TWFJ 5. The Waterfall 3. - THE EMOTIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE FALL
Before the Fall, Adam and Eve had a secure foundation, a secure home a place of love, belonging and connection
their experience was of having all their needs fully satisfied within their trusting relationship with Father God.
They knew who they were and whose they were.
In that place, in the Waterfall of God’s love
they were filled by Him with overflowing love tanks,
allowing them to have full and satisfying relationships with each other. The vertical relationship with the Father was the key
to deep and perfect harmony between human beings.
Adam and Eve in the waterfall of The Father’s love knew that:
They were absolutely LOVED: they were at home, they BELONGED. They lived within a relationship of acceptance and security.
They were VALUED: God wanted to spend time with them and had gone to much trouble to set them in a place of shared delights.
They had WORTH: God gave them both trust and responsibility and the freedom to act.
They had MEANING and PURPOSE in their lives as stewards of creation and co-workers with the Father in His purposes.
SO WHERE DID PAIN COME FROM?
God created us with free will because His life force is, was, and ever shall be, love. Therefore, we as His children have the power to make choices, But the choice made in the Garden had a brutal outcome for all of us.
Pain entered the world through the Fall.
The forbidden fruit promised the belief
that Adam and Eve would know right from wrong:
that they would be able to make their own judgements,
order their own world and live independently of the Father.
However, the unlooked for consequences of disobedience and sin ,were immediate and drastic.
In Chapter 3 of Genesis The consequences were literally shattering. They were instantly afraid of the Father,
love and trust were replaced by fear and shame.
In turn these previously unknown feelings drove them to new types of reactions. Ashamed, they did what they could to hide their nakedness; afraid, they ran from and hid from the source of their life.
In anger and guilt they turned on each other
In a dawning sense of loss Adam tried to jettison the responsibility for his actions
first on God and then on Eve and
she immediately shifted the responsibility and blame onto the serpent:
The consequences of their actions were unstoppable.
Now desolate, each in thirst and in a new isolation
they were evicted from Eden,
for sin is sin and it cannot remain in the presence of the Father.
The easy heart to heart, spirit to spirit flow of love, harmony and understanding, through which the infilling of their hearts was sustained, was lost perfection was marred.
Thus our image, which required the fullness
of the relationship with the Father to flourish,
was now destined to be distorted by pain and hardship.
Even the environment changed.
From this time onward there would be enmity between the devil and mankind. The very ground became cursed.
Thorns and thistles would now grow where there had been none.
Man would now have to toil, by the sweat of his brow to eat and survive. Childbirth would be painful for the woman.
The extent of the fall from grace can be seen in the contrast between Chapters 1& 2 of Genesis and Chapter 4 in which by verse 8 Cain murders his brother, motivated by anger and jealousy.
We were born to live in the conditions and the relationships of Genesis 1 & 2. Just as for a fish, our natural life-giving habitat is water, living in the presence of the Father is where we were created to live. We NEED the River of Water of Life which flows from the throne of heaven. After the Fall and cut off from that sustaining, life-giving relationship, with the Father we are fish out of water!
We are on the bank of the river gasping, thirsting, empty and it hurts. In desperation, we are driven to where we think we can satisfy our raging thirst.
We were created to be surrounded and drenched by love but parents can only give out, of what they received when little and
in the fallen world our relationships, circumstances and experiences are never wholly favourable
causing us emotional wounds and as a consequence
to live out of the negative messages
we have believed about ourselves.
We learn very early in life what strategies work for us and what defences we need to keep ourselves safe.
We hide our pain and play out the role that means we survive,
so that we are not discovered to be the failures we perceive ourselves to be.
WE GO TO OUR CISTERNS.
Out of the environment we were created to inhabit,
with trust broken and in the throes of the spiritual death
caused by isolation from the Father,
the image we were created to be, becomes distorted.
Our ego becomes becomes god.
Man’s thinking, feeling and choices are now no longer in tune with the Father’s heart and As disobedience broke trust , there was an immediate fundamental change, the other-centredness of harmony became the ‘I must survive’ of independence. Thirst for what we have lost, drives all our behaviour towards our cisterns, where we scoop up into our bucket
those things that we think will deliver our needs and fill our emptiness. Our deeply buried motivation is to get our needs met at all costs.
It is key to understand that we all are driven to the cistern where we believe we can be filled, with the sense of ‘love and belonging, value and worth, and meaning and purpose’.
Cut off from the well-spring of life (John 4: 13-14) we are alone and isolated, unsure of ourselves and are wracked by feelings of being ‘less-than’ everyone else, life seems pointless because we cannot measure up.
If we are not connected to the Father as our source,
we must meet our needs somewhere.
We all dig our own cisterns and have different contents in our buckets but our idols, those things we try to use to fill us, cannot do what God can. For example, one person may get satisfaction and fulfillment from their job as the wholesome outcome of their efforts
but another may judge his worth and sink his identity into the way he experiences his job. On a bad day he sees himself as a hopeless failure.
He is relying on the job and not His heavenly Father to fill his life
with meaning, value and worth.
His job has then become his idol.
Our sense of identity thus can be in some thing, the image we project or what we think other people think of us.
In the effort to keep up appearances
the gap between the part we play on the outside, which we show to the world and our inner life can get more and more disconnected. We all live out of a place of distortion, until healing restores the broken image.
Our stories are important. God entrusted each one of us with our own individual walk He wants to restore us, to lead us to wholeness and to make those stories matter in Kingdom terms. For His purposes He needs our stories to be redeemed in His own.
When we give our life to Christ, God starts the work of transformation. It is the sanctification process.
Slice by slice, God will restore us, healing the wounds,
unpicking our twisted thinking and aligning us again to His heart.
WE NEED to start believing that God loves us right now, as we are. We do not have to earn that love.
My knowing that God loves me is the game-changer
even if I cannot yet experience it.
We need to start by believing what God says about us.
God makes us aware of our need for healing by bringing the pain of our inner story to the surface
through memories and circumstances, past and present.
We can be pleased when this happens for what He starts He finishes and the Holy Spirit is highlighting ‘Here is something I want to heal.’
Years of journeying have shown that
not everyone is willing to let God deal with their pain:
it is both part of the blessing and the cost of discipleship. Facing the pain of our inadequacies and wounds,
being open to healing and letting go of the past
we reach out to the freedom and wholeness that Jesus died to give us.
When we come into the Waterfall the process can speed up because the Holy Spirit will teach us how to co-operate with Him in our healing and equipping, ‘for it is with the comfort we receive that we will comfort others’ (2 Corinthians 1:4). We find the ‘years the locusts have eaten’ (Joel 2:25) are restored
as we minister out of the transformed experiences we have been through and see the hard things in our lives become the treasures of the Kingdom. Now we are working with God and not for ourselves.
Now God can really do business with us.
JESUS IS THE WAY TO RESTORATION.
RESTORATION needs AWARENESS, REPENTANCE and CHANGE.
In Jeremiah 2: 13 God names the two sins that cut us off from Him, firstly turning our back on all He is and offers us, and
secondly, by our own efforts trying to replace what we should draw from Him.
“My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns,
broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”
When we are cut off from the presence of the Father by our sin, we have Jesus. Wonderfully, God provided the sacrifice to pay the price for us.
Jesus died taking the penalty for our sin that we might be cleansed and forgiven and able to return to the fullness of the relationship with the Father that we were created to enjoy.
When we have the self-awareness to understand our inner story, we can see our independence.
We begin to see sin is not just about robbing a bank
but every belief and attitude that is not aligned to the nature and Word of God. Awareness, repentance and forgiveness are needed continually as we are journeying to transformation.
The Way is not only the pathway to our inner restoration
but will lead us on to holiness
if we are willing to let the Holy Spirit minister to the pain within us.
The good news is that when we are ‘born again’ God starts offering us restoration. When we come into The Waterfall, abiding in God’s presence, the healing can be speeded up as we co-operate with the Holy Spirit in a growing awareness of what He is doing.
As He deals with our pain and brokenness wholeness and freedom beckon.
In addition the Holy Spirit is also honing and equipping
us for the way we will be used.
In this way we will find every event and tear in our story,
once transformed, will add to the resources of the Kingdom
The Waterfall is only ever a step away,
becoming aware of our sin and
the need to repent
we can come through the Cross of Jesus Christ and step back into the presence of the Father.
There, as we offer ourselves to the Holy Spirit’s ministration into our hearts and learn to co-operate with Him, He in turn will use us to reach out to others.
There is a clear choice of where we stand to live our lives, either outside the place of abiding,
thirsty because the leaking dregs from a broken cistern do not sustain us or in the full flow of the River of the Water of Life cascading in and through us. The Waterfall is the presence of the Father
where we trust God for every aspect of our lives and
our true identity rests in God
where we are who He says we are.
In the next episode we are going to explore ways of experiencing the reality of living in the Father’s presence in the Waterfall. This is where life changes. God wants you to know how real He is.
It will reframe your life.
To begin my journey I wrote a prayer which I would repeat each morning to consciously place myself into the Father’s presence, as I wanted to abide where Jesus walked.
This is my daily prayer.
I CHOOSE TO LIVE THIS DAY IN THE WATERFALL OF YOUR LOVE THAT I MIGHT BE LED BY THE HOLY SPIRIT ON THE WAY OF HOLINESS, FOLLOWING THE FOOTSTEPS OF JESUS AND IN THE PRESENCE OF THE FATHER, TO THE FULFILLMENT OF YOUR DIVINE PURPOSE. ENABLE ME LORD TO LEARN AND GROW IN YOU TODAY. AMEN
And with that intention I knew I was home! Join me next time to explore the ways you too, can walk each day with the Living God
