Be Fruitful and Multiply
Genesis 1:28
Pastor Joshua Kennedy
Sunday February 17, 2008
It can be very hard to enter into God’s presence when we are going through trials, when we are getting beat down by life and everything is such a struggle. Do we ever question God why life is the way it is? Why do we have to struggle? Has anyone ever said, “Why me God?” We all get tired and want to give up. We all get to that place where we wonder why things are the way they are?
When Adam and Eve sinned, it brought a curse upon the earth. But thank God that through Jesus Christ that curse can be reversed. I believe that is what God wants to develop in us, the strength that we need to reverse the curse in every area of our life.
If we are family, which we are, it hurts to see others struggling. At times God will allow us to feel each others pains. I feel the pain of many of you who are hurting today. Christ came to redeem us and restore us to the way it was before sin. I believe there is revelation in the garden to gain the understanding we need to allow Christ to reverse the curse.
Genesis 1:28, God blessed them and told them,” Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. Be masters over the fish and birds and all the animals.
We see here from the beginning, as soon as God created man, He did not curse them but He blessed them. He poured out his goodness upon them. Adam and Eve knew nothing but that which was good. They did not know evil. God is calling us to return to that place where we completely turn away from evil. How do we walk in the blessing?
Deuteronomy 28:1-14, If you fully obey the Lord your God by keeping all the commands that I have given you today, the Lord your God will exalt you above all the nations of the world. You will experience all these blessings, if you obey the Lord your God. You will be blessed in the town and in the country. You will be blessed with many children and productive fields. You will be blessed with fertile herds and flocks. You will be blessed with baskets overflowing with fruit and with kneading bowls full of bread. You will be blessed wherever you go, both in coming and in going. The Lord will conquer your enemies when they attack you. They will attack you from one direction but they will scatter from you seven. The Lord will bless everything you do and will fill your storehouses (or bank accounts) with grain (or money). The Lord will bless you in the land he had given you. If you obey the commands of the Lord your God and walk in His ways, the Lord will establish you as His holy people as He solemnly promised to do. Then all the nations of the world will see that you are a people claimed by the Lord and they will stand in awe of you. The Lord will give you an abundance of good things in the land He swore to give your ancestors. Many children, numerous livestock and abundant crops. The Lord will send rain at the proper time (just when we need to be refreshed) from His rich treasury in the heavens to bless all the work you do. You will lend to many nations but you will never need to barrow or be in debt. If you listen to these commands of the Lord your God and carefully obey them, the Lord will make you the head, not the tail, and you will always have the upper hand. You must not turn away from any of the commands I am giving you today to follow after other gods and worship them.
This passage talks about the blessing of obedience. So let’s not even deal with the curse because if we deal with the blessing, it will cancel out curse itself. And again, the key to being blessed is obedience. Once we receive the Lord, we have to learn to walk with the Lord. It is one thing to receive the Lord but it is another thing to walk with the Lord. We need not just receive salvation; we need to walk it out. We must receive Jesus Christ as lord, every day, all the time. God wants us to walk with Him always, all the time, everywhere. He wants us to learn how to be obedient in everything, not just to come to church. That is a very small part of obedience. God wants us to be obedient in every day life, in our workplaces, in our schools, in our homes. God must be obeyed everywhere if we are to receive His blessing and see His hand upon us.
Whatever we do in the spirit multiplies, but what we do in the flesh divides. There would be no division if we did everything in the spirit. That which we do in the spirit will always expand, it will always grow. God is an always growing, He is always expanding. That is why the Bible says we can do even greater works than Jesus because God is always doing greater. So things should be getting bigger and bigger, better and better, each and every year. But it comes back down to that question, are we walking with the Lord in every area of our lives?
Here is a little analysis that is unlike me because I am not a gardener. Every time my wife and I try to plant something it takes only a little while before the plant is dead. It takes time to garden, so if you do not have time, it will not work. We are like a field. What is planted in us will naturally effect what comes out of us. For a plant to grow, it greatly depends on where it is planted. We cannot have multiplication without fruit. A lot of people want a harvest, but you cannot harvest a crop unless it has fruit. We ask God to bring a harvest, but there is no fruit. This is how the fruit comes; let us look at Psalm Chapter 1,
Verse 1-2a “Oh, the joy of those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or stand around with sinners, or join in with scoffers. But they delight in doing everything the Lord wants.
Can we say that with our whole lives? Do we delight in doing what the Lord wants in everything?
“Day and night they think about His law...” (or His ways)
Do we try to do everything His way or our own way?
Verse 3, “They are like trees planted on the river bank, bearing fruit each season without fail.”
So even in the winter, even in the midst of a storm, the fruit is there. It is one thing when things are going good and we are fruitful, we are kind and nice, the nature of God is being seen in us. What about in the storm? It is the storm that brings everything to the surface; it exposes us for who we really are. A storm can actually help the fruit. When a storm comes it takes the seeds of the fruit and scatters them so that the harvest can become bigger. A storm can do two things; it can make us bitter or better, plant seeds or plant weeds, depending on how we perceive it. If we are planted in God, we will bear fruit even in the storms.
“Their leaves never wither and in all they do they prosper.”
What we allow to surround us will dictate how far up we go in God. If what we allow to surround us is weeds, it will choke anything from growing and producing anything good. The people we allow in our lives could be the cause of our problems. We may be receiving more negative words than we do positive. We are getting more evil than we are good. If that is what is being deposited in us, then we cannot expect anything good to come out of us, for out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. If evil is planted in the heart, evil is going to be spoken out of the mouth and death and live is in the power of the tongue.
God said He came to give us life and live more abundantly. His life is the God kind of life, ZOE (Hebrew word for life), the abundant life, a life of overflow, always having more than enough. That is the life God intended us to have, but for it to be experienced, we have to watch our mouths. We are going to have to establish boundaries of what we allow to be planted in our fields (hearts).
The key to our success, to us prospering is the garden, our secret place. Are we neglecting our relationship with God? Do we spend quality time alone with God, our great gardener? Are we allowing Him to cultivate our lives? The soil that we are supposed to have around us is His presence. Our field needs to be saturated with His presence if it is going to bring forth His life.
John 15:1-2 “I am the true vine and my father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch that does not produce fruit, and He prunes the branches that do bear fruit so that they may produce even more.
God has a work that He wants to do in our lives. Every day we neglect the garden, we do not grow, and we remain the same and miss out on God’s best for that day. We might say, “I am too busy for the garden.” We cannot expect any good to come unless we have a secret place. Unless we have a time alone with God, if we are not people devoted to God’s presence we cannot expect His life to manifest anywhere else. If we are not allowing God’s presence to invade our homes, there will be division. The problem with most marriages is that simple, getting the presence of God back into our homes. You cannot be intimate with each other until you are intimate with God. When you have an intimacy with God, it is easy to be intimate with man.
We need to allow God to cut things out of our life. The things that we neglect will deteriorate. If you neglect a car it deteriorates. I do it all the time. I recently went to have a routine oil change done and I was told that my breaks were bad even though I have had the car only nine months. And instead of having my oil changed every three months, it usually turns out to be every five months. We cannot pretend that everything is going to be okay, that God will take care if it. We must take care of what God has given us for it to work.
God has saved and called us first of all to have a relationship with Him. That is the first thing that must be restored, that is the first thing we see in the garden, that God created man and that man walked with God in the garden. God created us for that purpose alone, to walk with Him. And if we walk with God it will affect every area of your life.
Verse 4, “Remain in me and I will remain in you, for a branch cannot produce fruit if it is severed from the vine. You cannot be fruitful apart from me.”
Again no fruit can come apart from Him.
Verse 5 “Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit.”
It is a guaranteed thing. The main thing I try to do with the teens of this church is to make sure they have an environment that they can deepen their relationship with God. They have the choice every week to enter into God’s presence, the atmosphere is there. I know that I cannot produce growth out of them, only God can. And that can only come in the Garden, in the secret place. All that I can do is plant seeds and trust that God will bring the increase. Multiplication can only come through their fruitfulness. And the thing that I am starting to see in our young people is reproduction.
“My true disciples produce much fruit; this brings great glory to my father.
When a tree (us) is firmly planted in good soil (God’s presence) and it is being watered (God’s Word), the fruit (God’s character) will grow and in it’s due time and season, when it has blossomed, the fruit will now fall from the tree into the ground and scatter seeds and begin to reproduce itself. I am starting to see the life of God that is in me, in those He has given me. I truly am expecting to see a harvest. That through them there will be a 30, 60, and 100 fold return. This takes time and very few people are willing to do what it takes to see a harvest. . A lush garden does not come quickly. If you see a truly good garden, its gardener takes hours and hours of cultivating the soil and watering the plants. It takes time for a harvest and very few people are willing to invest the time to have a good garden.
One bad apple can spoil the bunch. We cannot neglect any area of our life. Usually we have an area of neglect and it tends to come over and spoil the others. A personal example is when it comes to who I am at church. I will come and pray and seek God’s face and share God’s word with power. But when I come back home I kind of take a break. Sometimes I get a little spiritually lazy. The Bible says that we are clothed in God’s righteousness, to put on Christ. I walk in His nature when I am at church but at times when I get home, I take it off. I can tell right away because I am impatient, I am harsh sometimes with my words or get upset over something so small. What we do at home, effects the Christian body around us, because we are all part of a body. Whatever is affecting one of us effects us all. So if we are divided at home then we are divided as a body.
We must allow God’s presence to flow into wherever we go. We must put everything in it’s proper order. First of all is the garden, our secret place. Secondly is family, which is the second area that God has planted us in, our homes. As husbands we are to love our wives as Christ loves the church and give ourselves fully to them. That solves a lot of problems if we can understand what that really means. Just think of Christ and what He does for us and do the same thing for our wives. The Bible says that our wives are to honor us as they honor God. That is what we have to bring into our homes, that is obedience, if we are going to see God’s hand and His blessing upon us. The Bible also says that we are to raise our children up in the way they should go. The key to growing in God is spending time with Him in the secret place; it is the same in our home. If we are God’s righteousness and we walk into our homes, the righteousness of God has now entered in. And the conviction of His presence has falls upon each person in our household. When they are in the midst of sin they should be convicted. We worry a lot as parents but if we learn how to walk in His presence our kids would be running to us repenting for what they have done in secret. The presence of God is stronger than darkness. We need to be filled with His light and bring it in to our homes.
Third we need to bring God’s presence into our workplace. A lot of times we are one person in Church and another person at work. We need to understand that your ministry is your workplace. You have been anointed by God to bring His glory to your job. The Bible says that God wants to fill the earth with His glory. The earth cannot be filled with His glory if the church is the only place God receives glory. Your source of income is God, not your job. You are at your job to bring God glory, to manifest His presence. If you see it that way God will now begin to speak to you. He will give you wisdom. Do you want to see increase in your life? Solve problems. When you see people who are prospering, they usually are people who solve problems. When you have the right perspective on your job, God will give you answers to problems in your workplace and therefore you will gain favor. When you gain favor, you will gain increase, you will gain promotion, and you will go to a higher level in your job. You will have a better life.
God takes us through all kinds of phases in life. There are times to be without and times to abound. God wants us to bring Him glory throughout the nations. He wants us to have plenty so that we can give plenty to those who are in need. Our perspective upon our job is a very key thing. Are we bringing God’s presence upon our job or are we just working for man? Do we have an attitude all the time and complain that we are not treated fairly. We wonder why we do not get promoted but yet we come in with an attitude every day. If we have the right perspective, we will have the right attitude. If we have the right attitude we will prosper. These are the three places so far, the garden ,the home and the workplace which should not even be called a job because each of us are ministers in that place of ministry every day. Do not call it a job anymore because it is your place of ministry. If you change the name you will change your perspective.
Then you have the church, the body of Christ, which has a purpose besides the gathering together. We come to church to be equipped and to go into the world do the work of the ministry. We must come to church with an attitude to learn, to grow, to connect, to be a part of and to find our place. When we have the right perspective we will know our place. A lot of us have no clue where our place is in the body because we do not have the right perspective. We will hear God’s voice when we see things clearly. We will then come here with a different attitude not just hoping that worship will be good or hoping that the preacher will give a message that will benefit us. Our attitude will be completely different because we are here as a body to glorify God and to be equipped to go out and do greater works. Amen?
We need to examine our lives because the Bible says that the fields are ripe and ready for harvest, pray for laborers. People are ready to get saved. The problem is we are not planted. We cannot have a harvest if there is nothing planted. Then once things are planted it must bear fruit. The world is ripe, but the church is not very fruitful. We will see a great harvest when we choose to be planted where God has established us and become fruitful, and once we become fruitful, harvest will take place. If we are being led by the Spirit throughout the week and we are being fruitful, we should be filling the seats with people that God has sent us to.
We should not see subtraction or division but rather addition and multiplication. That is what we need to see. Church it is time! It is time to see a harvest. But the fruit takes time.
Return to the way it was in the beginning. Get back to the garden. Allow God to prune and strip us of everything that is not Him.
Sometimes as a potter you must crush the vase and start all over again. Some of us need to get crushed and be put back together again. Do we want a different life? Do we want a better life? God can do it, but do we believe? A way of belief is to step out. So I am calling upon you today. Do you want to see good come out of your life? There is a real call to step out of the life you now have and step into a new life.
Say, “God come! And do a new work in me.” If your life is so full of weeds then maybe it is time to buy a new field. Just say, “God, give me a whole new life.” If you believe this step out because we cannot hear something and not respond.
Response is the key if we are going to receive what we have heard! A lot of time we like what we hear, but we do not respond to what we hear. Response takes faith, ACTION! This is a call no matter where you are at in your life, just surrender to God and ask Him to take you. And He will because His arms are right there ready to embrace you and love on you.