We’re looking to cultivate a relationship of intimacy with God so that we become one spirit with Him.
The Kingdom of Heaven is within us (Luke 17:20-21), and God has come to make His home in us (1 John 3:24). So we can meet with God anytime we want – He is right here inside us. In our hearts, as we saw yesterday, we each have a garden. Our garden is a secret place we can go to on the inside of us, a place of relationship where we can meet and fellowship with God. We need to cultivate it. And in that garden, in our life, there is a wellspring: a fountain and a river.
We saw this scripture yesterday too:
And her wilderness He will make like Eden,
And her desert like the garden of the Lord;
Joy and gladness will be found in her,
Thanksgiving and sound of a melody.
(Isaiah 51:3).
Perhaps we might feel that inside of us is like a desert. Nothing growing there, no water there, no life. Have you ever seen one of those nature programmes with time-lapse images of how a desert is transformed by just a little rain? Within a few days the whole barren wasteland can be teeming with life, ablaze with colour. How does that happen? There were seeds waiting for water to cause them to germinate and spring into life.
(Click here to watch this clip on YouTube – opens in a new tab/window, or copy and paste this link into your browser: http://goo.gl/SdBbNN)
If it feels like a desert, our garden may be just waiting for us to water it. Then ‘joy and gladness will be found in [us], thanksgiving and the sound of a melody’. That is a lovely description of what our lives should be like: the sound of a melody. joining in with the symphony and the harmony of heaven.
Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. The Lord God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed… Now a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it divided and became four rivers. (Gen 2:7-8, 10).
The Bible says of Lucifer, “You were in Eden, the garden of God” (Ezek 28:13). Eden is the garden of God. At this time, heaven and earth were overlapping, and earth was in connection and relationship with the heavenly realms, not separated as it is now. So the garden of God was in Eden and it was the same as the Garden of God in the heavenly realms. Then, it says, He planted another garden, and the water flowed out of Eden (the Garden of God) and watered that garden (which we call the Garden of Eden, the garden that God made for man). The garden God made for man on earth was connected to the Garden of God in heaven, by the River of Life.
They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day… (Gen 3:8).
Adam walked with God: they enjoyed relationship in His garden, where the Tree of Life was. As a result of Adam and Eve’s sin, that garden and that Tree are now in heaven. Adam and Eve were driven out, and at the east of the garden God stationed cherubim with a flaming sword (they did not have flaming swords in their hands: the flaming sword is a living angelic creature). They were to guard the way to the Tree of Life (Gen 3:24) and stop Adam accessing that realm.
Jesus said, “… whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life” (John 4:14).
Now our lives have become the garden, connected to the Garden of God by the River of Life that is flowing into our lives, watering what was a desert. Our connection to the heavenly realms has been restored.
And rivers are also to flow out of our garden to water the earth, bringing the rule and dominion of God to the rest of the world, to the universe, and beyond.