Participating in the Tree of Life series: Introduction

 This is intended as the first of several related posts.  It involves a revelation I received a number of years ago, while reading the Bible, and something that came together quickly in my mind.  It was during a period of significant spiritual growth for me, when I finally learned that I needed to stop trying to figure out things in my own mind (my own physical capacities) and instead, receive from God the spiritual gifts He intends for those who believe.  While I had been reading the Bible since high school, it was only in my 30s when I really began understanding what it means to read the Bible through a spiritual lens.  You can put Luke 24: 36-49 and John 20: 19-23 together (same event – the encounter of the resurrected Jesus with the disciples) to understand that the receiving of the Holy Spirit by the disciples coincided with the opening of their minds so they could understand the scriptures.  Likewise, we have access to the same spiritual understanding of the scriptures through receiving the Holy Spirit.  At that time, I had been working through the prophets in the Old Testament, and finally jumped into the Book of Revelation (a book I had shied away from previously).

It all started with Revelation 22: 1-3

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.  No longer will there be any curse.

This passage immediately struck me in a way I can only describe as supernatural – as if a light bulb went on in the midst of darkness.  There was so much there that I saw immediately, as my mind raced through other related and connected passages – Genesis, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Joel, John, Galatians.  It was all there, laid out as clear as day – it was always there – I just never saw it before.  It was amazing.

Shortly after this revelation, the pastor of the church I attended at the time (Benson First Assembly of God) called me and said he felt God had a message He wanted me to share with the church family, so he asked me to speak at an upcoming Wednesday night meeting, a night he would be away.  I had not previously shared a message with a church body, and that made me quite nervous.  It’s one thing to deliver a lecture to college students – not nearly as significant as sharing a message to a group of Christian believers.  So I prepared a message anchored in the Revelation 22 passage, traversing a number of other related scriptures, and explained what God revealed to me.  While it was very well-received, I didn’t expect a phone call from the pastor a few days later.  He was as overjoyed and excited as a person could be, and he was routinely a joy-filled person, but this was at a whole new level. He said he learned from the message, and he asked me to share the same message the next Sunday morning.  Since then, I’ve shared this message in a number of forums and churches.  There are always people who are truly overjoyed and excited to hear it, and this is what prompts me to share it here, as a series of blog entries.  At one time, I thought it might become a book, but twenty years later, that still has not happened (shame on me!)

If things go as planned, I hope to publish at least one entry a week over the next several weeks.  Click here for the second post in this series