Next school year, we want to thrive, as individuals, in our families, at school, and as a community. We want our work to matter and to produce great results. We want the effort of our minds to give us insight and wisdom. We want our relationships to bloom with love, joy, contentment, and peace. We want our systems to run smoothly, our governments to strike the right balance, our neighborhoods to protect our sense of security. Our money to swell, our possessions to remain pristine, and our moods and emotions to remain under our control.

By contrast, we don’t want to waste time and effort or to have our hard-earned recognition be taken by someone else. We don’t want our investments to diminish or our decisions to result in suffering for us or those we love. We don’t want our deeply held convictions to be dismissed, and we don’t want to find that we’re addicted, or angry, or depressed, or sick.

So, what do we really want? In short, we want the paradise God created back in Eden. How do we get what we want? 

But how did we lose it? Scripture teaches us in Genesis 1-3 that we lost it when Adam and Eve reached out and took the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden. Perhaps you’re tempted to feel cheated by this, thinking, “That’s not my fault. If I had been there, I wouldn’t have doomed humanity to permanent suffering and death.”

Wouldn’t we though? Adam and Eve did it in Eden, but so did the disciples in Gethsemane. The church did it during the crusades, and again in the colonial conquest of the Americas, and when African people were being imported as slaves. Would we have stood opposed to the wicked and destructive actions of those in power? Did the Germans during WWII or the Russians, or Chinese or warring tribes in Rwanda? We can look back and understand with compassion that none of these people, Adam and Eve included, knew what the future would hold. Most of them, at the time, could NOT possibly have understood the ramifications of their complicit silence, and seemingly innocent turning-the-other-way in the moment. But their ignorance does not make them innocent, and it certainly does not reverse the effects of their actions or inactions on the rest of us.

And we are guilty as well, though we don’t like to think about it like that. But sin doesn’t begin with wanton destruction, it begins with avoiding the hard work demanded of us today. It does not begin in bitterness, divorce, betrayal, and scandal, it begins in our choice not to hold back our biting words to those we love when we feel angry, hungry, and/or tired. Cain, in Genesis 4:7, discovered this about sin. It does not come at us in the obvious way that we might resist it; instead, it “crouches at the door…”, and we must resist it or we will find ourselves giving in to our pressing desires for relief, pleasure, and power over others, and in that way sacrificing our futures too, to the devastating effects of sin.

We want paradise back, but our sins have made that impossible, and we’ve got no one to blame but ourselves. So, how do we close the gap?

We don’t! But Jesus did. Jesus never left paradise! He never gave in to His fleshly desires or said something he later regretted. Jesus stayed with God in the garden of Eden and when we found him in the garden of Gethsemane our envy led us to kill him for it. But praise God, He is not resentful, spiteful, vengeful, and malicious like we are, because instead of retribution, which is what we deserve, He extends an invitation to come home.

That person, [who places their faith in Jesus and abides in Him], will be like a prospering tree. We can have what we want this year, by giving up everything we are and everything we have and trusting in and abiding in Jesus, who promises to give us back the desires of our heart. We can reenter paradise with Him, bit-by-bit in this life and completely in eternity. Then, like the psalmist says, we can, “Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise; give thanks to Him and praise His name.” (Psalm 100:4)

Let us, therefore, move toward next year with hope that we can get what we want, and let us discover that what we really want is to be found in Jesus. I invite you to join us in the often difficult and frustrating journey of dying to yourself, that we might thrive together in Christ.