When Adam and Eve were in the garden, they walked with God and talked with God and had direct access to him. They knew him intimately. Yet when Satan comes along to tempt them, they easily find in themselves a desire separate from God.
This creates a huge challenge for us. How can we, who have sin dwelling in our body and who have had our minds influenced by sin all of our lives ever hope to avoid sin if Adam and Eve couldn’t. We don’t have a direct line to God like they did. Or do we?
If we know Jesus, we indeed have a direct line to God. In fact, we have something better. The Bible tells us that when we asked Jesus into our life, our lives are transformed. It says that Jesus himself becomes our very life. So, while Adam and Eve knew God intimately, it was side-by-side, walking in the garden. When we know Jesus, he becomes our very life and that is very different.
It is different for many reasons. First, it means that his life is what God sees when he sees us. This means even when we do sin, it is canceled out by the life of Jesus in us. The Bible says that God knows that we are made of dust. So he provided a solution that overcame the sin that dwells in our body. He also knew that our minds are polluted by the world in which we live. So, having Jesus dwell in us, we actually have the mind of Christ available to us always.
Still, we seem to regularly not take advantage of the wonderful gifts that he has given us in Christ as our life. The Bible says that God will meet all of our needs and he actually does that by giving us Jesus as our very life when we accept his grace.
A big part of the problem for us fully accessing the gift is that we want more than what we need. Said another way, our wants and our needs frequently don’t match. Sometimes, when we feel like we need something, we really just want something, and we actually need something different. Every parent knows what this looks like from the way in which they have had to interact with their children. God, who is our father, has the good of his children in mind when he is dealing with us. Sometimes, we can just be a little bit spoiled and throw temper tantrums when we can’t have what we want.
The question is, if God was really trying to give us our needs and we pushed to have our wants instead, what did we miss by not having our actual needs met? Substituting the best for merely the good and often times the not-so-good absolutely has a cost. Denying ourselves is very hard indeed, but it is the only way we can come to know abundant life. God, alone, has our best interest in mind. The world certainly doesn’t and, clearly, we frequently don’t either.
The Bible says the truth will set you free and we can know the truth. The truth is certainly in Jesus who says he is the way, the truth, and the life. It’s interesting that he says the truth and the life in the same verse. The truth is what we need is vastly more important than what we want and God has met our need by giving us Jesus as our very life. So, today, are we going to scream for cotton candy or have real food?