Farmer?

Genesis 2:8
The LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had formed.

Before the fall of man, that is, before we became conscious of our sin, everything was perfect. God and man walked together, they talked, they laughed, they enjoyed each other’s company. The created enjoyed the blessings and abundance of what the Creator had made. The only work, if you choose to call it that, man (the word ‘man’ being used to represent both man and woman) had to do was harvest.

The Bible tells us in Genesis 2:9 that God made every tree grow, some to look at for their beauty and others to yield produce for food. The point was that God Himself did all of the work. It was God who planted the seeds. It was God who watered the roots. It was God who fertilized the soil. Man simply had to come and receive, or more appropriately, take what God had cultivated and provided for him.

It wasn’t until after the Fall, when sin consciousness entered, that man had to do the work for himself (Genesis 3:17). Prior to that, God, with His grace abounding, did all of the dirty work on behalf of man. So, since the Fall things have been different. We, mankind, have to toil (struggle, work exhaustingly) in order just to feed ourselves. It’s the curse that came with our desire to be like God. Since we chose to have His knowledge of good and evil, we also chose to have His work in providing for ourselves.

From the Garden of Eden up until the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, all of humanity lived under this curse. But I am here to tell you today that through Jesus Christ we are renewed to a right relationship with the Father. We have the ability to travel back in time to the time when God did all the work and we, His “very good” creation, reaped all the harvest! (Romans 5:10 For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.)

This being the case, there isn’t a Christian out there who should believe that their seed of faith needs to be sown in order to reap a harvest of abundance. The fact is that God is planting seeds constantly for us, His creation. He’s tilling the ground, watering the seeds, and fertilizing the soil so that we simply have to glean what He has blessed us with through His work. The cross restored us to a pre-sin age, when God and man were in perfect communion, and so lifted the curse that was upon us as sinners. (Ephesians 1:3-13) It is good to invest out of our abundance into the Kingdom of God, but in order to do that, we have to first become abundance conscious!

The grace that God extended to all of mankind through His son Jesus Christ at the cross, when He became our sin, our disease, and our curse (Galatians 3:13 and Deuteronomy 21:23) doesn’t simply stop with our knowledge of eternal life. It doesn’t only pertain to our “happily ever after”, but also to our here and now! Where sin abounds, grace super-abounds. That being the case, we as Christians need to change our mindset from that of working (toiling) with our sinful nature, to one where work no longer exists. We need to simply come to God our Father and continue to take an abundance from the grace that He has extended to us.