All right. Well, hey guys, welcome to our campuses this weekend. We are in a brand new sermon series today. So if you have a copy of scripture, you can take it and turn with me to Genesis chapter six. As I say, every single time we get the chance to start a brand new sermon series, it is a great time to be new, no matter who you are, no matter where you're coming from. It's a great time to be new because we're all going to be new together as we start a brand new sermon series here this weekend. So you guys be finding Genesis chapter six. As you're doing that, I wanted to explain a little bit of context for our church and give you a little bit of an origin story here.
Okay. When we planted Mercy Hill, and this is a little bit of a, an intro just kind of to Mercy Hill. This is not really the sermon quite yet. You guys be finding Genesis chapter six while I'm doing this, but I want to share a couple opportunities with you and I want to connect them to the vision of our church. So when we launched Mercy Hill, we had a vision to see 500 people gathering to hear the word gathering and community by year five. Okay, we launched in 2020.
I was 12, I was 28 years old. We had a group of 30 that moved. That may not sound like a lot of people for a church like Mercy Hill, but I'm telling you, I was talking to a church guru, church expert, one of these guys that knows the stats this week. 92% of churches in the largest evangelical denomination in North America are 200 people or less. And so for us to have a goal of a church that had zero people, okay, to say we want to see 500 people come and many of them to come and be baptized and to jump in our discipleship pathways.
For us, that was a big goal. Y'all, we got to year five and we had not seen 500 people attending. We had actually seen over 500 baptisms.
All right. And so we were praising God for that and we were excited about that. It was around that same time where I got a chance to speak at a conference in Washington, DC. And the other speaker that was there was talking about how we have all of this, you know, all these dreams and the visions that God was giving him for his church. And he was talking about how God had given him a vision on a napkin. And he was at a restaurant and talking to brothers and they were praying and boom, God had given. And then God had just blown life into it. And they were planting campuses and churches and people were getting saved and just revival was breaking out of Chicago. And it was really cool. And he handed everybody a napkin. And he's like, hey, what is your napkin kind of prayer? You know, and this was, you know, man, I was there to speak at a conference and lo and behold, I'm getting ministered to more than anybody else.
Right. And I'm and I'm sitting there and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I felt like the Lord was speaking to me. He was speaking into my life.
And I felt like he was kind of gently saying, you know what? Five hundred people is a good goal. Five hundred baptisms. That's an even better goal. Five hundred baptizers sent out to multiply the movement all the way to the ends of the earth. That's a great goal. And man, God just put something on our heart all the way back then at year 10.
We sort of unveiled that. And now the goal here at Mercy Hill by 2032 is to see 500 missionaries sent out from one church. To get there, we're going to need to see about 5000 baptisms. And we pray that God's going to do that. But we want to see 500 missionaries sent out from one church.
And and one of the reasons that I want to bring that up real quick. And I've only got a minute here is, hey, we've all got these cards in our seats at all of our campuses, no matter where you are today. So you're man, you're you're you're all over the tribe, really? Guys, these cards are a very condensed way of us showing you the types of things that those 500 missionaries that we're going to send out get a chance to do.
We have a sending agency, we have multiple actually, but we do work with one sending agency primarily. And these are sort of some of the buckets that people can funnel their missionary service into. So if you're a college student, if you're a young family, man, if you're someone who thinks about doing entrepreneurial work to the glory of God, if you are approaching retirement years, okay, one of the programs on here that I'm most excited about is the ISC program, where people that are retirees want you to think about the missionary field, who is it mostly, it's young people with young families, they need some grandparents on the field, they need some people to step in with just some straight up life wisdom on the field. All right. And so man, this is an opportunity for you.
Listen, when you come to Mercy Hill, some of your brand new, when you come to Mercy Hill, you're stepping into a tornado, it's a whirlwind of things that God is doing here. Okay. And a lot of that is about your growth. And that is awesome. And we're about that. And we want to see you take steps. But a lot of it is about our collective impact around the world as well. And so we want to see those 500 missionaries go out.
I'm just hoping that you'll pray over this card, and maybe get in touch with us if you feel like God is pricking your heart for the nations. All right, let's dive in Genesis chapter six, we are going to study the story of Noah for the next few weeks here together. And guys, I'm just going to go ahead and say it's right on the face of it.
Y'all, we're heading into the month of June. And everywhere we look, there are going to be rainbows from cereal boxes to sports, to the grandest displays you've ever seen at Target. Okay. There and other big box stores, they'll be twice as big as the Fourth of July stuff. Okay.
They'll be massive, and they'll be and it's all about this idea of pride. And you guys understand, here's what happens in our context. A lot of Christians get real stirred up this time of year, and they want to boycott stuff and all that and I'm always down for a good boycott.
Okay. Makes you feel morally superior and all that. But the reality is that as we move through this month, I had this thought a few months ago, and I thought, man, as the lead pastor of Mercy Hill, from the senior adult all the way to the child, we cannot surrender this important biblical symbol. Every rainbow we see for the next month, we need to think about why that rainbow was placed in the world.
What God's original intention for it was before it was co opted. That is our great sin. And every time we see a rainbow, that is what should go through our mind. And it is actually fairly ironic, right? The rainbow has become the symbol of pride when the actual rainbow is a symbol that God's grace extends to us despite our pride.
Despite the sin that we have in this life. Now the story of Noah really, I think it's something we can relate to, right? Because it's about a world that's in rebellion. And if we've ever been able to relate to that, we should be able to relate to it now. I think that's a little bit of bias for every single culture.
Everybody thinks theirs is the worst culture that's ever been. But you guys understand, right? Like they're there. We look around the world, and we could just start naming some stuff that's out there.
What about the stuff that's in here? We can name big news stories, we can talk about different things that are going on in our world. Yes, in our nation, there are people that are having their children taken away because they don't go along with gender affirming care. Yes, abortion is a national tragedy.
Yes, they're clearly around the world. Women and children are used as friends in warfare. I mean, I can just name tragedy after tragedy after tragedy, right? And it's a result of sin that is in the world, man. But what is what what is it on a personal level? I mean, what about us?
What are the ways that we have declared our independence from our creator? Maybe it's some kind of sexual sin, or maybe it has absolutely nothing to do with that. Maybe it's the way that we treat the poor, maybe it's the pride that's in our life, or maybe it's the arrogance, or maybe it's the way that we refuse to speak the truth, or I know, but for every one of us, we can understand that there is a rebellion that we have taken part in. And you know, the story of Noah, I'm going to rely on a little bit of knowledge here, okay, but the story of Noah and the great flood and wiping away of humanity. It's a shocking story.
But one of the things that we've got to get straight at our campuses here today is this. This story is not shocking because everyone was wiped away because of their sin. It's shocking because not everyone was wiped away because of their sin.
That's why it's actually shocking. Okay, the world got what the world deserved. And a few people got grace. And they got what they didn't deserve.
And they got favor from the Lord. And this is a precursor, y'all, to the story that we're going to see play out at the end of the world. Every single one of us, me included at our campuses, guys, we have sinned, we have rebelled. And for that rebellion, there is a penalty against the Holy God. And that penalty is that the flood of God's wrath should bury us in the bottom and the depths of hell.
And that should be what we deserve. The shocking part about the end of the world is not going to be that God judges the world. The shocking part of the end is that many people are going to get what they deserve. And some people, the narrow road, are going to get what they did not deserve. And that is going to be dependent upon what they did in this life. Did you respond to the call of God's grace and mercy in your life? Well, that's the story of Noah. That's where we're going to be going over the next few weeks here.
Here's where I want to go today. Y'all, we want to talk about the weight of our sin. Our sinful hearts grieve the heart of God, but God will not be grieved over it forever. There is a coming justice, there is a righting of every wrong. See, the sin of the world grieves God, but he will not leave this world in that condition. And I think what we need to do today is to sit under the weight of our own sin and understand the sins that bring about the judgment of God, his justice in that, and then we need to ask ourselves, man, what have we done to prepare for that?
Do we have the favor and grace of God? All right, let's dive in. Genesis Chapter 6, here's what it says. Now, just to sort of ease us in here, Chapter 6 starts with a bang, all right? Be honest with you guys, this is pretty tough among some passages. Maybe this is one of the harder ones that we could really understand exactly what's going on.
That's okay. We'll walk through it here. But Chapter 6 starts with this, if you read it with me in verse 1, man began to multiply on the face of the earth. Is that not exactly what God told man to do in Genesis 1 28, right? To multiply, be fruitful.
See, God started out looking at his world and saying, it is really good, right? But as man began to multiply, it got really bad really fast. With more humans came more sin, and the world is beginning to take a turn.
And this is what happened. This is something kind of way, what ends up prompting the intervention of God to come in and almost reboot the whole thing, okay? Look at what it says in verse 2. The sons of God saw the daughters of man were attractive, and they took as their wives any they chose. Now, who are the sons of God and the daughters of man?
That's a logical question, and it's actually one that I think that comes up fairly quickly. Why would one be called the son of God, one be called the daughters of man? Certainly the sons of God. There could be some who look at this and they think, man, maybe there's some type of angelic feature to the sons of God. We see that in the book of Job. There's sort of a reference that is a little bit that way.
And things are getting pretty weird. It's like, wait a minute, is this some kind of angelic deal with fallen angels and they've come and now they're having children with the human women that are on the earth and all this. It gets complicated a little further when you start talking about giants, okay? The Nephilim, verse 4, were on the earth in those days, and also afterwards. When the sons of God came and the daughters of man and they bore children to them, these were the mighty men.
These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown. Now, who are the Nephilim? Okay, who are the sons of God, daughters of men, issue. Who are the Nephilim, issue. The Nephilim here, the original, the Hebrew term kind of means like fallen ones. Okay, that's interesting. And then actually the way that Greek translators first translated that term from the old language in the Old Testament. Is they actually translated it to be gigantis. So they looked at them like, okay, these were giants. All right, now, here's what I want to bring up, all right?
What exactly is happening, sons of God, daughters of man, and the Nephilim? Are you ready? I'm not totally sure. Okay, I'm just not.
I'm not exactly sure. But here's what I am sure of, and this is a really good teaching point for anybody who's reading the Bible and just FYI, if you've ever wondered, do we teach people to read the Bible here at Mercy Hill? We do every single week. That's what a sermon is. A sermon is me sort of showing you how to walk through a text so that when you're reading the Bible on your own, you'll sort of understand, okay, this is what we're doing. We're explaining things. We're illustrating things. We're applying things. What does it mean? What is it like?
What does it change? Okay, I've gone through that before. All right, now, here's why I bring that up. If you're a Bible reader, you come to something like this.
Here's a big tip for you. Don't get bogged down in these smaller issues that you're not sure what they mean, especially when the larger issue is right there in front of you. The larger issue, something about the sons of God taking the daughters of man, there seems to be maybe even something forcible potentially that's going on here, could be. It's a little bit like what you see in the story of Adam and Eve. They saw the fruit.
They delighted in the fruit. They took what they chose, and now you see that again. They saw that they were attractive.
They took them. Here's the two prevailing views that I would say in this church are going to have people that land on different places on this. Number one, these are fallen angels who decided they were going to take the daughters of man. Maybe there's some kind of violence that's going on here, and they produced monstrous children, and that's one view that people have had over this. Honestly, to me, that seems pretty far-fetched that angels fell and had children with the daughters of man, and now there's these kind of demonic giant things running around on the earth. They're before the flood.
Seems a little bit far-fetched to me, but people have said that. Something that seems a little more in line with the way I would think about it, if you want to know, and we could disagree on this, okay? The Reformers thought a little more this way, that the sons of God probably meant the lineage of Seth, or at least it meant a godly group of people that were on the earth, and that the daughters of man may be represented the daughters of Cain, or an ungodly group of people that were on the earth, and so here's what ends up happening. Take your Bible knowledge here, okay, and I know I'm relying on a little bit. Where does this story play out again, okay? God's people, they end up going into a land, and they end up seeing people they're not supposed to get married to, and they do. Could this not be just a simple foreshadowing of the way that Israel would fall again, right?
That they see things, they jump into relationships that they're not supposed to be in. In that case, the Nephilim are not demonic, half-demonic giants. They're just regular giants, okay? Just regular old giants that happen to be on the earth. They're not really involved with this story other than they're a place marker here. The Nephilim show up before the flood. They show up again after the flood. Anybody ever heard of a guy named Goliath, okay?
There's people like that that end up having this gigantic sort of stature that are in the earth later. They're not of the lineage. All the lineage is cut off in the flood, but I think there are times in the Bible, particularly here and in the book of Numbers, I'm getting way too far into this, okay, where you see the Nephilim spoken of almost as a placeholder historically. People would have known of these men of renown, and so they're kind of placing something in history here.
Here's my point. Either way that you put that, the point of what the Bible is doing is the same. The point is something really evil was going on in the world, and finally God had had enough.
And then here's what he says, the Lord said, my spirit shall not abide in man forever. For he is flesh, his days will be 120 years. Some take that to mean that God took most guys like Noah that were living 600 years or whatever and cut them down to 120. That's going to be a normal lifespan.
Other people, I probably maybe take this view a little bit. I could totally be wrong, okay? How many years was it from between Noah's kind of days on the earth? Well, when he had Shem, Ham, and Japheth, he was 500. We see that in chapter 5. By the time he gets on the ark, he's 600. Maybe what God is doing here is saying you got 120 years to repent.
120 years on the earth. And after that, we're going to be blotted out. I'm not sure exactly which this is, but again, the same thing is true.
The overarching point is still the same. There is wickedness in the land. God sees it. The storm of judgment is brewing.
And it's right offshore. God sees it. His heart was only evil continually. You just let that sink in for a minute. The weight of our sin. The weight of sin then.
This is one thing we got to contend with, y'all. Even a flood that wipes out everybody but eight people on the planet. And yet as soon as the flood is over, what happens? Evil in their hearts continually. The same disease lives in us. If even the flood couldn't wipe away, how heavy is this? How wrong is the thing that's wrong with us?
Right? And that's what he says. The sin was great in the earth. Every intention of the heart was evil.
Continual. And the Lord regretted what he had made. That he had made man on the earth. And it grieved him to his heart so the Lord said, I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land. Man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens.
For I am sorry that I have made them. You know, sometimes people are like, what did the animals have to do with it? What did the animals have to do with it? What did the animals have to do with it?
What was placed here? The way man goes, the world goes. We are here to steward creation. It's not the animal's fault. It's our fault.
It's humanity's fault. But they will face the wrath of God here as well. Notice the fish are not mentioned because it's kind of a pre-foreshadowing of the flood that's going to come. But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God and Noah had a three sons.
Go back with me to verse five. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth. Every intention of the thoughts of his heart were evil. Only on evil. And it was continual. Continually.
Three things. Great wickedness. Every thought is evil.
And it is so continually. One of the things that we have to wrestle with here. The weight of our sin. Many of us feel this way, okay, about our sin. We feel this way about our kids sin.
That it's something external that happens to us. If we could just keep them off the cell phones, okay? If we could just keep them away from the language that they hear at school or on the ball field, right? If we can just keep them away from these things, then they're going to be unstained.
They're not going to be sinful in the world. Y'all, I want you to think about the weight of this. The wickedness of man was great. Every intention and thoughts in his heart was evil.
And it happened continuously. One thing we've got to wrestle with is this for just a minute. Y'all wickedness is born from the inside. It's not what we are defiled. It's not what's outside that comes in.
It's what's inside that comes out. This shows us that there is a pervasive nature to sin. What we think is, well, if I can just stay away from the world, then I'll be okay.
And we don't realize the problem is on the inside. Many times we make rules and we think the rules that God gives us are only to keep what is bad out of our life. And they are that sometimes. But sometimes it's the other way. Sometimes it's what's bad is innocent.
And rules are there to keep it from breaking out. I thought about this. You know, I used to have this dog named Big Hoss. All right.
90 pound pit bull. He was bad. Okay. He could jump in the back of my truck, just tailgate up, head the size of a basketball.
Okay. He was awesome. Now here's the rule I had with Hoss.
Hoss was a good dog. He was fine. If I was there, he could be out. He could play around.
He could run around with people, all that kind of stuff. If I wasn't there, he was not out of that fence. All right. He was pretty bad.
All right. He was a pretty bad dog in terms of just kind of, I wanted to make sure here's the deal. I didn't want someone to come in. I wasn't scared of someone hurting him. The fence was there to keep Hoss in, not to keep other people out.
If that makes sense, right? Because in interactions with humans and all that kind of stuff, he would have been considered the dangerous one. I wasn't really worried about something getting over.
I was worried about him getting out. And I think the same thing is true when we think about rules. In our life, when we think about laws that God has given us, y'all, there is a place where God wants us to stay out of the candy shop. And I understand that if we got a sweet tooth. But there is also something that is deeply wrong with us.
And the rules that God gives us helps keep what date what's dangerous and wrong from breaking out and hurting everybody else that is around us. I mean, think about our heart. So many of us might think to ourselves, you know, it's like, well, you know, it's all these ads on the phone that keep popping up with risque kind of things and all this. And it's, if this wasn't happening, wait a minute, is that really the problem?
Or is the problem a heart that is itching to lust? Now, it's kind of both. Like, I get that, like, it's kind of both.
But it's not this idea of like, oh, it's out there somewhere, right? I think about, you know, I mentioned how I've learned now that this high school term, okay, the tea is hot. That means gossip.
Okay, I didn't know that. But it's like, why do we have and that's not just a teenage thing, right? That's all of us.
Like, what? If I just never heard the gossip, wait a minute, don't you have the ability to just get up, walk out? Or do we have a heart that wants to latch on to elevating ourselves by putting someone else down? We want to hear what's being said, we want to speak in to what's going on. We I mean, the heart burns, we itch to want to jump in to spill the tea or whatever it is, right.
And it's like, my point is, it's not just outside in, it is certainly inside out. Great wickedness continually thoughts that were in on evil. And here's what the Lord finally decided. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.
What is he saying? What does it mean that he's grieved? I'm sorry that I made mankind. I'm grieved over their sin. Some commentators go to the point of saying, one way you could translate this is God saying, I repent of what I have made. Now, one thing we got to say about this is very important, okay, because we have some people I mentioned this a couple weeks ago, right, we have some people that are like, Well, man, I just take the Bible literally, okay. Like, I just take the Bible literally, don't talk to me about genre and all that stuff. Like I'm a Bible person, I take it literally take this literally. Go ahead and take this exactly literally, that God has repented of something that he has done.
Do you know how problematic that would be on so many levels to like all of our theology? That God could make a mistake that he needs to make up for? What about the fact that he says I will blot out mankind, but then he don't? He actually saved some of them. That's not what he said. Did God make a literal promise here that he didn't actually fulfill?
Do you know how problematic that would be? To just Hey, man, I just take the Bible literally? No, we got to go deeper than that. We have to understand genre. And we have to understand what the language in the text is doing.
And what the language in the text is doing. You could say it in a real theological term, God is speaking in an anthropomorphic way. He is putting himself in the shoes of a man so that we as men and women can understand what the world he's talking about.
You could say it like this. You know, in passages like this, God speaks in a way that we can understand. He's trying to communicate the grief that he feels it's not that God made a bad decision. It's not that he's making a promise that he's not going to follow through on.
It certainly ain't that he's wringing his hands because he don't know how this whole thing is going to play out. He's trying to show us man, that our sin and our bad decisions. And the way that we hurt each other and the way that we've hurt people in this world. It grieves our God. His heart is broken. You know, it's funny people have such problems with the stories in the Bible about God's judgment.
You understand they bother God more than they bother us. These stories of judgment, they grieve his heart more than they grieve ours. He is the father to the children of the world. He is grieved, but he will not be grieved forever. There will come a day where that grief turns into justice. He will not allow an injustice to go on forever.
For what type of just God would he be if he did? But he is grieved. He will not be so forever, but he is here. He's grieved and he's going to blot out mankind. And he doesn't talk about the fish of the sea. There is a flood that is coming. But here's what he says, but Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.
You know, we talk about we sing that song. There's some pretty serious butt God moments in the Bible. You know, the humanity ought to be blotted out. But God, but Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation.
Noah walked with God, and Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Now, to understand where the rest of the sermon needs to go, you got to understand the end of the story. And I understand that it's a spoiler. Okay, I've been known to spoil some things. Okay, Bruce Willis is dead.
The whole time in the movie, The Sixth Sense. Sorry if you didn't know that. All right, Darth Vader, Luke, I am your father. We all know there's some spoilers out there that are like, you know, 20 years old. You should know.
Here's a spoiler you may already know. In the end, Noah and his family are the only ones that are going to be saved from this flood. And as I said earlier, once we understand the weight of our sin and God's original intention, God's original thoughts even to say I am grieved. I'm going to blot out humanity. It's not shocking that God would blot out humanity. It's not shocking that God would destroy the world. What's shocking is that anyone was saved from this. And Noah is going to be saved.
Why? He's found favor in the eyes of the Lord. Man, he's upright. He's righteous.
And here's what I want to engage for just a moment, all right? A lot of people read this story of what they think is, well, of course, the whole world was evil, but Noah was awesome. He was a great guy. He was righteous, the Bible says.
Now, we know that. We understand that to be a lowercase r for righteousness, all right? Other places in the Bible we learn very quickly, no one is righteous, no, not one. No one is perfect. But sometimes the Bible will use this word righteous or upright or blameless as a way to just say, you know, they were trying to walk with God.
They were doing the best that they could do, all right? Now, look, Noah has got some issues later in this story, okay? You understand once he gets off the boat after he sees everything that God has done, he gets drunk and naked and starts shaming his family.
So, you know, there's some things with Noah, all right? But he walks with the Lord. Man, he's found righteous.
He's found upright. Here's what many people think, especially when they teach kids this story. They're like, hey, see, what you got to do is not sin, not be bad, and then you get to be on the boat. That some kind of way, if you're good, God will save you. I remember, guys, when I was in one of our mission trips, and preaching overseas is always tricky, okay? I remember one time getting ready to preach overseas, you know, in a foreign context, and with the trains that are all that, I got my stuff all together, and right before I went, I was like, when I walk up there, one of the guys' leaders comes over to me, and he says, hey, the pastor has decided he wants you to preach a sermon on telling people not to be late for church anymore. I'm like, man, I don't know what that sermon is, okay? I don't know how to preach that exact sermon, all right? So sometimes it can get a little weird, but one time I was over, and I preach a story of Gideon, and like we do at Mercy Hill, at the end of the story, I sort of, that Charles Spurgeon thing, we try to plow a trough to the gospel, water everything we were saying in terms of motivation by getting to the gospel, how Jesus is a greater savior than Gideon, and all this stuff, and man, the missionaries reprimanded me, okay?
It was really weird. We're sitting in the back of this church, that truth, the whole thing, and it's like, hey, man, these people are, and illiterate people, we're trying to teach them orality, so we're trying to build a Bible in their mind through storytelling, and by going from Gideon to Jesus that fast, they're probably thinking Gideon was a New Testament character or whatever, and I'm like, well, okay, you know, so, all right, so I'm learning, I'm fine. I was teaching about Noah, and it was teaching these little kids. I tell the whole story of Noah. I get to the end of the story of Noah, kind of like I'm doing now, knowing not the end of the story of Noah, but the end of the teaching for that day, and instead of making a beeline for the gospel and plowing a trough back to the gospel, I just sat down, and I was like, okay, we're building a Bible in their mind. We're just going to tell the story, and to my horror, someone came up right after me, and they started doing almost like a small group questions, because, now, see, kids, don't you understand that if you're not good, you don't get on the boat, and it was one of those moments where I was just like, golly, you know, I can't really, it was very hard for me to kind of stomach. I'm like, man, that is the exact opposite of what we need to get into here, and I want to make sure that we understand.
The point is not if you're good, you get in. Did you see what the Bible actually said, but Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God.
Let me ask you a question. You've been hearing this story your entire life. Did Noah find favor because he was righteous, or was Noah righteous because he had found favor with God? He had found favor in his life. Noah found favor with God, and, therefore, was being found blameless before God. He was walking with God because God has graced him.
God has put his hand on him. God has been favorable toward him, and I don't know who else in the ancient world God was trying to be favorable with, but they certainly were rejecting it. Was God trying to lavish something on others?
They didn't want to hear it. But God's initial movement towards Noah, his grace on his life, his favor on his life, and Noah responded. Noah is not perfect. You see a crazy story later in this about Noah and his family and all that stuff, but you know what?
He was walking with the Lord because the Lord had come running towards him, and this is what you need to understand. This is what I hope we can end up seeing today. We look around at the world today. We look around Noah's world, and we're like, some people are shocked that the world is destroyed in Noah's time. Remember that the Bible talks about one day it being wiped clean again. I'm not shocked by that at all.
That part is not shocking to me. I look around the world, and I'm like, man, I don't know if there's a God how it could not happen, if there really is a God, right? But when I start thinking about my own sin, is his wrath not coming just not for the big news story that's out there? What about for us? What about the lives of independence that we have created, although God has created us to be dependent upon us? What about our pride? What about our arrogance? What about the times that we have chosen our way?
What about the times that we have entered in to stinginess or dishonesty or whatever it is in our life? See, we need the Lord to grace us, to favor us, and we find that, especially in our day. Man, the Old Testament, they're looking forward to salvation that we see the seedlings of in Genesis 3. Certainly Noah would have known that. One day God is going to, right?
But what we get to do is look back, and we say, oh no, wait a minute. God has shown us his grace and his favor in giving his son to come to the cross for us. You know, there was an ark that was built out of wood to save Noah and his family. Well, there was a cross that was built out of wood to save all of humanity.
And it was Jesus Christ. Y'all, Jesus saved us from the flood by shedding his blood for you and for me. What we needed was a savior. What we needed was not pull yourself up by your boot shafts and try to dig yourself out of the hole that you've dug yourself in. What we needed was someone to pull us up and put our feet on the rock.
We would have sunk in the miry clay. The Bible says that we were dead in our trespasses and our sins. And this is what we have in the gospel. That Jesus Christ has come and lived a life that we didn't live. You and I live lives, I'm telling you, that sound a lot like Genesis 6. You know, the things that we think about and the things that we, but yet Jesus Christ has come to cover us for those things.
Man, I was so heartbroken. I heard from one of our missionaries in another place in South Asia. Do you know they're trying to engage a people right now that have a custom that goes back for who knows how long? Thousands of years.
Here's the custom. When the sin gets too great in the valley, all the people come and they confess their sin to one of the village elders and then they poison him. And if he stays dead, the sins aren't forgiven and washed away. But if he can resurrect, beat the poison, and come back to life, then all of a sudden they'll realize that the gods or whatever have accepted this sacrifice and now their sins can be washed away and they'll go another however long until they need to practice this again. And I thought, you know, there are echoes of eternity in every heart.
There's little things like that that you see in every single culture. That look like the gospel, but they're not right. We don't need someone to fake die. We needed someone to die for our sin and then in his resurrection to guarantee us the grace of God in our life for all eternity. If we would simply accept it. Here's my conclusion, y'all.
I want to call you today first right off the bat. Trust in the gospel and stop grieving the heart of God. But as soon as as soon as humanity starts multiplying again, you see this.
The problem is not gone. It lives in you. It lives in me. And today is one of those days where we just have to feel the weight of that sin.
And for some of us, maybe it's crushing us today. And for some of us, we have not been saved. And we're like, I don't know that I ever could be saved.
And what you need to hear from this story, I think, is that your story is not over. And that if there is breath in you, there is a God who stands ready to receive you. The grace of God is available for anyone who will ask of him. If you will call upon his name, he will save you. And instead of the flood of God's wrath bearing down upon you, it will be the flood of his cleansing flow.
It will be the cleansing water that rushes over you as he washes your sin away. And I pray that you would come and you would do that today. You could talk to somebody who came to you, go to one of our campus pastors at the campuses or first time guest tent. If you're here at Regional, come talk to me. And believer, I would say this.
In what areas of your life do you need to realign with who you are in Christ? Because here's the deal. I understand that cosmically, I don't even know exactly how to say it, in 30,000 foot truth, you can't really grieve the heart of God. I get that.
You know why? Because the blood of Christ covers you, believer. And every time God looks at you, what he sees is the righteousness of his son.
So there is a capital T sort of truth to that, right? Like there is sort of this, man, God, the sentence of your life has already been declared, but are we grieving the spirit by the way we're living outside of that identity? Is the fact that nothing you do today has any bearing on the way that God feels about you, does that push you closer to him or push you closer towards sin?
What areas of your life are aligning with your identity as a beloved son or daughter? Or are there areas where his grace is being taken for granted? Y'all, you and I deserve the wrath of God's sin. We deserve to be on the earth, in the flood, not saved by the ark. But Christ has given us a great salvation. Back to God's love.
Man, God loved me enough to save me from the flood by shedding his own blood. You and I, if you're a believer, are children of the king. And I pray today that we will maybe repent of some things and bring our lives back in line with who he has called us to be, all right? Let's pray. Father, we come before you, and Lord, we ask that in this series, God, we will just take the weight of our sins so seriously, and it will push us to see the weight of your salvation and really your glory. Lord, I pray today at all of our campuses, if there be people that need to come to you, they would make that decision and nail that down today. But Lord, I pray for every one of us that we would be moved today to repent of sin and be further brought in line with your identity for us. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.
