:11-22).
15. An example (1 Peter 2:21).
16. Redemption (Rom 3:24).
17. Advocacy (1 John 2:1).
18. Deliverance from fear of death (Heb 2:14-15).
19. Hope (Rom 5:1-11).
20. Wisdom (1 Cor 1:30).
21. Regeneration (1 Peter 1:3).
22. Access to God’s presence (Heb 10:19).
23. All things (Rom 8:32).

In short, Christ’s death has given us God (1 Peter 3:18)."