Apples and snakes

Amidst God's stunning creation stood a truly awesome tree. It stood taller and more beautiful than all the others in the garden. The fruits on it large, sweet looking and tempting. Along came a snake.......

The rest of the story I am sure you know. For poor Adam and Eve the future was bleak, a revelation of God's knowledge was not the wonderful utopia they had been led to believe.

We are promised so much by the world today. We can live longer if we eat certain things. We can have money and expensive lifestyles, if we put our minds to it. We can work all hours and still give our families everything they need. These are false promises, they can not be kept. Much like the temptation of those beautiful and sweet apples, all is not what we are led to believe.

We are going to die, when? Who knows. We can work all hours, but we are unlikely to achieve an expensive lifestyle. Even if we do have a comfortable lifestyle, if you scratch beneath the surface you realise it has come at a consequence to someone else. We can give all our time to work and pay others to give our children all they need, but they are missing out on something far more crucial. Our love!

Rather like eating the apple, we find a life which embraces temptation an empty one. We can never find fulfilment in satisfying only our immediate desires. It comes from something far deeper. We need love and we hunger for God. It is tempting to believe the promise that eternal happiness and long life will come from superficial self gratification, however true lasting happiness and eternal life comes from finding and keeping God in our lives. 

We can project the 'I wants' and 'I needs' and manipulate the rules according to what makes our lives easier. However it will nibble away at your spirit. Your conscience will start to feel naked and you will seek to cover up all your wrong doings. In a downwards spiral you will become more and more embroiled in a never ending cycle of desire, want and guilt. That will never stop. Unless you put God back in the centre of your lives. It might be a harder road to walk, but it is a far happier one.

It is hard to seek forgiveness of others and of God. But forgiveness is essential, to building a new life built on trust. As general synod meets this week, I hope we can all look past our own desires and meet together in forgiveness of all that is past, that we may build a future in a new found trust. This will not be easy, trust has been broken for both sides and there is much pain and suffering. But there was pain and suffering on the cross too. I pray that we move forward as one body in Christ.