Crystal Rivers | Kingdom Mysteries | Nov 12, 2025 You are invited into a journey where God is not a distant idea but a real Father who wants you to grow from a mere heir in theory into a mature son or daughter who actually shares His heart, His pleasures, and His judgments. Your life with God unfolds through a process Scripture calls the foundational principles: turning away from dead works, putting faith toward God, being immersed in His teachings and Spirit, learning to yield to His touch, living in the power of resurrection, and finally seeing life through His eternal judgments—His way of discerning what is truly right and truly wrong. The Garden of Eden is a picture of this training: it was not just about two physical trees, but two kinds of life, two kinds of desire, two kinds of “knowledge of good and evil.” To “know good and evil” in God’s world is not merely to have information; it is to have your desires trained so that you enjoy what God calls good and hate what He calls evil, the way someone slowly acquires a taste for beer, cigarettes, or sinful habits through repeated exposure. The “tree of life” represents Christ, the image and pleasure of God, whose life and presence teach you to delight in doing the will of God; the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” represents Satan’s life, teaching you to enjoy staying away from God and savoring the things of this age. Eden means pleasure or delight, so the garden is the environment where your appetites are being shaped—either into cycles of life or cycles of death—by whatever “tree” you keep eating from: teachings, influences, and spirits that pull you into their orbit like a star pulling planets with its gravity. Angels and spiritual tutors were designed to help humanity learn the powers of the heavens and grow into the full dominion God intended, but Satan, a fallen tutor, now drags people into his own orbit of death if they draw near to him instead of to God. Mature Christianity is not a life of grudging rule-keeping—“I can’t club, I can’t smoke, I can’t sin”—but a life where you genuinely enjoy God’s presence so much that you are grateful to be free from those things; this enjoyment is the result of mind renewal, where you present your body as a living sacrifice, refuse the stains and counterfeit pleasures of this age, and allow God to transform your inner judgments so you can prove and savor His good, acceptable, and perfect will. The “secret place of the Most High” is the lived reality of dwelling in God’s presence—choosing, day after day, to turn normal sources of dopamine (entertainment, addictions, distractions) into sacrifices of time and attention so you can sit with God in worship, teaching, prayer, and gratitude until His presence becomes tangible, sweet, and addictive in the holy way; “dwelling” is your intentional staying, and “abiding under His shadow” is the overflow when His presence begins to follow you into ordinary moments because you’ve made room for Him in your heart. Seasons may come when God “rushes” you with intense encounters, goosebumps, and obvious nearness, but those are invitations to respond with even deeper pursuit, not moments to coast; if you don’t respond, you may enter dryness, not because God has abandoned you, but because He is now calling you to seek Him deliberately as a priest, not just a guest. When you feel stuck—knowing what you should do spiritually but not doing it—offer God a real sacrifice: lay down a comfort, a habit, or a pleasure and replace it with time in His word, worship, fasting, and listening; spirits respond to sacrifice, and this opens space for the Holy Spirit to work mind renewal in you at a deeper level. When you fall into sin, never stay away—run straight back into the secret place with all your shame, because God delights in showing mercy and comes alive in forgiving and restoring; condemnation is Satan’s voice trying to keep y