In 2Timothy 2:15, Heavenly Father tells us to do everything in our power to be approved by Him as a good worker. He defines a ‘good worker’ as a person that has no reason to be ashamed because this person is someone that handles His Word correctly. Anyone that is trying their best to be obedient to their Christian responsibility understands that becoming a ‘workman’ or a good worker of God’s Word is a process without an expiration date. We must continually study the Bible, and we are continually nourished by it. God’s Word is food for life. It’s hearty meat, and sometimes we must break it up into manageable bites to digest it. One of the ways that I personally do this is by going back to where everything started, which is the Book of Genesis. I pray you’ll journey with me, because there’s an integral piece of yumminess that I believe will greatly aid your faith and believing.

Genesis 2:15-17(NKJV) tells us, “15 Then the LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it. 16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; 17 “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” There are some very obvious truths in this passage, and I don’t want to be redundant, but I pray you’ll indulge me as I point out the time span that is implied. God created a man, Adam, and then plopped him smack dab in the splendor of paradise, the beautiful Garden of Eden. But he couldn’t just stand in the middle of this beauty and gawk all day. No. Adam had to get to work. He had a responsibility, a job, right off the bat.

The importance of this can’t be overlooked because God put it in His Word, and this means that it will add something of value to our overall spiritual growth. Everything God does has order. He does things in a most brilliant and systematic way. After He created Adam, our Heavenly Father wasted no time communicating to Adam exactly what he should and should not do. To please God and to make the most of himself, Adam would need to get busy with the good work he had been assigned, which was the stewardship of God’s creation. Secondly, Adam was told what NOT to do. He could not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, because doing so would mean both a spiritual and physical death. Heavenly Father made this perfectly clear, and there was no room for error or doubt in understanding what God meant.

From this, you and I must know that Adam was a highly functioning and intellectual being. God would not have given Adam commands that he couldn’t understand or follow through with implementing. Adam was able to not only receive the information God communicated, but he was intelligent enough to process it. Adam knew God’s expectations. Before he sinned, his mind was superior, because there was no sin in Adam’s blood, and no impurity in his thoughts.

We know from Genesis 3:13 that both Adam and his wife, Eve, did in truth disobey God’s Word; they bowed to the devil. God had given them an explicit command and here’s the ridiculousness that they choose to indulge, they chose to trade their work in paradise for death. And the question before each and every one of us is “will we do the same?” Just like Adam and Eve, God has told us that the payment for sin is death (Romans 6:23) And just like Adam and Eve, many of us will chose to trade our good work for death any way. God doesn’t want us to do this, because it causes us to forfeit the blessings He wants to give us.

There are two things that the Word points out about Adam’s and Eve’s mistake. The first is that once the trade was done, paradise was no longer an option. Adam and Eve could no longer remain there. Why? Because they proved themselves unable to provide good stewardship over it. For all of us, the monumental questions are, “Can you maintain the blessing you’re asking for? Are you able to maintain your paradise?” If there’s any doubt in your mind about it, now is a really good time to begin to pray and seek God’s direction and counsel, so He can prepare you to receive and steward His blessings.

The second thing you and I must be fully aware of is that God already knows whether we’ll take a stand and reject the flawed thinking of Adam and Eve, OR if we’ll make the same trade they did. God knows if we will abdicate our commitment to the faith for the quick pleasure of sin, so we can’t fake our commitment to God through Christ or attempt to go at it half-heartedly. We need to be all in. Jesus Christ gave his life on the Cross of Calvary so that we could take a stand, so that we will choose life and not death.

We are so close to the breakthrough we’ve been praying about. Let’s seek God so we can add to our catalog of faith and position ourselves for promotion. It is monumentally important that we take a stand for God’s Word and reject what Adam and Eve did. If there’s even a hint that we might abdicate our responsibility as they did, let’s repent. God has empowered us to be good stewards of His blessings, and if we will continue to humble ourselves through obedience, we will prove that we are able to handle them. ●

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

“Maintaining Your Paradise”, written by Reverend Fran Mack, edited by Kim Times for Sundie Morning Sistas ©2019. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord! SMS is dedicated to inspiring and encouraging Christian Women through the Word of God.