Alright, we did do some fishing this last week. Really enjoyed doing a lot of fishing. And fishing is something that is not foreign to the Bible whatsoever. It's not foreign to the Scriptures.
It's not foreign to Yeshua. Yeshua was the greatest fisherman by far. And in the true sense of the word, fisher of men.
His disciples were also fishermen, many of them anyhow, at least the very first ones. And they did a lot of fishing. And I want to say, give you a little bit of background about me. Most of you don't know me in these type of outfits, praise God. But this is how I grew up.
You're looking at Jim Staley from 25 years ago, and this is what I did almost every day. I would take my fishing pole and find myself a little pond, a little water. Shoot, if it was a pothole in the street, it wouldn't matter. I wanted to fish. I loved to fish and did a lot of it growing up.
And the Father, interestingly enough, would choose to use me as a fisherman and transfer all of that information, knowledge, experience, and the idea and just the concept of fishing into fishing for men. And most of you know that we have made a transition from the Hebrew Roots Movement to the Christian Roots Movement, and God has been showing us just the depth of getting back to the Christian roots. of our faith.
And the Christian roots, of course, is not Constantine. He didn't start Christianity. It went all the way back to Acts chapter 11. And so we see that the disciples, the roots of their faith was their Hebrew background.
And Paul was one of the greatest fishermen in the Bible, in my opinion. Matter of fact, he's probably my hero in many respects because I can relate to him. And Paul was a little bit abrasive. He was a He was a good teacher, but he was a lot of times hard to understand, but he was definitely all-in when it came to being all things to all people. And so in my past, in the spiritual sense, when I came into understanding the Hebrew roots of my faith, the Hebraic perspective, as I started off, I was handed this.
And I don't know if you can get a close-up of this on the camera or not, but this is called a treble hook. And if you were a fish, wouldn't this just be appetizing? How many fish do you think you would catch with a treble hook?
Not very many. So, most of us in the Hebrew Roots Movement, when we were there, we don't have a choice. You have one lure, and so you use your lure the best that you know how. So, you cast it out and no one... bites.
So the best thing that you can do is you take your lure and you simply cast it out in the audience and yank as hard as you can. Now, I'm not going to demonstrate that due to our insurance policy here at PFD. But the truth of the matter is, this is what many people do when they come into the roots of their faith and begin to understand the Hebraic perspective.
They get frustrated with people and they get frustrated with the idea of people not being interested in what they have to say. After all, you're interested in what you have to say. And so you only have one lure that you've been given and so you do your best to use it in multiple different ways until you begin to hurt people.
And you begin to... People began not being attractive like any fish would be attracted to a single hook. So the Father began to teach me that he has a larger tackle box. And it's meant, this is what Paul meant when he says, it should be all things to all people. Some people are worms.
Some people like worms, but they don't like that color, so they like this color. Or maybe, you know, they're just very interesting, and they like things that look like animals, a little salamander. But better yet, you've got all kinds of different people that are out there.
Some people like something that looks like a green frog, just frog legs. It's not kosher, by the way, in case you were wondering what else we have in here. Or one of my favorites that catch a lot of fish is a popper, a topwater lure. This one that doesn't go very deep. This one doesn't go very deep at all.
Matter of fact, it stays on the top of the water. And normally the very active fish, the fish that are ready to feed. will take a topwater lure and they'll take it right away. And so it's my favorite lure because I catch the most fish with the topwater lure because it attracts all of the active fish that are actively feeding. Why do I say all this?
Why do I show you all this? Where am I going with all this? So I want to take a few minutes before we get into the Scriptures tonight to say that evangelism is important to God. It's really important. Matter of fact...
When He gave the plan to the disciples to go out two by two, and He sent them out to Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the earth in Judea, and so on and so forth, He sent them out and there was no plan B. There was no, hey, Peter coming up and saying, Yeshua, listen, this is a pretty good plan, but what if this doesn't work out? What if they don't receive us? What do we default to?
And He says, this is it. This is My only plan. I don't have a plan B.
If you don't open up your mouth, people are not going to hear. People are not going to be convicted. People are not going to come in covenant with me. Amen?
And so it is our job to share what we believe. And going back into my Christian days as an evangelist and as an apologist, this is what I did. is share the gospel all the time. 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. When necessary, I used words, but words are really important.
And so as Yahweh begins to do things in your life, it is your responsibility to share those things with other people. And there are fish, there are people, because that's what fish are in the scriptures, there are people that are actively waiting. to hear the message actively.
And they're only six inches below the water because that's where they're at in their walk with God. They're just in a shallow section of the lake. And if you throw one of these down into the water, it's going to sink to the bottom.
And the only thing you're going to get caught on is you're going to get what they call snagged on a log, or you might bring up some leaves or dirt. Every once in a while, you might accidentally catch something that was swimming by and you snagged it in the tail or the gut. But you will miss the ones that are ready to feed on the Word of God because you chose the wrong lure.
All you had to do was choose the right lure at the right time, and they strike every single time. Yahweh is in the movement of moving people. And it is...
unfortunate that in most of our lives, we are not even carrying a tackle box. Most of us don't even carry one lure, much less a fishing rod at all. And so I declare to you today, as the feast days are over and the new year has begun, that God is going to be moving Passion for Truth into an evangelism effort to reach the people of the world.
and to cast a net and to cast the right lure at the right time, prophetically allowing Yahweh to tell us which lure to use. And things will look a little bit different. Not much different than now, except more exciting, more power, more amazing things, healings and miracles. God is going to move from Genesis to Revelation through Passion for Truth as we get close to His heart. And you know, His heart is to minister to His people.
His heart is to evangelize His people, first with the Gospel of Yeshua in its basic format, Jesus died for you, and then into the depths of His Torah, His instruction manual, which brings them into covenant. Amen? And so this next year, I commit to you that I'm going to be teaching you some evangelism strategies, some evangelism techniques to teach you how to talk to your friends and your family without driving them away and offending them.
There is a way to share your faith with someone where it becomes attractive. But first, it starts... with knowing how to fish, period.
And to know how to fish, you have to first be a fisherman. You have to first understand that you cannot go fishing if you're sick. You just can't. It's very difficult to go fishing when you're sick. And so what the Father has done over this past year at Passion for Truth is He has begun the process, and we're deep into the process of healing.
God healing people physically. Miraculously, you can cue the picture in just a minute, but it starts with your personal life. Until you personally get healed from the inside out, you're not even qualified to fish.
So God has done a tremendous amount of healing in people, leadership, and those that are here. Relationship, marriage-wise, friendships, getting out deliverance, tremendous deliverance. Things that you've been delivered of, of all your past, and some of you even your present. And where Yahweh is taking you is to be able to be qualified to be Gideon's army to fish. So this next year is going to be a lot of fishing.
A lot of sharing of your walk and your faith. And you will begin to see that the power of your words has nothing... let me qualify that...
has very... little to do with what you know. Very little to do with what you've studied.
Very little to do with even the depths of some of the things that you will learn from me and others. It has everything to do with your health. With your spiritual health. Because you can think that you are ready to fish.
You can put on all the garb. You can get all of the material. you can study the Word of God until you're blue in the face and have every single lure that you could possibly need. But if the Father of the creation doesn't hand you a rod and reel, you're not catching anything.
And so the Father has been creating the protocol for how to fish. I've never met a person yet that comes into the Hebraic understanding of their faith that doesn't want to share it. So there's an innate, incredible desire to share what you know.
Why is it that it's not received so much? Because default, Yahweh's trying to teach you something. What happens in the physical?
There's a spiritual message. So you should ask yourself when you look in the mirror, why is no one responding? Why are the only people on my YouTube channel my friends?
Why doesn't anybody want to follow me? on Facebook. Why doesn't anybody want to hear my message? The result is telling you the answer.
You're skipping a step. Because many times, if not most, all of the time, Yahweh is bringing you into the roots of your faith to understand the protocols to approach your king so that you can get healed. It's not for your neighbor yet.
It's not for your neighbor. You haven't even been qualified to have a fishing pole put in your hand yet. God is showing you that you don't even know how to fish. And so you learn, I need to fish.
So you tell everybody, did you know I need to fish? And they go, that's nice. Do you want to hear about how I need to fish?
No, I don't want to hear about how you need to fish. Why not? And you shake them, you need to know how to fish. You're supposed to come with me.
And they're not interested. But if you go in the proper order to learn the depths of the Word of God, which we're going to get into in Genesis 1, 2, and 3, you will discover that there is a biblical protocol on how to be fruitful and multiply. And taking the fishing pole out of the order that it was put in your hand will strip you of all of your credibility and all of your fruitfulness, and it may remove your destiny completely.
God has given you a gift of evangelism, every one of you. Some of you think evangelism means that you're eloquent in speech. Many of you don't even realize that Paul was not even eloquent in speech.
Because we get this idea that Paul was just this greatest eloquent speaker, tremendous in oratory. No, Paul was a brilliant big mouth. If you study him and you know him well enough.
He even says it in one of his books. Nobody even understands him. He says, I'm not eloquent in speech. But we assume that it is because he's a great writer. How many of you have ever read a phenomenal book and then you go hear the author speak and you go, there's no way this is the same person?
It can't be. I've been there. Maybe some of you haven't. Sometimes authors are not the greatest speakers. So maybe you're a blogger.
Maybe you share through your writings. Maybe you share through your giftings of giving and so on and so forth and your gifts of the Holy Spirit. So let's begin and find out what is the proper protocol for fishing. So I'm going to open up my tackle box and pull out the Word of God.
So turn with me, if you could, to Genesis chapter, let's see here, this is Simchat Torah, the day after, not today is Simchat Torah, but right after. The Feast of Sukkot comes Simchat Torah, which is the beginning, the starting over of the Torah portions. It starts back in Genesis chapter 1, and so that's where we're going to go today. We're going to start over in the very beginning. And I find that it's very prophetic, especially for this ministry, that we are crossing over the Jordan River.
If you've been following with us, you've been seeing that God has been calling us, refining us, getting ready to cross over the Jordan River, creating a Joshua generation. in this generation around the world. He is calling people to be Spirit-led and be led by His Word and to discover what that looks like. And so, crossing over the Jordan River is very interesting because now we start over. It's all a reset.
It's like blue screen on your computer. Hit the reset button. There's no way else to get around it. So let's do that.
Let's start over. And let's get to... Start in chapter 3. There's so much that we could go into, but we're going to go through and start in chapter 3. Alright. Alright, now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.
And he said to the woman, has God indeed said you shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die. Then the serpent said to the woman, You will not surely die. This is the very first instruction of the Bible that is counteracted by the enemy. Where God gives what's called in Hebrew, Torah.
And the Torah is, do not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. You are only allowed to eat from the tree of life. And the enemy says, God didn't really say that. You're not really going to die. Do you really believe that God, the one that loves you, is going to kill you?
Now let me ask you a question. Has anybody ever died up to this point? No.
So how on earth does Adam and Eve even have a clue of what death even is? Do you really think that Adam understood the depth of death at this point? Absolutely not. It's part of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He has no concept of death.
So the only concept that he has is life and instructions that lead to life. I'm sure that there was some sort of... Maybe external knowledge of like a definition of death, meaning that you're not going to live, but he doesn't understand what that means. He doesn't have a clue.
Then the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die, for God knows that in the day that you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. Now, let me ask you a question. Did Eve hear God say, don't eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil?
No. She did not hear this instruction. Where was she?
Inside of Adam. So she's one with Adam at this point. She's not in existence when the instruction was given. Who heard the instruction?
Adam himself. For God knows in the day that your eyes will be opened, you'll be like Elohim, knowing good from evil. So they have no concept of death.
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of it its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate. Here is the key, one of the keys. It's not at all what I want to talk about, but I'm going to bring it up since we're here, is that God told Adam, if you eat of it, you're going to die.
He did not tell Eve that you're going to die if you eat of it, did he? Let's be literal. Let's be exactly what the Scripture said. God did not tell Eve she couldn't eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He told Adam.
So Eve eats. No response from heaven. Do you find that interesting? There's not a response.
There's not even a blink of an eye. She doesn't even blink an eye. But Adam knows exactly what's going to happen.
Why does he eat? He knows what she's done. Why does he choose to eat the tree of knowledge of good and evil? Why does he eat the forbidden fruit?
Knowing what's going to happen. What does He know is going to happen? He's going to die, right? Who does Adam represent? Who's the first Adam?
Adam. Who's the second Adam? There's only one other person in the Bible that has that title.
It's Yeshua Himself. What does Yeshua do for His bride? He willingly chooses to die for His bride. So can I suggest to you that Adam knows exactly what he's doing. That Adam knows exactly what he's doing.
Adam is choosing to die for his bride. Because he would rather die than live without her. Because if he chooses, ladies and gentlemen, to not take this fruit, He lives forever, and he has to watch his wife die. That's my suggestion.
Because everything in the Scripture is precedent and protocol and foreshadows of Yeshua. It's the Messiah written over and over and again, and we can't even get three chapters in. Matter of fact, you can't even get one word into the Bible. Bereshit has got Yeshua written all over it like there's no tomorrow, and someday I'll go through it.
There's 10 or 15 words right inside the word Bereshit that all talk about Yeshua. It even says that His hands are going to be nailed to a cross, crown of thorns. It's credible.
Father and the Son, Echad. It's amazing. But in the third chapter, do you find it interesting that it's the third chapter?
The number three is a messianic number. Always when you see three, thirty-three, thirty, three hundred, three thousand. Look deeper, you're probably going to find something to do with the Messiah built in there.
And in the third chapter, we find the first Adam dying for his bride, taking the sin of his bride on his shoulders. So then what happens? Here we go.
So they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden. Time out. Theologically, I'm already messed up.
Yahweh is what? He's Spirit. How on earth is Yahweh walking in the garden? What do you use to walk? Feet.
What's connected to feet? Legs. What's connected to legs?
And the thigh bone's connected to the hip bone, right? On and on it goes. That means that there is a person walking around in the garden. Person. I bet you never thought through that a little bit.
Because you think of God, it's the Spirit of God in the cool of the day. And it is, but He's walking. I'm not going to unpack that because I'm going to unpack that two weeks from now. So, I'll just tell you up front what my message is going to be two weeks from now. It's ten years in the making.
Everyone's been waiting for this. I've been waiting for Yahweh to give me the opportunity and the permission to do this, but He hasn't until now. But two weeks from now, I will be talking about the Trinity. And I will be teaching on who Yeshua is, who is Jesus, who is God, what does it look like.
the different manifestations and so on and so forth. We're going to unpack that. Will that be okay with you? I was so excited because the Lord just gave me permission about an hour and a half ago to teach.
And I've been waiting to actually teach something in depth for a long time. And He's not allowed me to until now. And so I'm super excited. You're going to be blown away.
It is so depth. The depth of God's Word is off the charts. We're going to dig into the deepest part of the Hebrew.
It's going to be a very complex study, but I think it's going to minister to you on more than one level. So here we go. Check this out.
So he's walking in the midst of the garden to hear the sound, the cool of the day. Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord. Those of you that are at Sukkot, we talked about this a little bit.
I want to talk about it a little bit more. So I'm just going to read this, and then we're going to come back and I'll show you the protocol for fishing. Okay.
So the eyes of them were both open. We skipped the scripture. So, uh, Adam eats. Verse 7. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked.
As we say in southern Missouri, they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, Where are you?
He didn't go to Eve. Why didn't he go to Eve? Because the instruction was given to Adam. So he said, I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself. And he said, Who told you that you were naked?
Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat? Then, interesting, it doesn't say Adam. It says man. Then, man or Adam, it could go either way.
Then Adam said, the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate. And the Lord God said to the woman, what is this that you have done? The woman said, the serpent deceived me, and I ate. So the Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, you are cursed for more than all the cattle and more than every beast of the field.
On your belly you shall go, and you shall eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.
And he goes on and he gives these disciplinary actions of the result of their sin. But I want to go back and focus on this, because what we're getting ready to go over is... is to show you exactly what men do to prevent the Holy Spirit from working in their life. This is how we act, is this protocol right here.
So go back with me to verse 6, because this is where it all starts. When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and she ate. So what happens when you sin or something happens to you that is...
traumatic. Maybe someone puts sin on you, if you will. The first thing that happens when you consume it, it goes down inside. What is inside of fruit?
Seed. So seed goes down inside. When the seed goes down inside from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, this is the problem. There are two sets of seeds. There is the seed of the tree of life, which brings forth light, according to the scriptures.
Matter of fact, there's some ancient sages that say that the tree of life was brilliant, that it was so bright you couldn't even look at it, because there was nothing but light coming from the tree of life. So when the seeds of life or the seeds of God's Word go down inside, what do they do? They produce life. They only know how to reproduce its own kind, according to Genesis. And so when you put the seed of life down inside of you, it dispels the darkness and outcomes out of your very pores of who you are, light.
Remember when Moses was on top of Mount Sinai, what happened? He was in the presence of the Most High God, and what happened? He came down from the mountain after spending time in pure light, and He glowed. So much so, it freaked out the people.
They had to give Him a veil. Remember that? This was an illustration that God is saying that when you truly eat from My tree, you will glow.
You will be what? What does Yeshua turn to His disciples and say? You are a city on a hill.
You are a city. It wasn't metaphorical. In a way, it is figurative, but in reality, he's saying that you are literally the inner tabernacle of the Most High God.
And inside the innermost tabernacle is the Shekinah Chavod. It's the Shekinah Chavod. It's the glory of God, which radiates the third millennium temple. It's what?
It's going to glow from the inside. Yeshua is going to be the light. Where does Yeshua live? Here. So you're supposed to be light.
I shouldn't even have to teach this. This is so basic, right? We are supposed to be the light of the world.
The light of the world only is the light if the word, the Devar of God, the Torah of God is inside of you. The word light in Hebrew is or. Everybody say or. See, you already know how to use that word.
It's fire or light of God. When I say boker or, It means morning fire, morning light. It means good morning. So the light of God is supposed to go down on the inside. That is the tree of life.
But the problem is that before they sinned and they ate another seed, they were full of light, were they not? Right? Their light emanating from them, do you think that they shined less than Moses or more than Moses?
More than Moses! Are you kidding me? They're in the very presence of the Almighty. Can you imagine the light, the physical light that was emanating from them? If the physical light was emanating from Moses'face, imagine the physical light emanating from their entire bodies.
You follow me? It's not a stretch, is it? At all.
It's real. So when they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which is a mixed seed, which, by the way, the Torah commands not to mix the seeds. Potentially, maybe it's because Hasatan took his seed, mixed it with the tree of life, up came the knowledge of good and evil, and they ate from that tree.
And the moment that they ate from that tree, what were they swallowing? Death. A mixture of death and life. Death will always outperform life if it's eaten. Darkness will always prevail when it's eaten with life.
Because life... only prevails over darkness when it's eaten by itself. But if you compromise or mix the truth, that word wicked is where we get in the English wicked.
It's two things wicked together. Wicked is actually worse than evil. True evil is just evil. Wicked is a mixture of good and evil.
And so when they ate the good and evil, it destroyed the light that was emanating from them. And so if they're looking into a very first century mirror before the fall, they are seeing nothing but light. But if they look into the mirror after the fall, the light is now gone, and they see their physicality. They realized they were naked. Does this make sense?
So now they see their nakedness. Who created them that way? It's not a trick question.
Yahweh created them to be naked and clothed in, thank you. Took the word out of my mouth. I was hoping both words would come out.
Light, righteousness. You quoted a scripture. Your mind went to scripture.
Have you ever wondered why the psalmist says that? You are to be clothed with righteousness. Paul repeats it. Because righteousness is doing the right thing, which means that you are consuming the seed of the tree of life, which is bringing light. And light does what?
What is light? What's another word that starts with the same letter? Love.
Life. What does love do? It covers a multitude of sins. Do you see the connection? Love and light and life are all connected to the tree of life.
It's connected to the seed that goes down inside that brings forth light. And light, when it's fully manifested, it covers you. God created you to be naked, covered in Him, covered in life. So here's the problem.
Let's get back to our text. So now their eyes were open and they knew that they were naked. Their physical eyes were open. They were walking once in spiritual eyes.
And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the unauthorized covering. Because the first thing that most of us do when we sin is what do we do?
We want to cover it up. It's the first thing we want to do. It is a natural inclination of man that when you sin, you know you're naked.
You know you're wrong. So the first thing that you want to do is sew together something, discord. You'll sew something and you'll put it on you. You'll cover your sin. That's the first thing that we do.
This is what prevents you from walking in your destiny, prevents you from walking in your spiritual gifts, prevents you from being a true fisherman of men. You cannot be a fisherman of men if you follow this pattern. I'll show you the answer in just a minute of how do we get back to being true fishermen. They sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings. They wanted to cover what God created to be natural.
And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden. What is the next thing that normally happens? The Holy Spirit begins to convict you, right?
You covered your sin. If you're a believer, the Holy Spirit begins to walk in the midst of your garden, and He convicts you of your sin. And so what do we do next?
We hide. Now we take what's already covering us, and we want to hide. What's interesting is, where do they hide? What's it say? Among the trees in the garden.
According to Scripture, you're a tree. So what most men do is they will take their sin, cover their sin, and then hide behind someone else. They'll hide.
They don't want to get close to anybody. They don't want to be intimate. They will hide among the trees.
It's really easy to do in a large church. You can hide. Nobody knows you.
So nobody knows your issues. You can smile, wear the nicest clothes like camo shorts. And what's the next thing that happens?
The Lord God called to Adam and said, where are you? I heard your voice in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. So we see that one of the most powerful forces in the universe, the very first force that causes a division, that causes man to hide from God, the spirit of fear. The spirit of fear is what causes you to hide because you don't want to be humiliated.
You don't want to be humbled. You don't know the power of nakedness. Is this resonating at all? So he said, who told you that you were naked?
Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat? Then the man said, the woman whom you gave to be with me. She gave me of the tree, and I ate. Now, we always take that a certain way, and you can take it however you want it, but watch what the woman says. What is this that you have done?
The woman said, the serpent deceived me, and I ate it. So what's happening? There's a blame game happening, isn't there? Is this not apropos of exactly how we deal with our sin? First, we get embarrassed and we make a covering for ourselves.
We try to cover up our sin. That's normally a lie. Then we hide from God.
Then we blame somebody else. This is what happens. And you know what the result... And this is amazing to me. The result of this conversation is banishment from the garden.
Now, I'm going to ask a question that I can't prove, but I'm just going to suggest to you that there is a reason why God has this conversation. Because it makes no logical sense for Yahweh to have this conversation. Are you serious as if He doesn't know any of the answers to these questions? He says, who told you you were naked?
Like He wasn't there watching. Who gave you the fruit? Like He wasn't there, a part of the situation. He's asking these questions.
for a reason, and it's not for his own knowledge because he is omniscient. He knows all things. I'm going to suggest to you that he is asking the same. Matter of fact, let's just go back and look at it here. Who told you that you were naked?
Have you eaten from the tree of I commanded that you should not eat? He asks, ladies and gentlemen, these questions are the same questions he asked Peter before the cock grow three times. The reason why he's asking these questions is giving them a chance to repent. Now, I'm going to theologically go on a giant limb here and say that there is a possibility that if he would have responded in humility, Yahweh may have forgiven him and we may not be in the mess that we're in. But the curses, interestingly, came after the questions that he didn't have to ask.
It makes no sense to even ask the questions. He's trying to see if Adam will fess up to his sin. He chooses not to fess up to his sin. He hides himself, lies, hides himself physically.
Then he blames. Eve blames. The serpent's the only one left. So the consequence are these serious consequences, and ultimately the worst consequence is banishment from the garden itself.
So how do we find, how do we get back to the garden? Isn't that what we've been talking about for the last year? We've got to get back to the garden. We want to get back to the garden.
We want to go back to the garden, get back to the center of the Garden of Eden, in the midst of the Garden of Eden. How do we do that? I tell you and submit to you that the answer is found right here in Genesis chapter 3. In the very way that man got banished from the garden is the very way that we get back.
The formula is there. Here's the formula. We're simply going to go in reverse. You don't blame.
You take responsibility for your sin. You take responsibility for what's happened to you. You don't say, okay, well, it's my mom's fault, my dad's fault, my brother's fault, my dog's fault. It's your fault. You take responsibility for your sin.
Number two, you do not hide amongst the body. You don't separate yourself from the body. You don't every once in a while decide I'm just going to be a part of PFT when I want to.
That's hiding. I'm just calling it out. That's hiding in the body. Nowhere in the Scriptures are you going to say, don't forsake the assembling of the saints every once in a while. Or come together and submit to one another three times a year.
There's no way to submit to one another. We don't even know you. How can I submit to what I don't even know?
God does not give you the latitude to hide even though you want to. Because what happens when you don't hide? It's uncomfortable.
So number one, don't blame. Number two, you be a part of the body. You don't hide. Number three, take off the fig leaves. We already know you're naked.
Nakedroots.com, right? You want to get back to the roots of who you really are? You want to get healed of all the junk in your life?
Take the fig leaves off. What do we say at PFT? Open the chest.
Show the sin. It's not like we're going to be shocked. Our sin's probably greater than yours. There's not a sin that's new under the sun. Your hurts are the same hurts as the person on the other side of the congregation, or maybe the person sitting next to you.
So this is how you become healed. This is how you get back to the Garden of Eden. This is why there are people in this congregation that are so healed from such tremendous trauma that they're hardly sitting in their seats because they want to come up and give a testimony, which we're going to give an opportunity in a minute. And it's because they chose to do this.
It's because they chose to not hide their sin anymore. To say, I'm done hiding. Here's my palm leaves. Burn them.
This is who I am. I am a naked mess. I'm not going to blame anybody. I'm not going to hide anymore in the back row. I'm going to be here.
I'm going to be in community. I want people to know me. Here's who I am. If you don't like me, so be it. And the moment that you do that, there is a supernatural healing because what you're doing on a real biblical level in Genesis, is that you are opening your chest and allowing the Holy Spirit to reach down inside of you and pull out the seed from the tree of knowledge and good and evil.
Gone. And the moment that it comes out, what's left? Pure light. You become covered in righteousness. You become covered in the light of the Almighty God.
When you put out, when you open the chest and pull out. Why do we talk about this so much? Because what you don't know that happens behind closed doors and the people that do, you don't see the miracles.
I'm talking everything from supernatural physical healings to real demonic entities that are cast out of people. I have heard demonic voices speak to me from people that I would have never thought. Could speak like that. It shows you the darkness that's hiding.
It shows you how much darkness is in our lives that we don't even know. And some of us, we want so bad the power of God. If I ask a show of hands, who wants to be more like God? Who wants to be more like Yahweh?
Who wants to fulfill their destiny? There wouldn't be a hand that wouldn't go up in here. But why is it that there are people that are still... operating in the same spirit of fear that killed Adam and Eve, that prevented them from hitting their destiny.
Fear is the only thing that will do that. You're afraid of what people might think. Did you know that if everybody opened their chest at the same time, we would all just be in shock and awe at the same time? If everybody stripped naked at one time, that's a thought for you. Stop thinking that, by the way.
It would be shock and awe all at one time. And you don't know you're shocked at them and they're shocked at you. And then we go on with life in the garden because the reality is you're never going to have the light of the living God come through you and every pore in your body until you get connected with someone else. Until you get connected with the Lord God and with people that are around you, it's never going to happen.
You're not going to be fulfilled. You won't hit your destiny. You won't ever be given this. Some of you will go your entire life and never be able to minister to a single person.
And you will miss the only calling that God gave mankind. When you stand before the Most High God, I hope that you have a stringer full of people that you minister to. that you encouraged, but you can't encourage a single soul when you're hurting, depressed, full of anxiety and fear, which means you'll never hit your destiny.
When your family's out of order, Yahweh takes the fishing pole away. Oh, but look, God, I've got every lure in the tackle box. He says, I don't really care because the only one that you're going to pull out is this ugly looking treble hook. I don't want you hurting anybody anymore.
So that's all I wanted to share this evening because I'm saving up some deep water lures for a couple of weeks from now. But I want to encourage you, get involved. If you're listening online and you don't have a local mishpachah and you're part of our online family, find people.
Four is the number, by the way. How do we know that? Because it took four people to carry... The heart of God, the ark of the covenant, took four.
So you need four people. to carry you when you're down, when you're bummed out. And if you don't have four people, then you are an Ark of the Covenant sitting out in the middle of the wilderness going nowhere. You have to have multiple people around you.
Simple message, but it's a message that if you apply like other people have, maybe you'll hear from a few minutes here, maybe you'll be healed too. Maybe you'll be happy for once in your life. Maybe you'll have joy come back in, healing come back in.
Maybe the power of the living God will turn on the supernatural. About a month ago, we got a phone call from a gentleman of our online satellite, Congregational Leaders, and we've already shared the story. I'm just going to share the conclusion.
And he said that his daughter was dying in the hospital. She was born. She had drank the meconium. She had a lung problem.
They hooked her up to the lung machine. She had only a 50% chance of living. They had an infection that they couldn't figure out where it was coming from, her temperature was off the charts, all kinds of problems.
And for all intents and purposes, she was dying and the doctors didn't know what to do. So he called me to pray for her. I didn't know what else to do but pray.
So I prayed, and in the middle of praying, I saw a vision of her lying on her right side. And the Holy Spirit spoke to me and said, there's something wrong with the right side. So I told him, I said, I was embarrassed, but I said, I don't know what this means, but I saw her on her right side.
You need to check it out. She needs to be on her left side. There's something wrong with her right side.
So they went back to the doctor, told the doctor. When you look on the right side, the doctor looks at him like, okay, really? Who's the doctor here? But they did.
They opened up the ultrasound, which they would have never done. They found three blood clots on the right side. Tried to get him out through blood thinning and couldn't do it. Ended up having to do surgery, take out the blood clots. And if you could put up the picture, today, Micaiah is home.
and she's alive and she is 100% healthy. Amen. That little baby has gone through the ringer the last couple of months.
But what saved her life? It wasn't Jim Staley at all. It had nothing to do with it.
I was simply a vessel that God could bring down, bring His light into the earth realm. So let me ask you a question. Could have been anybody. Could have been you. Let's say it's John Doe that God used to heal this little baby, to bring this vision.
What happens if John Doe eats from the tree of knowledge of good and evil? You're not looking at that picture of Micaiah. Micaiah dies.
Now, I don't know God's will, and I don't understand how He chooses life for one. He used to take another. But this is how important you are to the body and how important and why this message, this very simple message, God says is off the charts important for His body. That if you don't choose to get healed and you choose to walk in a spirit of fear, in a spirit of pride, you are so selfish and you're killing people and you don't even know it. You're killing the body.
You're preventing the body from hitting its destiny. Because your important, valuable talents and giftings aren't being used, not being matured. You're stunting the rest of the body. And Pastor, for truth, our vision and goal here is to be a healthy body where the spiritual gifts can be in operation. Well, that's up to you.
It's not up to me. My job is just to put it before you of how to fish. and show you what it takes to get there.
But I've taken people's heads and shoved them in the water, and they still don't want to drink. So my job is just to give you a map. I'm not putting anybody's head in the water anymore. I learned that lesson long ago.
There's a world and a big ocean out there ready for us to go fishing, but it starts with you and your neighbor. Don't be silent. Don't find yourself in the cool of the garden.
And God asking you, where are you? Amen.