Keeping in a Fallen World (Ep #4, The C3 Man)

With Eve now in the Garden, all is set. But when Adam fails to keep out the Intruder, everything unravels. This is our world now. 

Christ Community Church Little Rock
A community transformed by grace sent to transform the world for the glory of God.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Ben, thank you for being here bracing the cold. I'm Justin. I say that because you might not recognize me without a towel wrapped around my waist. For those of you guys who weren't here on Sunday, a little bit of an inside joke. And what's actually really funny about me giving Easter announcements wearing a towel is that that was the plan. So sometimes we we nail it, sometimes not so much. Well, man, it was uh not the summer of 1969, but it was the summer of 2007 that the Lord brought me my Azer. And the long story short is we were talking on AOL Instant Messenger. Okay. Anybody remember AIM? Basically texting on your computers back before you could text on your phones. And uh we were texting, she was in Nashville, Tennessee. I was in Little Rock, Arkansas, and after two years, from 14 years old to 15 to 16 years old, we finally decided to meet. And we were gonna meet at my lake house, and I went up with some buddies and my family, and she came down with a family member on July 27, 2007. I remember her coming up those stairs at our lake house, and I saw her, and my first thought was I didn't know that God made them like this. And I kid you not, my first thought is I saw her, I started sweating. I know y'all are wondering, firstly, my wife has aged like four minutes in 20 years, and what is she doing with that ball cut loser, right? Um I I literally said to my mom, like, mom, like in front of Meme, I was like, Mom, it's really hot in here. Can you go turn it down on the thermostat? And uh, long story short, we uh we fell in love. She fell in love with me as one of God's greatest tricks ever. And uh, you know, we read we read Genesis 2.23 like we did last week. And that is my portal into understanding it. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man. If I would have said to her on that, is bad enough that I mentioned a thermostat and that I was sweating, that's totally not cool. But if I would have said to her, bone of my bones, she would have turned around and ran away. And so I'm glad I did not say that. But man, uh I I hope that that is just a good reminder that your rib for the single men, for the married men, we all have a rib, as we've talked about, is a constant reminder to linger in beauty. That the very existence, the very soul of your wife, of your local church, of the women in your life, is a reminder to linger in beauty. She is beautiful. And at the bottom, as men, we are to linger in beauty. We were placed in a garden, not on a farm. It's not all about yield, produce, efficiency. It's about lingering in beauty. Well, man, this has been an incredible tour of the garden, and I hope it's been an awesome entrance into the garden over the last three weeks, getting to know kind of the where the way in which God has formed us and he has specifically placed us. And you know, in the chronology so far of Genesis 2, which is where we've been spending all of our time, it starts with God. God is the main character of Genesis 2. And then he creates the wild. And then there in the wild he forms man. And it's just him, it's Adam and it's God, as God plants Eden and is training this keeper, this new shamar, to plant Eden, and then here comes Eve. That's what we got last week, and kind of what we moved into this morning. And then there's gonna be another visitor here in a little bit. But I've distilled some of the truths as a way of recap, uh, and I've kind of formed them into a bit of a machine gun. And so I'm just gonna kind of machine gun. So if you want to get your pen out, you can you can do that. But just I've kind of created a constellation of all of our primal truths that we've gone through. And I just want to run through them pretty quick. First, the man fills the gaps. Remember, this is recap, but we as men we we sometimes need reminders. God formed creation and left it unfinished on purpose. That's how Genesis 2 opens up. The heavens and the earth were finished, and yet they're unfinished because God did his portion. Now we need someone to form, to work the ground. And that's at the bottom who you are as a man. You finish the unfinished, you work the ground, you fill in the gaps. Man is formed by God, like God, and for God. Man is formed wild. In the wild. And a lot of us have lost this. And remember, this looks different. To so many of us, this doesn't just mean that we're John the Baptist sorts out in the wild eating locusts. It can mean that, I guess. He was the most righteous man of all, you know, but but we are made in the wild as wild. We are not tame like other creatures. God is man's partner. We know God is creator there at the beginning of Genesis 1 and 2. But what God desires, he does not need man to form the ground. There is no desperation, there is no anxiety in that sense, but God wants to form man. And he wants this relationship at the bottom, who you are as a man is a partner of God. God is man's trainer. Every single thing that Adam is called to, every single thing that you are called to, we look to God. Remember, manhood is theology. If you want to know yourself, know Jesus. What does he do? What is he doing? Man is a king, dignified and reigning. We're uncomfortable with this. We talked about this last week. You are noble, you are regal because you are made in God's image. And this is not just for Christians. This is not just for men. For all people, all humans. We have a dignity inherent to us. That is the Judeo-Christian belief. Last, what makes the garden grow? Blood makes the garden grow. I was hoping for a little more excitement than that, but that's okay. Hey, uh, what makes the garden grow? Blood. That's right. That's right. To recap, I just want to make sure I'm holding myself to it. These are our five guarantees. Biblical manhood will be clarified and made accessible. We will become familiar with our gardens and will know how to flourish them. Our strength will increase and be rightly directed. My bride will be uplifted and understood, feeling loved. Our church will further establish what we expect of our men and how we will pass down manhood to the next generation. And most of this is flowing from our definition that Toby just ran us through. The biblical man. Do you guys have it memorized, by the way? You think we could try it together? The biblical man is formed and placed by God to keep, lead, and bleed for God and garden. Man, I hope that's helpful, man. I hope that goes deep into your hearts. And that every single word you can squeeze and something comes up. Some one word that just explains it. So you can just be applying that to your day moment by moment. In talking last week, there were also a couple things. I don't know if you've ever left a conversation where you're like, man, I wish I would have said that a little different. There were just some things last week that I just wanted to tie a row, a bow around. We got into a lot of great conversations last week. I got to hear from a lot of you guys at just after your tables because I was curious. I went up and asked you, how did that go? Because we got into some deep territory and I think it was fantastic. But I wanted to form another machine gun and just shoot some bows to tie up last week as we move into this week. First, I want to make clear that a wife or an azer submits only to one husband, not to all men. It's not that women submit to men. We're talking about a wife submitting to a husband. We'll talk in a minute about what submission is. A wife, an azer, learns submission from Jesus, who he himself submits to the Father. Jesus says, I don't do anything on my own accord. I just do what God tells me to do, what the Father tells me to do. We learn that kind of submission. And that is the model. God is also training women in the same way that a husband learns leadership from Jesus, who himself died for his bride. God is our trainer. Submission is about trust and goodness. It's not about control. That can be the dump truck that you can hear, the baggage we put onto that word submission. It's not there. It is not there. In the Hebrew, it's not there in the New Testament. It is not about control. It's about trust, which means the burden of the shamar, of the keeper of a husband, is am I trustworthy and worthy of that trust, of submission? That's our burden, men. If you are married, your burden is not how do I get control of my wife? It's am I trustworthy? The burden's on us. And it usually involves, it always involves. If not, I better start bleeding. Not as a doormat, not as an alpha, but we bleed. We self-sacrifice, we love. This trust includes emotional intimacy and connection. I might just do a whole teaching on this uh later. Um women initiate 80% of divorces. Did you know that? You know why? Because men think the garden is flourishing, but it's withering. Our perspective of how things are going isn't as reliable as we think it is. And what they need more than anything else is emotional intimacy. I feel language. And so that's a great place to start if you're married. The strongest men are always the gentlest. If you're threatening and pushing, firstly, we'll find you. Secondly, that's cowardice. The strongest men are the gentlest. The ones who can actually cudgel the best, they're the ones that are always cradling. Most women don't know their immeasurable worth. This vile world has corrupted the self-perception of women. They don't know that they're queens. That's our job. We get to honor them. We don't treat them like commodities. We don't sexualize them. All of us have a hidden brothel in our brains that we can so easily go to. And we start to kill that piece by piece and we burn it. We want to honor and dignify and just recognize what is already queen regality of who women are and how God has formed them. The biblical man bleeds for the garden, he does not bleed the garden for himself. That's our default. This is the me monster inside of all of us. And I think that's all. Okay. Two machine guns, just to start off. I know we're not used to riding anymore, but hopefully you got all that down. If not, I can send you the slides. Man, I hope Genesis 2 has been a treat. We've covered a lot of ground, and as Toby even alluded to, it's all this garden that God has made. And now Eve has joined. He's brought Eve to Adam. It's all about to unravel. It's all about to unravel. Because here comes Genesis 3. And before I read the passage for us, I want to illustrate how pervasive sin is by talking about a show called Alone. Has anybody here ever seen the show Alone?

unknown 13:07

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

Quite a few. It's a survival show where these survivalists are put onto northern Canada a month before the winter comes, and they're all by themselves. They're their own camera crew. They get like seven or eight pieces of gear that they get to pick, and they're just on their own. They get a five-mile, five-square-mile plot, and it's just survival. Last man standing, last woman standing wins. Okay? And there's this incredible scene where this guy makes a fire. I was just watching this episode, which is a pretty smart thing to do. Like making a fire. But what happens is as he's sitting there boiling water, about five yards away from him, he starts to see smoke come up. And then about 10 yards over here, he starts to see smoke come up. And what he realizes, and he explains the cameras, that he's actually set the whole root system on fire. And so now beneath them, where you can't even see it, everything is on fire. And that's like the quickest way for forest fires to happen. And so he has to spend the next hour getting water and countless calories that he's he's already half-starved, pouring onto the smoke, hoping that he can quench this fire that he can't even see. And then it's an incredible picture. The frantic, the pervasiveness of this fire is such a great picture of the moment that it starts for sin in Genesis 3. Everything is affected by what we're about to see as Satan enters the garden. Because if you think about it, by Genesis 4, one quarter of the human species are murderers. It ends up being one-third. It's pretty bad. And then you have Lamech in Genesis 4, who's got two wives already. And he's just boasted about killing a child. That's how fast things turn. That's the root system that spreads into our world today. So what the heck happened? Well, we read this, Genesis 1, uh, Genesis 3, 1, 2, and 3. Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. And 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 here's what's wild. Satan comes in with a question, and do you see Eve's mistake? You can see her heart, which is exactly what Satan does, and he's going to pounce on it. She said, But God said, You shall not eat of the fruit that is of the tree that is in the midst of the garden. God said that. But then she says, Neither shall you touch it. God never said, Neither shall you touch it. So you see what Eve's doing? She's over-correcting. She's adding on to God's law. Which is showing, kind of mirroring what she's thinking about God. It's painting God as this gigantic cosmic kill joy. That's the lie of the garden. That God is withholding from me. And we still believe it to this day. And so Satan sees that and he pounces. Look at verse 4. But the serpent said to the woman, You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it, see what he does? He senses this. God is withholding. When you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. 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. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. They sowed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. So he goes from questioning Satan to heresy, and then he doubles down on God withholding from Eve. And we read at the top here in verse 6 so when the woman saw that the tree was good, and if we had spent as much time in Genesis 1 as we did in Genesis 2, maybe our ears would be hearing something that sounds like tires screeching. The woman saw that the tree was good. That is a whoa whoa whoa. The rhythm, the pattern just got shattered. And what I mean by that is if you follow Genesis 1, you can do it today, you will see almost a dozen times where it is God who creates something. And then at the very end of that creation, and God saw that it was good. Vayar Elohim Kitov. God saw that it was good. God saw that it was good. God saw that it was good. That's the pattern of Genesis 1. It's not God discovering how good creation is. Oh my gosh, I created something awesome. It's God declaring. He sees it, he declares it's good. That's the pattern. But now Eve is deciding for herself what is good. That's what the tree of knowledge of good and evil is. Adam and Eve now deciding for themselves what is good and what is evil. And men, as we know, that's the haunting warning of the entire Old Testament and the entire New Testament. And everyone did what was right in their own eyes. And that is the scourge of the world today. What's wrong with the world? Justin deciding for myself what is right and what is wrong. And you participate in that too. And so does our world. Every man in this room has a man inside of them that must die. I put my kid in timeout about a year ago. Sent him up to his room. Take a breath, control yourself, Justin. After a few minutes, I went up to join him. And he was already like sad over his head. And his first words, usually I gotta convince, but his first words were, Dad, help. How do I do this? This has been a pattern. How do I fight this? And it was a cool four-generation moment. If I'm third, my son is fourth. I quoted to him a little poem that my grandpa quoted to me when I needed help, when I needed a tool in the toolbox to fight against the man inside of me that needed to die. And so I got to teach it to my son. And the poem goes like this two wolves beat within my breast. The one is foul, the one is blessed. The one I love, the one I hate, the one I feed, will dominate. I remember my grandpa teaching me that. And I got to teach it to my son. And uh and I hope that's just a great example, by the way, just as an aside, that God's gonna be using you for generations, men. Your wisdom, the weird things that you can memorize, even like our definition, perhaps. But it's just a great example that we have within us, even those of us redeemed by Christ, there is still a flesh part of us that is dead and yet must die. Eve falls, men, but so does Adam. And in this scenario, we might ask, where is God? I've heard so many people ask, where is God in Genesis 3? But because we've been studying Genesis 2, we know that that's not the question. The question is, where is Adam? God did his portion, he trained Adam. Adam would have never been a legitimate keeper had he not been given the chance to keep. God did his portion. This was Adam's turn. To just keep. Serpent comes up and starts questioning God, your partner, your trainer, not even your savior yet, your creator. To eve, your Rib? And he just lets it happen. So the question is not where is God? And even today, men, when we fail, who do we blame first? We blame God, don't we? Where were you? He's there. But it's our portion. This is our time. We step into the gap. With his help, of course. Then the curse comes, man. And I'm not going to read the passage. We know it. And men, the tragedy we feel as Adam is kicked out of his own garden. We all know that that's what happened. But now maybe that we've studied Genesis 2 enough where we feel it more than ever before. Adam is kicked from his own garden. Can you imagine how disoriented he must feel? Him and Eve as they leave this Garden of Eden? His purpose? No wonder we still struggle with purposelessness, meaninglessness today. How lost, how clueless, his anger, his frustration is, oh my gosh. The shamar kicked out of what he's supposed to be shamari. Just stripped from the roots, east of Eden. But before he's kicked out, there's also a promise. Verse 15, God speaking to the serpent, I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He, this offspring, shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. Then another keeper was promised there in the Garden of Eden, who will crush the serpent. And that deserves an entire sermon on its own, too. But we know that Jesus, the keeper, capital K, comes. And on the eve of his death, he turns the words of death into the words of life. It's cool that even Toby mentioned Passover earlier. At Passover in Matthew 26, the night before Jesus dies, look what he says. Now, as they were eating, Jesus took bread and after blessing it, broke it and gave it to the disciples and said, Take, eat. Does that sound familiar? The Lord's Supper is a reversal of the sin of the garden. He turns the words of death into the words of life. Hey, you've taken and you've eaten the wrong thing, but I've come your keeper. Now take and eat of me. Of my life, of my death, of me. Full redemption, full reversal. That's what Jesus did as our keeper, as our savior. We know how pervasive sin is. Maybe we don't know how pervasive Jesus is. There's an amazing song that we all know, Joy to the World. There are some lyrics in it that maybe we've never thought of before. No more let sins, I'm not going to sing it, and Brandon's not here. I mean, I guess Josh could, but no more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground. He comes to make his blessings flow. What's the qualifier? Far as the curse is found. Far as the curse is found. Far as the curse is found. Men as pervasive as your sin is. There is a fire underneath all of our nice polite faces in this room. And I know that of you. You're exposed. Because I know that of me. That's how far Jesus' blessing and healing and salvation is. As far as the curse is, that's as far as Jesus is, putting out those fires, but taking the fire upon himself. Jesus is creator, he is trainer, he is partner, but that's not enough to spend eternal life with him. We've got to know him as Savior, as master, as king. He's done more than train us. He died to save us. And as awesome as we are as kings and as keepers, it's important to admit that we are evil. We are evil. I don't think I was supposed to get there quite yet. Give me one second. That's why there's this tension. We are beautiful, dignified, amazing image bearers, and yet we are evil. And there's the tension. And so, men, I was going to, there in your booklets, you'll see that this morning was going to be called Keeping in the Keeper's Priorities. I felt the Lord shift my burdensome to where now we're, it's going to be kind of keeping in a fallen world. And I really got one point, and I'm trying to be mindful of time. But how do we keep in a fallen world? Because that's tricky. Adam failed, and he was in a perfect world. Here we are in an imperfect world, but we have Christ. How do we do it? Well, here it is. Here's the one point for the morning. In your keeping, know that you are kept in grace. In your keeping, know that you are kept in grace. Man, this is one of the most hard, difficult things for men to believe. All the labor of your life in Christ is beneath the divine smile of God. You are blessed before you perform. God does not love you based off of how well you keep your garden. The performative nature of you being a shamar, of you kaboshing, of you subduing, has no effect on God's love for you. And I'll prove it. Genesis 1, 27. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him, male and female, he created them. Watch this. Verse 28. You can look in your own Bible. And God blessed them. And God said to them, Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I want to ask you a really important question. When did God bless Adam and Eve? Before or after they obeyed or didn't obey his commands? Before. What came first? Redemption through the Red Sea or the law? Redeemed first. Blessed first. Men, the greatest shamars know this. The greatest keepers know this. And I implore you to put this on the forefront of your mind. That we do not sweat as shamars, as keepers, in order to earn the pleasure of God. We have the pleasure of God in Christ. And so we sweat. And so we bleed. And that difference is absolutely everything. That means that all of your garden, remember we spelled it, G-A-R-D-E-N, your relationship with God, your appetites, every relationship, your disciplines or lack thereof, all the emotions you feel as you walk your garden and men. I hope that you've been doing that practice that we did week two, where you close your eyes and just for two minutes walk your garden. It takes two minutes. God, where am I at with you? Is our God do I even send you in my garden? Appetites, the good and the bad, relationships, disciplines, emotions, and then of course the neglect. That's your next best step. As you do all of that, as things are doing great or not great, it has no bearing on God's pleasure in you. He formed you. He placed you. He blessed you. I probably should have put that in the definition, but that's just all around it. Because you didn't earn any of the forming, any of the placing. Our keeping, leading, and bleeding is not a report card. It's not a resume. We receive, and so we give. And that is the gospel, and I hope that you keep that close to your heart, men this week. I remember I was sweating, another time I was sweating. I was in my professor's office in seminary, like two months before I took this job. And I just had this burden of this fear. Some of it was healthy, most of it was probably unhealthy. And I just remember saying, confessing to this professor, I just want to be a good pastor. I just want to be good. I was 25 and I was young and I was freaking out about being a full-time pastor. I just want to be good. He kind of looked at me. He had a New Zealand accent, Mark Bryan, and so everything he said just felt like it was straight from Jesus, you know. I would try to impersonate his accent right now, but that's like Michael doing, you know, a Scottish accent, that just doesn't work. He just said, you know, I almost did the accent. You saw that he said no, Justin. You've got to be a faithful pastor. You get to be a faithful pastor. There at the end, man, what we want from Jesus is to hear, well done, my good and successful pastor. Lucrative, creative. What is it that is ours? You know, what's our idol? We all have one. We all have multiple. Good and faithful. That does not mean that we work not at all. That's actually a high calling to be faithful to Jesus, but it is also like incredibly relaxing. Resting. Because it means we're faithful to Jesus off his metric, which means are we yoked to him? Just walking with our creator, lingering in beauty, sweating not to perform, to earn God your favor, but just resting in the reality that men, as shamars, you are loved. I'll end with this. I went on to marry that Megan Clements. And when she walked down the aisle, I can't even tell you. You know, you've been to a wedding, maybe you've been in a wedding. You look at the groom as that bride starts walking down. The emotions that went through my heart, I mean, overwhelmed. I'll never forget that day. Best day of my life, May 19th, 2012. Can you believe that that's how Jesus looks at you? Not Christians, not y'all, you, Senor. I bet you don't believe that. But we get the cudgel out and we fight for that belief. You. That's how God looks at you. How God the Father looks at you right now in Christ because he sees his son, and you are a new creation. You, singular, you. I know it's weird for us as men to like be the bride. You know, it's marriage is meant to be a metaphor all along for the gospel. So don't take on that female aspect, just being treasured. At the bottom, that is who you are and what you are in Christ. This is um, we receive that men. Um, and you better believe it. We receive it, and that's God training us. The better we receive that love, we're being trained in it so that what? We can give it. We can treasure our garden and everyone in it. I keep this uh picture. I took a picture of the picture, it's not the best, in my office. Okay, this is us driving away from the wedding and uh heading off in a little bit to the airport where we have just the best honeymoon. I keep this because this is what I want and fight for my garden to feel like. I don't I don't meet this bar. This ain't how my wife looks all the time. But this is what I want my garden. This is what I want. This is what I want my boys to feel, the parents on the soccer team that I'm talking to, everything, everyone in my garden, this is what I want it to feel like. Man, I I would implore you this week today, find something that's kind of like your your your vision. This is what I want the garden, this is what I want life to feel like. But here's also, this is what I'm gonna end with. Here's what I don't believe. This is what God wants from me. He's not just looking for the next punch to throw at me. He's not looking to rip the rug out. He doesn't bless me so he can take things away from me. He wants me to be like this. This is what he's working towards. And ultimately, that's glorifying himself and me getting all up wrapped up in that.