What Went Wrong

Let's celebrate what God's doing among our college students here at the Summit Church. We engage a lot more than just college students in mission at the Summit Church, but let me talk specifically to the 2,000 or so college students that are at our church every weekend because there are some time-sensitive things that you need to know. Derek's story that you just heard is literally one of only hundreds that I could share of college students that have joined up with our GoNow Initiatives. GoNow Initiatives are what we use to refer to our summer City Project as well as our two-year missions opportunities for college students after you graduate. Like Derek said, his journey began with one of these summer initiatives called City Project, which is a two-month intensive discipleship and missional experience where you learn, you dive deeper into the Bible, you learn to articulate and defend the Christian faith, and then you serve locally, nationally, and internationally.

It begins with one week in New York City, five weeks right here in the Triangle, and then two weeks overseas. It is an absolutely incredible experience. I get mad every time I hear it wondering why they didn't have something like this for me when I was a college student.

It's awesome. Whether you are an underclassman or a graduating senior, whether you're majoring in pre-med, engineering, or still undeclared, majoring in video games, the call of duty, and getting the attention of the opposite sex, one of these projects is for you. They are not just for people who feel called to full-time ministry. In fact, we encourage all of our college students to give at least one summer to something like City Project, and then the first two years after you graduate to engage in one of our two-year initiatives. I did something like the two-year deal when I was in college after I graduated. I spent two years overseas.

It was the most life-changing, formative experience of my life. And so I want personally to invite you to put your yes on the table and to consider Pray Through being a part of one of these mission initiatives, particularly this summer with City Project. The deadline for applications for this year is February the 1st. You can find out more information at summitrdu.com and begin to ask the questions because the time is short for you. For the rest of you who are like, oh, I wish I was a college student, those days are past.

You're not going back there. But we have a lot over the next few weeks that you're going to hear about for an opportunity for you to put your yes on the table through multiple opportunities. Signing up for a short-term mission trip, sponsoring a child through Compassion International, that'll be next week, engaging with one of our local ministry partners. So if you'll stay tuned, there'll be plenty for you. But this is time-sensitive, so I wanted to give it specifically to our college students, okay? All right, well, this is week number three of our series where we are working our way through the whole Bible. So if you have a Bible, I would invite you to take it out now and open it to Genesis chapter three.

If you have a notebook, maybe take that out, take some notes on it. I think statistically I can prove that you are much less likely to face eternal judgment if you take notes in church. I don't have a Bible verse to back that up, but I think I could still prove it. So take out your notebook, take out your Bible.

This is, Genesis three is one of the most important passages of scripture in the whole Bible. It is the story of the fall of the human race. The title of the message this weekend is what went wrong. I know many of our NC State fans are asking that very question after a great first half, but well, that's not what this sermon is about.

It's about the fall of the human race. I would like to begin this weekend with what I think we all know and can agree on, whether you're a Christian or not, whether you embrace Christian faith or not, we understand that something is not right with the world. A lot of times it's easy to see that in other people. There's a lot of dangerous people out there. And maybe you think that those problems are the result of something like a lack of education or poverty.

If you are on the left, you might be convinced that the problem is the ideologies of the right or vice versa, or maybe you see the world's problems as a breakdown of the family structure, or maybe you see religion itself as the primary problem. But in our more reflective moments, we have to acknowledge, if we're honest, that there's a problem in our own hearts also. Do you ever have one of those moments where in the heat of some moment, something slips out of your mouth that totally embarrasses you? Maybe it's an outburst of anger, or you say something about somebody or to somebody, or you verbalize some desire that you have, and later you feel bad about it.

So what do you do? You go back to whoever you said it to and you say something like, I'm sorry, I didn't really mean that. That's not really me. But really though, because in that moment you sure meant it. And if it's not really from you, then where did it come from? Maybe a better explanation for that is that when you get older, we just get better at filtering what is in our hearts. We know when to keep our mouth shut until we get really old and then we lose that ability again, but at least for a time. But just because we don't say it doesn't mean it isn't inside of us. In fact, maybe what snuck out of your mouth in that moment is the best reflection of what is actually in your heart. Maybe that's the real unfiltered you.

Maybe it is not the exception, but the reflection of what's really going on down there. Or think about it this way, when you were dating, did you ever play that game? What are you thinking right now? You learn to play, you learn not to play that game after you get married.

Because when you're totally infatuated with the other person, it's always safe. What are you thinking about right now? How beautiful you are, how cute that little snort is when you giggle.

After you've been married for a while, they might ask it when you're thinking, how much weight have you gained over the last five years? How would you like it if there were somebody who, whenever they wanted, could just read out loud whatever you were thinking? How awful would that be? Recently, I was on a trip and I had to rent a car. The rental company gave me a Jeep Cherokee and I had this new GPS feature on it where they could tell what the speed limit is on the road you're on. And every time you go over the speed limit, this pleasant little voice in a slightly alarmed judgmental tone would come on in the car and say, the speed limit is 55. Now it was totally embarrassing because I'd be driving down the road talking to whoever was in the car when this little self-righteous voice would come on announcing my sin to everybody in the car. But it made me think about how uncomfortable it would be if a little voice did that out loud every time I sinned in my heart.

When you're in a restaurant looking at the dessert menu, a little voice announces you are already 12 pounds overweight. Or if you're walking through the mall and you see a pretty girl, the little voice says your wife's name is, you know, and then you just put my wife's name in there. You got to acknowledge however you get there, there's a lot of stuff going on down there, that it's not good and you can't just brush it away. Andy Stanley points out that we like to call dumb decisions that we make mistakes. Oh, I made some mistakes in my previous marriage.

Oh, I made some mistakes at my former job. Or when a politician or a celebrity is discovered to have been involved in a multi-year affair and he always will refer to those recurring rendezvous as poor choices or mistakes. But does mistake really capture the magnitude of an affair? The offended spouse doesn't usually think so. Your kids don't see it that way. A mistake is what happens when you forget to carry the one in a math problem. Offended spouses feel something different. They feel betrayed. Or think about it like this, Andy Stanley says, sometimes we make mistakes on purpose, don't we?

Don't you? Sometimes we plan our mistakes. You are probably guilty of some premeditated mistakes in your life. So what do you call a mistake that you make on purpose? What is the best term to describe a mistake that you make on a recurring basis? What do you call a person who plans out their mistakes and then carries them out over and over and then lies about it to everyone?

A serial mistaker, is that what you call them? We have to have a better word, folks, and that's where the Bible offers, I believe, a better explanation. It's going to explain that there is a disease that has corrupted all of us, a disease that has absolutely destroyed our lives, and you're going to see the outbreak of that disease in Genesis 3. Genesis 3, God created us perfect and that lasts about 10 seconds. Adam and Eve appear to have the moral attention span of a two-year-old hyped up on pixie sticks, and so just a few verses after their creation, this whole thing comes unraveled. Genesis 3, verse 1, now the serpent, now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, did God actually say you shall not eat of any tree in the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it lest you die. Now technically God had never said the don't touch it line. She added that to what God had said, and I'm not sure if that is supposed to reveal at the beginning of this resentment she feels toward God like, oh he is so unreasonable, he won't even let us touch it, or if she's just ignorant of what God's word actually said. Either way, distortion of God's words is dangerous.

If she had been in our Awana program, we would never have let her get away with that. She would not get credit for the verse till she said it exactly right. Verse four, but the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die. You see, God knows the day that you eat of it your eyes will be open and you will be like God knowing good and evil.

That's why I didn't want you to take it because he didn't want you to be like him. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate and she also gave some to her husband who was with her and he ate. That is a terrible verse by the way for men. Who was with her means in Hebrew that they were right there together literally elbow to elbow. He wasn't some off somewhere doing man things, you know, killing and grilling while she stayed home and planted flowers in the garden. He was standing right there like an idiot waiting to see if she would drop dead when she ate it. First Timothy 2 tells us that Adam was not deceived. Eve was deceived, Adam was not.

He knew exactly what God had said. He knew what God said would happen if they ate it and so he was like, I wonder what's going to happen now and if she drops dead then I'm not going to touch it and if she doesn't then it's not that bad. Verse 7, then the eyes of both of them were open and they knew that they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. In this story we're going to see four very crucial things about our lives. Number one, we're going to see the nature of our sin. Number two, we're going to see our instinctive response to our sin. Number three, the devastating consequences of our sin. And then number four, the only cure for our sin. Number one, the nature of our sin.

There are several components that make up this temptation. The first is letter A, unbelief. Unbelief. The serpent launches his offensive with the words, did God really say? Are you sure he said that? Maybe they just told you that in Sunday school but it's not really true.

Then Satan assails the character of God. You know, God doesn't really have your best interest at heart. He doesn't really love you.

You can't really trust him. You know, Eve, you would make a much better lord of your life than God would because nobody, Eve, knows you best like you know you. Only you, Eve, can decide what is best for you. Only you know your heart.

Only you can only trust you to make you happy. You see, up until that moment God had been the one who declared what was good. That's how the creation story went and God saw it and it was good. Now here in Genesis 3, they take upon themselves the responsibility to decide what is good for them. I know what's best for me, not God.

That was a terrible trade. Next, the serpent tells her, you will not surely die. In other words, there will be no judgment. You don't have to worry about that.

That's not really going to happen. That's not a factor. Every single time you are tempted, these are the core components of the lie. God doesn't love you.

He's not really trustworthy. You know better than God does and don't worry about judgment. Surely there is not an afterlife where people actually are punished forever for their sins. Or maybe you don't even disbelieve that.

Maybe you just never think about it. That's where most people are. Blaise Pascal, a philosopher I quote up here a lot, said that for most people life, he lived about 300 years ago, life is like like you're in a stagecoach barreling toward a cliff. The cliff is a several hundred foot drop and you know it's there and you know it's coming.

So what do you do? He says you just distract yourself with the pretty scenery around you and all the amusements there and refuse to think about that cliff that is coming. He said that is insanity because that cliff represents your death. He said most people know death is coming. Most of them believe in God and that judgment is coming but they're more distracted about what their friends are saying at school.

They're more distracted about the race they're going to get at work, what kind of clothes they have, where they live, what kind of car they drive, what's the next series that's going to come on TV that they're going to be fascinated with. He said it's just insanity to not spend most of our time making sure that we understand that there is a judgment coming and that we are prepared for it. Unbelief leads right into letter B, idolatry. Idolatry, I'm not going to spend long on this one because I've dedicated whole messages to it but the apostle Paul in Romans 1 says about this scene that it was the first worship of an idol. What he says in Romans 1 is that Adam and Eve gave to one of God's creations the glory that belongs to God.

Glory in Hebrew literally means weight. So when you give something glory or you worship it you're giving it a weight that you should give to God only. It doesn't mean it's a bad thing in itself. In fact usually an idol in your life is not a bad thing. Usually it's a good thing. A good thing that you turn into a God thing and it becomes something that has so much weight in your life. You live for it. You're obsessed by it. You can't see how you'd be happy in life if you don't have this thing.

Idols would be things like romance. Can't be happy unless I have good romance. Can't be happy unless I have family. Can't be happy unless I have the approval of my friends. It can't be happy if I don't have money.

Can't be happy if I don't have these pleasures that are a part of my life. Whatever it is you think you could not live without that is what has become an idol in your life. In this story the idol that she goes for, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, has three components to it.

The apostle John says three components are the components of every sin. The lust of the flesh she saw that it was good for food. It was desirable to her. Her body wanted it. The lust of the eyes.

Lust of the eyes means I know that God's holding out on me and there's something else out there that I need besides what he's given to me so that I can be happy. The pride of life means I can be like God. I would be best in making the rules. I'd be better than him sitting on the throne.

I should be making the decision. This all culminates in letter C rebellion. In the words of Frank Sinatra who sings the anthem of hell, I'll do it my way. Every sin, every disobedience, every time follows this pattern. Unbelief, idolatry, rebellion. These lies they bubble up from your heart. These lies surround you in your culture. They so saturate our culture that they're accepted as dogma.

I was explaining this to my kids the other night in our family devotions. I have three. My three oldest children are girls and the oldest is 12.

The youngest is eight. And so like every adolescent girl in America, they love the little mermaid. Now you've seen the Disney's Little Mermaid, right? You got a story about a an underwater princess who doesn't want to be under the sea.

She wants to be part of that world. And so she falls in love with a prince and goes to her dad. Dad won't let her go because dad's afraid.

Dad doesn't know what he's doing. And so she goes to the witch, Ursula, who gives her legs and she goes up and falls in love with the prince and seduces him and they live happily ever after. That's Disney's Little Mermaid. So I told my kids, I was like, now you kids probably don't know this, but Disney didn't write the Little Mermaid. The Little Mermaid actually comes from a story written by Hans Christian Andersen. Just out of curiosity, how many of you have read the real Little Mermaid? Raise your hand.

Okay. So for the rest of you, which is 98% of you, Hans Christian, his Little Mermaid goes a little different. That's where Disney got the story, but same deal. She wants to be, you know, part of that world. And so she falls in love with the prince, goes to her dad.

Dad says no. She goes to the witch, which gives her legs. She goes up, except in the real story, the prince doesn't fall back in love with her. In fact, the prince falls in love with somebody else and marries the other girl. So Ursula, the witch, shows back up and gives the despairing Ariel, the Little Mermaid, I don't think that's what he calls her, but he gives the Little Mermaid the knife and says, now you got to go kill him. And she doesn't know what to do.

So the last scene in the book is she jumps out of a window and kills herself. That's the real Little Mermaid. Now Disney has taken that story and turned it into a parable that if you just follow your dreams long enough, you ultimately you'll be happy and everybody else will come around to seeing it your way. The real Little Mermaid was a parable that basically the, the, the, the message of it was, listen to your dad, listen to your dad.

This is what we do at Family Devotions at the Greer House. That was our teachable moment right there, but it's a lie that just, it just says, Hey, you know what's best for you. And it's only when you choose your own way.

Ultimately, that's the way that you're going to be happy. Here's my question for you. Where are you believing those lies?

Where are you believing those lies? I'll give you the answer. It's in whatever part of your life you are not 100% sold out and surrendered to God.

I'll give you a few examples. We have unmarried couples in our church who come to our church who are living together. Now clearly the fact that you come to our church shows that you want God to be a part of your life. But in this area of your life, you think my way is better. This is an area where I feel like I can't trust God.

I know better, so I'm going to do it my way. Well, I meet a lot of people here at the church who say, yeah, I plan to get into church one day. Man, I love your church. I love the preaching. I love being here, but man, right now I just, I'm at a place in my career where I got to, I just got to work on the weekends and I don't have any time to be at church. Or I meet families who are like, yeah, my kids are at a stage where we just got to have them involved in all these, you know, baseball, softball, soccer, dance, and we just don't have time to do at this stage because I want them to have a bright future and get into the right college. Basically what you're saying is, God, in these areas, my career and my kids, I don't really trust you. I got to take care of me first.

I got to do it my way. It's wherever the teenager says, I don't really want to be that serious about Jesus because I know that becoming really serious about Jesus will lead me to an unhappy life. Those are the places that you are believing the lie. If you are not 100% sold out to God, no exceptions, no compromises, then you are believing and embodying these same lies that were given to this woman in Genesis 3 and Adam 2. That is our, our nature of our sin. Number two, our instinctive response to our sin. This is going to be a mirror into your own heart.

Watch it. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, where are you? And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden. I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. He said, who told you that you were naked?

Have you eaten of the tree, which I commanded you not to eat? What did we feel? What did Adam and Eve feel when they had sinned against God? Now I don't want to belabor this either because I explained this often because it's so core to the Christian message, but the first emotion they felt after having sinned against God was nakedness. Now, if you read the story, they were naked before they sin, but their nakedness never bothered them because get this, they felt clothed in the love and the acceptance of God.

But having been stripped now of the love and the acceptance of God, they felt naked and ashamed and afraid. Right? So what do you do when you feel naked? I've asked you this. What do you do? If you're a normal person, what do you do when you feel naked? That's right. If you have a problem sleepwalking and you suddenly awake at 3 30 AM and super Walmart and you're buck naked, you don't like, Hey, I'll pick up some stuff for the house that I need while I'm here.

That's not what you do. You go to the clothing section and you try to cover yourself. So what did Adam and Eve do? What did Adam and Eve do?

They, they wanted to hide. And this is a metaphor for the human condition. Even people that don't believe in God still understand that this feeling exists.

There's something inside of us that tells us that it's not right. And we feel naked and vulnerable and afraid playwright, Arthur Miller, who wrote death of a salesman said he quit believing in God in large part because he just couldn't, wouldn't accept the doctrines about sin and judgment. And he said, I thought that by freeing myself from belief in God, I would also be freeing myself from guilt. He said, but what I found instead was that that feeling remained and I began to live or die based on what audiences said about the plays that I wrote. He said, I was still as insecure. I still wanted to hear somebody say, well done, good and faithful servant. I needed to hear that validation. He said, I realized that all I'd done was switched out the voice of God with the voice of other people telling me that I was acceptable. Sometimes it manifests itself in a nagging sense of guilt that you just can't shake. I've quoted Jean Paul Sartre, one of my favorite atheists the last two weeks.

I thought I'd make it three in a row. Sartre said that inside every human heart, whether they believe in God or not is a voice that whispers not acceptable. You are condemned. He said that voice hinders every relationship we enter because we have this feeling that if people knew me, if they could see the real me, if they could see all the way down deep and they could see just this ugliness and this insecurity that I have inside of me, they wouldn't like me and they would reject me. And so it means that even for the closest relationship, we always keep people a little bit at arm's length because we don't want them to see the real us. So what did we do with that feeling of nakedness? We hid.

We hid in several ways. I mean, first Adam hides behind the trees, which has to be one of the dumbest scenes in the Bible. He'll never find us in the trees. I know we created all this with a word, but to the trees, he'll never see us there.

It's just dumb. Reminds me of when I used to play hide and seek with my kids and I would go to the bedroom and my two-year-old would have her head under the bed and her whole body sticking out of the bed. I'd be like, Raya, are you in here? And she'd be like, no, you know? And it's like, okay, folks, that is no more ridiculous than thinking that God doesn't see everything. He doesn't see behind every tree. He doesn't see behind every motive. He doesn't, he doesn't, he knows the secret things. He knows what was in your heart when you didn't say it.

He knows what you were contemplating. So how do we try to hide from God? Let me give you four ways. Letter A, by never being honest about our sin. By lying, not just other people, but to ourselves about it, by rationalizing it.

By saying things like, yeah, yeah, on the whole, I'm a pretty good person now, at least compared to other people, I'm not that bad. Or maybe you just put your head under the bed and refuse to think about it. That would be B, refusing to think about judgment. There are many of you who are like that person in the stagecoach, that you never think about the fact that one day you were going to die and you're going to face God at judgment. That cliff is coming for you.

You might be 12 years old, you might be nine years old, you might be 21 years old, you might be 71 years old. But what you all have in common is it is a point under you wants to die and you will stand in judgment. Here's another way we do it. Verse 12, verse 12, the man said, the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree and I ate. So the Lord turned to the woman and said, what is this that you have done? And the woman said, who's left? The serpent. He deceived me and I ate.

They're all standing there pointing at somebody else. Letter C, by blame shifting. Well, I was in impossible circumstances. They did me wrong first. My problem is I hung out with the wrong crowd and they influenced me to do bad things. You know, it was a difficult time in my life. Think about all the stress that I was under. My wife, she was impossible to work with.

My boss, he did me wrong first. We blame shift. We don't really take responsibility.

It's everybody else's fault but mine. Letter D, through religion. Through religion, they made for themselves fig leaves.

Get this, fig leaves are the first religion in the Bible. It's an attempt to cover up the sin and the ugliness within by something that we think will keep it covered and not expose it. You know, I'll make up for my guilt by going through these religious observances. I'll say these Hail Marys because God likes to hear Hail Marys. I'll just go to church a lot because that's what Baptists teach.

If you go to church all the time, that means you cover up your sin. I'll memorize verses. I'll give a lot to the offering. I'll be good. I'll go to church. I'll go to synagogue. I'll go to mosque.

I'll donate money. All this stuff is is like the man who buys his wife flowers in an attempt to make up for an affair or even worse, to cover up for an affair. Listen, if there were ever anything that cultural Christians in the South needed to hear, it is this right here. Listen, the number one substitute for a true relationship with God is religion, fervency in religion. You see, atheism is never really going to play well at the human race because the human race instinctively believes in God. But that doesn't mean that we're honest before God. It doesn't mean that we expose ourselves to God.

It doesn't mean that we're fully surrendered to Him. What we do is we come up with a revised version of God that we can pay off and control. Human beings are not by nature atheists. They're by nature idolaters, which means we don't want to get rid of God.

We want to change God into a form that we can control. Religious zealots are often the furthest people from God on the planet because they are using their zeal and religion to cover up the real problems in their heart. Fervency in religion keeps them from dealing with the pride and the insecurity and the hate that is deep down in there. And they employ religion not only as a cover but as an extension of the depravity of their hearts.

Folks, listen, this is your story. I'm not talking about the Catholics. I'm not talking about the Muslims. I'm not talking about the Baptists. I'm talking about you.

This is what you have done. You and I have rebelled against God. You and I prioritized all kind of things above the will of God. We prioritized the lust of the flesh. We wanted what our bodies wanted instead of the will of God. We have the lust of the eyes. We never think that God's given us enough. There's something out there that He hasn't given us that we need.

The pride of life. We're the ones who thought that our wisdom was greater than God's, which is why we chose our will instead of His. We thought that we knew best and where God's will got in the way of our will, we chose our will.

We put more stock in our wisdom than His. When others threatened what we wanted, we trampled them. We gossiped about them. We were jealous of them and hated them. We've been willing to bend the rules and cheat the system if we thought we could get away with it and we knew it would make us get ahead a little bit. And then to make up for it, we tried to compare ourselves to others and say, well, I'm not really that bad. Everybody else is like me.

I'm pretty good. And then of those times where we felt bad, we thought, well, I could do a little religion and that'll make up for it. That's a nice fig leaf. I'll go to church. I'll read my Bible.

I'll give some money and then God will be happy. Is that not your story? Is that not the mirror of your heart? You have the disease.

Genesis 3 is about you. You don't need a better version of you. You don't need reform.

You need a new you. You need a resurrection. There's no amount of fig leaves you put on that's going to cover up that heart that cheats the system that rages against God and that prioritizes everything else above him and his will.

You don't need reform. You need resurrection. Number three, the devastating consequences of our sin. Verse 16 to the woman, he said, I will surely multiply your pain and childbearing. In pain you shall bring forth children.

Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you. The consequences of sin, the first one, letter A, amplification of pain. Pain was introduced into the human experience. Now he mentions childbirth specifically here, but I think he's talking about more than just childbirth, although ladies having seen four childbirths, mad respect to you ladies, okay, but I think he's just talking about pain in life.

Life itself became painful. Here's the second thing, letter B, relational conflict. Relational conflict. Again, here he talks about the woman's difficulty in relating to the man, but I think this is also symptomatic of bigger things.

I say that because in the very next chapter Cain is going to get jealous of his brother Abel, his younger brother Abel, and he's going to murder him. Listen, the fruit of idolatry, whenever God is in the wrong place in your heart, the fruit of idolatry is constant unhappiness, which leads to hatred and conflict. Saint Augustine said that hatred and conflict and bitterness and jealousy, all they are are smoke that arises from the fire that you have built at the altar of whatever it is that you're worshiping. He said you want to know what you're worshiping, just follow the smoke of jealousy and bitterness down and you'll find it. For example, if you're somebody who believes that romance is necessary to make you happy, or you find your sense of worth from having somebody being paired up with somebody in your life, then when other people are getting hitched, they're getting into romances and you are not, then you despair. And if somebody close to you finds romance and you don't like a sister or a best friend, you can't not hate them.

You start to hate them because they have something that you feel like is necessary for your life. You show me in your life an area of hate, of worry, of despair, of unforgiveness or bitterness, and I will show you the idol that it comes from. Because all that stuff is just smoke that comes from the fire that you have lit at the altar of whatever thing that you have elevated to the level of God in your life. Verse 17, now to Adam, he said, because you've listened to the voice of your wife, you've eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground because of you, in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you instead of sweet fruit and vegetation. You will eat the plants of the field by the sweat of your face. You shall eat bread till you return to the ground for out of it you were taken.

You are dust and to dust you shall return. In letter C, futility, the world was cursed against us. The ground was no longer our friend. The world began to be filled by natural disasters. Our lives were filled with heartbreak and dissatisfaction.

It all seemed pointless like sound and fury signifying nothing. Letter D, death. From dust we came to dust we returned. This had not been God's intention for us, but it was his promise of what would happen when we sinned. The day that you eat of it, you will surely die. Now Adam and Eve did not drop dead when they ate the first bite, but they began to die.

I've heard it described like if you got a watch that glows in the dark, when you separate the light source from it, it'll still glow for a little while, but eventually it fades until it's completely dark. There is still life and light in the world and in the human race, but our bodies and the earth around us began to decay. Maybe even worse, our hearts got all out of order. We began to love the wrong things. We began to rage against God. We began to love everything else more than God.

One of the best descriptions of sin I've ever heard or descriptions of a sinful heart is by Dorothy Sayers who said that sin, a simple heart, is essentially disordered loves. We have all these loves and they're all out of order now. For example, if a friend confides a secret to me and tells me not to tell anybody, but if the next time I'm with this other group of friends, I just have to tell them, then what I've done, we've all done this, what I've done is I've elevated my love of popularity above my love of loyalty to my friend.

There's nothing wrong with loving popularity, but now I've loved it more than I love my friend and so my loves are all out of order. That's essentially what a sin-sick heart is, is we love things in the wrong order. We use people rather than love them.

We'll throw people under the bus if it's going to be helpful for us. That's what Adam does. He just throws his wife right under the bus in order to save his own skin. We oppress, we pray in the weak, we're vengeful and selfish.

Jesus Christ will give us the only picture of what it looks like to be healthy and alive. He is so surrendered to the Father's will that when the Father tells him to go to a cross, even though he's innocent, all he says is, not my will but yours be done. He is so loving that when they put nails in his hands and his feet on the cross, instinctively, he says, Father, forgive them.

They don't know what they're doing. He is so pure that he never entertains a hateful thought about anybody else. He is so humble that when the disciples' feet are dirty, he picks up a towel and starts to wash their feet. And then he says to us, listen, Matthew chapter five, unless you are perfect like I am perfect, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. I'm not doing these things, he's saying, because I'm God.

I'm doing these things because I am a fully alive human being which ought to make you despair. You will not go to heaven unless you are perfect like Jesus was perfect because he is how we were supposed to be. He lived the life we were supposed to live. We were supposed to be that surrendered and we were supposed to be that loving and that pure and that humble. But we died. Verse 23, and the Lord God sent him out from the Garden of Eden. They drove Adam and Eve out and at the east of the Garden of Eden, he placed the cherubim, the angels, and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.

This was by far the worst punishment. It was letter E, the eternal loss of the presence of God. We lost the presence of our Father. We had no way back in because to see God from this point on would mean death.

This was the greatest of all tragedies. We lost relationship with the Father who loved us. We lost our companion. We lost our best friend. We lost we lost our shepherd, our lily of the valley, our bright and morning star, the one who made life complete, the one whose love we were created for. Nothing after this would ever be complete again.

Nothing would make sense. Nothing would ever give us true and abiding happiness that we yearn for. Sin's consequences were unspeakable and unbearable. But we brought them on ourselves.

We chose eagerly to bring them on ourselves and we continue to choose to bring these things on ourselves eagerly to this day. We said, God, I don't want you in my life, and God said, then have it your way. In every other story ever told, this would have been the end. But as Sally Lloyd-Jones says in the Jesus Storybook Bible that we are reading, thank God not in this story. Everything changes in verse 9, verse 4, or in point 4, the only cure for our sin. The turning point of the whole Bible, listen to this, a scene so shocking that the Apostle Peter says the angels still look at it and just can't fathom what was happening. Verse 9, instead of God sending wrath and destruction to wipe out the rebels who have followed Satan, he comes looking for his lost son. This is where Jesus gets the story of the prodigal son, because the father came looking. Where are you?

Where are you? And then when he found Adam and Eve, he made him a promise. It's the most important promise of the Bible.

It's the vertex on which all the Bible hinges. Genesis 3 15, I will put in between hatred, conflicts between you and the woman. She says to the serpent, between your offspring and her offspring, and then he narrows her offspring to one individual, he. One day she's going to have a son, he will have a son, he will have a son, he will have a son, and one day one of those sons, Satan is going to bruise your head.

Excuse me, bruise your head or crush your head, and you're going to bruise his heel. This is the very first promise of Jesus Christ. You see the woman's offspring, one day would be Jesus, one day would be Adam, one day a woman named Mary will have a son named Jesus, and God in Genesis 3 15 points to a cosmic battle that's going to take place where the serpent will bite Jesus' heel, that Jesus will crush his head.

It's the first prophecy in every story in the Bible, every chapter in the Bible from this point on is going to flow out of that promise. You see Jesus would come, Romans 5 14 tells us, as a second version of Adam. He would be a truer and better Adam who did what Adam and Eve should have done, that is withstood the temptation of Satan, and he would do so even when the stakes were higher and the temptation was stronger. Think about it, like Adam Jesus was tempted by Satan, but unlike Adam Jesus was in the wilderness having fasted for 40 days. Adam and Eve were in paradise with all of their needs met, Jesus had been starving in the wilderness for 40 days. Unlike Adam Jesus received three temptations not just one, and every single time Jesus resisted the temptation.

And how does he resist? By doing precisely that thing that Adam would not do, he focused on what God had said. Unlike Adam Jesus actually felt the attack of Satan. You see in Genesis after tempting Adam and Eve the serpent slithered away, but when Jesus withstands the temptation of Satan the serpent bites him. Yet in that moment on the cross when the serpent bit Jesus and it appeared that the serpent had won, God was actually crushing his head.

Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate from a tree and died. Jesus will obey God and climb up on a tree willingly to die to bring life. He'll climb up on the tree to take the curse so that you and I can be released from it. He's going to take the flaming sword of justice that guarded entrance to the presence of God. That sword, that flaming sword of judgment is going to go into him not us so that you and I can walk boldly into the throne of grace. That's why verse 21 the whole scene ends with God taking an animal.

We assume it was a lamb and killing that animal and then taking the skins of that animal and clothing their nakedness telling them that one day one day the seed of the woman is going to come and he is going to be torn apart like this animal was torn apart and his death is going to clothe you in righteousness. I love how Richard Sibbes the puritan said it, thank God there is more mercy in Christ than there is sin in us. Our sin was terrible the consequences were terrible and Jesus paid it all because Jesus's love for us was greater than our sin and he said I don't want you to perish so I'm going to take these effects for you. On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross the emblem of suffering and my shame and I love that old cross where the dearest and blessed for a world of lost sinners like me was slain. You see the dividing line of history is this promise in Genesis 3 15.

Every son of Adam and every daughter of Eve is going to be on one side of that line. How do you relate to this person that was promised to come to end the curse and to bring life? You see Jesus would explain there's only one way to respond to this promise and it's repentance and faith. Repentance means you acknowledge that you're the rebel and that you have lived in opposition to God you wanted your will more than his. Repentance means you stop hiding.

Repentance means you stop blame shifting. It wasn't the woman that God gave you, it wasn't the circumstances he put you in, it wasn't your spouse or your boss, you weren't just hanging out with the wrong crowd you were the wrong crowd. That's why you chose to hang out with the wrong crowd because you liked them better than the right crowd.

You chose your friends you chose your friends. In the words of Led Zeppelin who don't often give out gospel truth ain't nobody's fault but mine. You got to own your sin. I wanted to be God. Didn't you? Didn't you think you were smarter? Didn't you choose your own way?

Can't you point to a hundred situations where you said not my will not God's will but mine be done. You got to strip all that away and you got to come out from hiding and you got to say I'm the rebel and I have nothing. All I have is judgment.

That's it. I had a friend who told me that when he was a little kid when you're his mom gave him a shark outfit to wear at Halloween. He was only five years old. He said I love that shark outfit. I wore it for days. It started to smell terrible. He said my mom said you got to take a bath son.

You stink. So he said I hopped in the bathtub with my shark outfit on. My mom said you can't wear the shark outfit when you take a bath.

He said but mom sharks like to swim. I'm going to wear this thing. I'm just not taking it off. And she said my mom said you can put it back on after I wash it but son if you're going to get clean you got to get naked first.

So the one way to get clean and that is to get naked. My friend told me he says I wasn't trying to I don't think my mom was trying to teach me theology but she taught me a very important theology lesson. If you're ever going to get clean if you're ever going to be healed you got to come out from hiding and you got to say I'm the rebel and I have nothing. So let me give you the greatest gospel irony.

Listen to this. The gospel irony is this if you cover your sin Jesus will one day expose it in judgment. If you expose your sin and repentance he'll cover it in grace. The only thing that separates you from being received in the presence of God is your refusal to repent and your refusal to be honest with God about who you really are. Jesus never turned a sick person away.

Every dead person he spoke to in a grave came out. The only ones who missed the only ones who missed what Jesus had to offer as those who would not admit they were so sick they desperately needed a physician and a doctor. Come you sinners poor and needy. Weak and wounded sick and sore Jesus ready stands to save you. Full of pity love and power I will arise and go to Jesus he will embrace me in his arms in the arms of my dear savior.

Oh there are ten thousand charms. Do you understand that Genesis 3 is your story? You're the rebel you chose your own way. Do you understand that God just like he came for Adam in Genesis 3 9 is looking for you? Maybe you sense that. That voice it hadn't been shouting at you but it's been there whispering and you know you know that he's been pursuing you it's why you're here this weekend. There have been all these things that have been happening in your life and you recognize that's God saying where are you?

He's coming after you and the pleasures in your life he's been whispering to you these are for me and the pain of your life he's been shouting at you you are desperate for me. This weekend he brought you here so that you could hear and you could believe and you could repent and you could come back to him. You see there's a lot of you in this room and listening at all of our campuses who know a lot about Jesus but you don't know him personally. You've never received him as your own personal lord and savior and so I want to ask you this morning if you want to do that if you never have. I had a friend of mine tell me that he said I'd heard the gospel many times but it never made sense until my student pastor my youth pastor told me to take John 3 16 and put my name wherever it said whoever. He said I don't know what it was but it suddenly made sense he said for God so loved Alex that he gave Alex his only son that if Alex would just believe on him Alex would not perish.

Alex would have everlasting life. He suddenly said I realized that I knew a lot about Jesus but I didn't know Jesus personally and I believed. You know a lot about Jesus but have you ever received Jesus personally as your savior.

Why don't you bow your heads at all of our campuses would you bow your heads. If that's you you say I'm not sure I'm not sure that I've ever received Christ personally as my savior. You could do it through a prayer like this one. I'll give you the words you can repeat the words after me. It's not magic words but if it comes sincerely from your heart God will hear it and he'll save you. Lord Jesus I know that I'm a sinner I'm the rebel say it to him I repent and I surrender to you all of me completely. I receive you right now I receive you right now as my savior. Thank you for saving me.

I'll spend the rest of my life following you. Now let me ask you at all of our campuses whether you can see me or not if you prayed that prayer just now for the first time or for the first time that you really feel like you understand it. I'm gonna ask you to do something I don't normally do but I'm gonna ask you just to raise your hand right now at all campuses and say yes this weekend I am receiving Christ as my savior.

Just put your hand up right now we've had several all over the place I see you put them up just hold them up for just a second. Father I pray for every hand that is raised right now at all of our campuses God I pray that you give them wisdom and the courage to follow you and to take the steps from here that will make this not an emotional moment but a lifelong transformation. I pray in Christ's name amen. I want everybody to look up here at all campuses listen I want to talk specifically to those of you who just prayed that prayer. Praying a prayer is good raising your hand is good but you need to talk to somebody you need to tell somebody that you just began this relationship with Jesus. The scripture says to confess it with your mouth that person seated beside you more likely than not is the person who invited you this weekend and I want you in just a minute when we all stand and say I want you to remain seated and I want you to tell that person I began a relationship with Jesus today and I want you to pray together. Hey news flash they already know because they were looking around during the prayer okay. When I said every head bowed they were looking like this at you right out of the corner of their eye and they were saying God let him raise his hand let her raise her hand and you did so they already know so just come out from hiding and y'all talk about it okay. If the person besides you looks as lost as you is confused then at every campus there are pastors in the back and when we stand up I just want you to slip out and I want you to go back there because you need to pray with somebody you need to seal this you need to pray and we would love to show you what the next steps are but you got to tell somebody okay. So I want everybody at all of our campuses I want you to stand to your feet and if you made a decision you either pray with that person next to you or both of y'all slip out and go toward the back and talk with somebody one of your pastors there. Students there'll be a student pastor back there and you tell them say I'm beginning this relationship with Jesus right now. As our worship teams come you obey what the spirit of God leads you to do.