Category Archives: Love

The Live for Love Christian

To most people, Love = no Rejection

Everybody wants to be loved. They crave it, but most human beings believe love is … you giving me what makes me happy. When you don’t give me what makes me happy, then you’re not loving. From a wounded spirit’s point of view if you say or do anything that doesn’t make me happy then you are not being loving and if you correct me then you are rejecting me. The opposite to your love for ME is your rejection of ME. It’s all about ME!

Whether you understand it or not, everyone marries for position. They say it’s for love because that’s what they recognise is the feeling, but the real hidden reason is elevation of one’s self-worth. Women have relationships for security; for friendship; to feel valued; for spite against another woman; to not be a failure in the eyes of other women; basically for self-value. Men have relationships to show off the beauty they caught; to get into a family that’s higher up the status quo; to have sex. In this generation, everyone’s having relationships for the benefit of their own self value.

The love of self is alive and well

A friend of mine financed a couple into a house because they couldn’t get a bank loan. They said they were grateful but the real thanks he received for his generosity was the wife secretly hated his own son for having rejected her desire to marry him. In the course of time, what he discovered was that the wife really wanted to marry his son because that would have given her an elevated social position over her brother whom she envied, and she held his son in contempt for even considering that she wasn’t good enough for him. Wow!

The real issue to most people is Love vs. Rejection. I want love, I hate rejection.

The woman was desperate to be loved, but the love she was looking for was the love of herself. She expected men to swoon over her and couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t. She didn’t view relationships through the eyes of love; she viewed everything through the window of rejection. That is, if you don’t reject me (ie. make me feel good) then you must love me, and if you do reject me (make me feel bad) you are bad and unkind and selfish. Everything she planned was based on avoiding rejection and this was her secret motivation in every interaction, and whether you can accept this or not, this behaviour pattern is the norm.

There were two key trees in the garden; the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Tree of Life.

Adam and Eve could eat from the tree of life but they were not permitted to eat from the tree of knowledge. One tree led to life and the other tree led to death. Why didn’t they eat from the tree of life? They didn’t have to, they didn’t need to, or perhaps it just didn’t occur to them, or perhaps they were too comfortable in their Garden, but if they had eaten from this tree they would have seen things differently to how they perceived things after eating from the forbidden tree.

God is love. He created man in His own image, including the ability to love. Everybody wants God to love them; that’s why they come to Him …”I need your love, I want your love”. Satan knows that God has created everyone to be loved, so he has to counterfeit this ‘love’ need if he wants to trap people in his control. So he set up a system where you will find love … in YOURSELF. Under this system, you don’t need God to tell you what’s right or wrong, you can figure it out for yourself, and no one needs to tell you what to do. Perfect, everybody wants that. In fact, you’ll be able to tell everyone else what’s right and wrong. This satanic system is easy; it’s inherent; you don’t have to think about it and you don’t have to give up anything to have it; so people just fall for it.

The Tree of Knowledge is God’s knowledge (v.22) but when you eat from it you become responsible for that knowledge between good and evil, but human beings can’t do 100% good and thus the power of knowledge leads down the path of of your OWN experiential deductions to excuse evil as good.

In the Garden of Eden, Satan sold the idea of love by inviting Eve to love herself by tempting her to eat the fruit that would make her into her own god and feel like god. The trick was that it’s not really love, but rather the love of me; which is really pride.

You can’t eat from the tree of knowledge without becoming your own god and using God’s knowledge to promote you.

It’s not the tree that’s the problem, it’s the human. Human beings inherit God’s knowledge of good and evil mixed with the contamination of their envy and pride. Thus they see good and evil through the eyes of their own sinful rightness. Thus every human being has their own perception of what’s right and wrong and doesn’t like being told they’re not right.

That’s why people don’t understand the love of God; they are only willing to find love from their own tree of their own knowledge and they only trust their own experience. They’ve worked out how to love God from their own tree, and it’s not love at all, it’s pride. When you eat from the tree of your own knowledge, everything you do is to improve your POSITION above people, even using your own false love of God, without you even being aware of it; without you knowing it.

Satan’s sale pitch covers all bases; like in the temptation of Jesus, Satan will even give you back God’s love once you’re committed to this system. Thus Christians walk around thinking they DO love God and He loves them, completely oblivious to the fact that all they are doing is eating from the tree of “I know”, and not from the tree of Life. You can’t survive if you eat from the forbidden tree, unless you give it up.

If you want the love of God you have to suffer the rejection of others, and that fear of being rejected is enough for people to take the easy way out; besides it’s right to love, isn’t it, and under Satan’s system you’re told and convinced you are loving?

You do get knowledge from the tree of knowledge, but it gets polluted by your rulership and you end up with … ‘I know better than you, don’t tell me’.

The tree of knowledge does give you knowledge. It wasn’t forbidden because it was a bad tree, but rather because man was not capable of managing its power. It was created by God [Satan counterfeits, he doesn’t create] for the purpose of testing man’s love and to demonstrate man is not able to compete with God; man does fall to evil, God doesn’t. Before they ate from the forbidden fruit they already knew what was right and wrong, otherwise God could not have advised them to not eat from that particular tree; they knew it was wrong to do so.

Because of Eve’s sin, everyone is born with the inherited knowledge of good and evil but it’s contaminated by the pride of self-love. Therefore, everyone measures good and evil according to their own blurred vision based on what they’ve been taught and what they’ve experienced. No one can see good and evil through God’s eyes until they repent of their self-love and trust His wisdom rather than their own. Consequently, if someone starts dictating to you what’s right and wrong, our own self-love will automatically inwardly retaliate with ‘you won’t tell me I’m wrong; you’re wrong’. No one likes being told what to do and no one likes being told they’re wrong. It simply becomes an argument of who’s right and who’s wrong. Why? Because everyone thinks they’re right and everyone thinks they know. It’s this inherited self-rightness that must be repented off, not the bad we have done. The bad is simply the expression of our self-rightness.

Both a worldly person as well as an unsurrendered Christian will make their judgments based on what they believe is right and wrong, but will be ignorant to the fact that all their knowledge will be drawn from the tree of knowledge which has been contaminated by their own selfish perspectives.

So what’s the tree of knowledge that leads to death?

It’s when the tree of God’s knowledge gets polluted with ‘I know’ and gets re-designed and re-shaped by us to become the tree of our own self-knowledge. We ignorantly become ‘wise in our own eyes’ (v.6), not wise in God’s eyes. We lose God’s wisdom. It actually evolves into the tree of the love of ME; the tree that promotes ME. If I eat from this tree I will see from my point of view and that will be what I know is right. As my own god I now decide what’s right and what’s wrong, and I make judgments against people based on my rightness. Thus I break the laws of God and pronounce condemnation on myself (James 4:11,12).

People go on a journey of increased knowledge all for the subtle purpose of promoting their prowess over others. In our society, education is a god, and religious rank and piety is a god. Knowledge is power to anyone that eats from the forbidden tree.

You can check what tree you’re eating from

After they had eaten from the tree all they gained was the knowledge that they were naked … so what? Did they gain anything from this new knowledge or did they become bound by it? What they lost was the ability to see righteously. They lost the ability to think clearly, so much so they hid from their true friend, they lied and blamed each other for the sin, and because they couldn’t see that they could have and should have repented they were separated from God. So what did they gain from their new found knowledge? Nothing at all, in fact they lost everything. They already had the true knowledge of God and they foolishly sacrificed it for the feeling of being their own god. They had been conned and they didn’t even know it. Wow!

The Laodicean church doesn’t know it is naked

The bible starts in Genesis with humans choosing to be their own god, becoming wise in their own eyes, and seeing that they were naked. But, the bible ends in Revelation with the lukewarm and financially comfortable Laodicean church ignorant that it is naked. In other words, when you are your own god you can see things from a physical point of view. You may have made yourself prosperous, but you lose your vision from a spiritual perspective. You become blind to God’s perspective and read everything (including the spiritual) from the physical, not the heart. You can see that you are physically naked; you can even agree that you are a sinner, but, like King Saul in 1 Samuel 15, it’s all for the purpose of retaining your position in the eyes of others. When you choose the option of elevated position you lose the ability to see from your spirit and even though you worship the true God it’s all to look good in the eyes of others, and eventually God separates Himself from you.

Blindness hides from the Truth but thinks it has the truth

The consequence of eating from the forbidden tree was to hide from the Truth, Lie, TELL God what’s right, and blame. BLAME is not a characteristic of God. Any time you BLAME someone, you are simply eating from your “I know” tree.

The Beatles wrote a chart stopper when they sung “all I need is love”. They tapped into the cause of the rebellious spirit. They hit the mark in everyone’s soul of the desperate lostness and the absolute craving to be valued by others, and thus started the revolution of rock and roll. The love they were selling was not the love of God but the love of yourself … Satan’s counterfeit love.

Satan sells the feel-good package of “live for love”; love will make you happy and love is right; whereas God’s love is free to everyone that dies for it.

When you eat the fruit of “self-value” you come under the will of satan, and under the curse of God

Whenever we hear a whisper that we should promote ourselves, automatically there’s a temptation to eat from the forbidden tree and a resultant choice as to whether you will neglect the tree of Life. Obviously the tree of life is Jesus … He is the Way the Truth and the Life. It’s this tree and this tree alone that gives you the humility to use God’s knowledge righteously. The whisper is to entice you to eat the fruit that promotes you to be a god; to sit in judgment over everyone else; to feel good about yourself; but ultimately to keep you separated from the tree of Life.

But if you really want to walk in the love of God you have to die to the love of yourself; you have to give up the desire to elevate your position; you have to give up the need for others to like you; you have to genuinely sacrifice the fear of what others think of you; you have to be willing to be rejected.

You can only do this by trust; by waiting on God for His plan for your life; not by telling God what He’s supposed to do and when. Without this sacrifice of self you can’t eat of the tree of life.

How do you trust God?

1. Repent of promoting our own knowledge. Give up every desire to promote yourself.

2. Don’t promote yourself, but rather trust God’s outcome.

Fake love becomes a competition to see who is loved the most.

Recently I spoke with 3 women. They were members of a Christian fellowship and were friends but each one hated the other even though they pretended to love each other, otherwise they would not have been liked by others. As I delved into their hearts it became apparent that they were using love as a weapon against each other. One woman believed the pastor loved her the most above the other woman. Another woman was retaliating in her heart with, so what, my husband loves me more than your husband loves you; whilst the third woman, knowing that her husband didn’t understand love at all, defended her position with, so what, my husband is the elder, he is the most spiritually intelligent.

They were simply eating from the tree of ‘promote me’; the tree of ‘I think I’m pretty good’; the tree of the knowledge of ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’, and they were using every personal positive quality they could get their hands on to fire as arrows against each other. They couldn’t see that they were doing this until it was pointed out to them. When you eat from the tree of I know, you can’t see your sin you can only see the wrong someone’s done towards you; you can only see you’re right and they’re wrong.

Who do you love the most?

Do you love husband, wife, children or friends the most? When it all comes down to it, if you don’t love God the most, you love yourself the most.

You listened to the voice of your wife

In Genesis 3:17, God said to Adam …because you listened to the voice of your wife you will be cursed in your work. Women like to be better than other women; they hate being below another woman; so women devise arrows to shoot at other women to put them down or to put them back in their place, all without anyone ever having to say a word. What God means ‘when a man is enticed by the voice of his wife’ is that his wife is tempting him to eat from his own self-value tree so she can control him to do what she wants under the influence of Satan. If the man is into his own tree of self-value he’ll take the bait because it makes him feel good. He will think everything’s alright but he won’t be able to see what’s going down, simply because, like Adam, he never stopped long enough to see what tree he was eating from. He never stopped long enough to consult God’s opinion. He got conned and the consequence was the curse of work.

Why do women do this? They like to have someone to blame if it all goes wrong, but more importantly, like the 3 women above, they love to use their husband’s arrows to shoot down other women so it will promote themselves above other women.

In 1 John 4, The Bible declares that God is love and that you can know you are in God and God is in you when you practice this love towards your brethren. If you say you love God and yet like shooting arrows at your brother to put him in his place, you’re a liar and the truth is not in you. If you say you walk in His commandments but covet your neighbour’s wife or goods or status, you’re a liar and the truth is not in you. Most Christians are liars and thus not Christian at all. They eat from their own tree and love God on the basis of their own knowledge and can’t imagine why God wouldn’t love them back, but they never eat from the tree of life.

God’s love is only accessed through the death of wanting yourself to be loved. I suggest you repent of eating from the tree of your own knowledge and eat from the tree of Life before you’re put out from the Garden. Take up your cross daily and follow Him and no longer eat from the Tree of “I know”.

Pastor Scot Waynard