Introduction:
The Origin and the Pattern of Sin (Genesis 3:1-13):
- Sin starts when we Disregard God's Word. (Gen 3:1-6)
- You Doubt the Authenticity of God's Word. (Gen 3:1-3)
- You Deny the Accuracy of God's Word. (Gen 3:1)
- You Disobey the Authority of God's Word. (Gen 3:4-6)
- Sin brings shame when we try to Disguise . (Gen 3:7)
- Sin causes us to Disengage from God. (Gen 3:8-10)
- Sin makes us want to Deflect guilt. (Gen 3:11-13)
Romans 5:12 - Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned...
Sermon Notes (PDF): BLANK
Hint: Highlight blanks above for answers!
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00:55-00:57
Amen. Genesis chapter 3, are you there?
00:57-01:00
You're like, yeah, you asked us to turn there like 10 minutes ago.
01:00-01:02
Found it right near the beginning.
01:03-01:08
Did you know I almost died several years ago?
01:09-01:12
Like, I don't mean like exaggeration.
01:12-01:15
I mean literally almost dead.
01:17-01:21
Some of you know this story, but actually Aaron and I were both at the gym.
01:21-01:31
I was in the men's locker room, Aaron was in the women's locker room, so we weren't together, but I remember exercising and going at it hard that day.
01:31-01:34
I don't know why I was so motivated, but I was going at it hard that day.
01:34-01:47
I'm telling you, Jonathan, it was like the treadmill hard, and it was the weights hard, and I used to be in shape, honest, and I was going hard, and then, so I was getting ready to hit the showers, and I just did not feel right at all.
01:48-01:53
Like, sick to my stomach, and I was like, I could barely stand.
01:53-01:55
It was like I could fall asleep on my feet.
01:55-02:02
And it was just, I'm like, I must have gone too hard or something.
02:02-02:04
I'm like, shower make me feel better.
02:04-02:05
A shower did not make me feel better.
02:06-02:10
And I remember getting dressed and I'm like, there is something seriously wrong with me.
02:10-02:15
And I went and pounded on the door to the ladies locker room and Aaron was just finishing up.
02:15-02:19
And I said, there is something seriously wrong with me.
02:20-02:21
and I have no idea what it is.
02:22-02:28
And she's like, "We're gonna get you to hospital." But the locker rooms were downstairs on this huge flight of steps and I could barely move.
02:28-02:36
So she kind of put her shoulder under my backside and like shoved me up the steps and got me to the hospital.
02:36-02:38
At the hospital, they immediately took me back.
02:38-02:43
I mean, there was no waiting in the waiting room, which tells you how bad I was at this point.
02:43-02:45
I was fading in and out of consciousness.
02:46-02:49
And it was just like off and on and off and on.
02:50-02:53
and they had no idea what was going on.
02:55-03:14
And I just remember as I was fading in and all these doctors and nurses and everybody running in, at one point I do remember saying, you know, between the one weight room and the locker room, I thought I got a slight smell of gas.
03:15-03:26
And they're like, "Oh, oh, oh!" They're like, "Well, I, and I, unfortunately I do remember this." They're like, "We're gonna do a blood gas test.
03:26-03:27
You know what a blood gas test entails?
03:27-03:33
They take a needle the size of a McDonald's straw and stick it in your wrist.
03:35-03:42
Oh, oh yeah, it's much worse than that." And then they get a, but that's how they do the blood gas test and they had to do several of those.
03:42-04:18
And, but I just, I do remember them sticking one of those plastic tubes with the oxygen up my nose, and the doctor coming in smiling, and he says, "I have great news for you." He says, "You have a lethal level of carbon monoxide in your system." And I'm like, "Waiting for the good news here!" You know, because when you hear "lethal level" of something, well, he says, "You are healthy enough," and he goes, "Now that we know what the problem is, "get you on oxygen, we're gonna watch you for a while." And I lived to fight another day.
04:21-04:26
You're like, "Did you have any long-term effects from that?" I think it did do some things messing up my memory.
04:28-04:32
And, why did I tell you this story?
04:34-04:34
(audience laughing)
04:35-04:39
Oh, this is why I told you that story.
04:41-04:51
In order for them to treat me, they had to figure out exactly what was wrong with me, right?
04:52-05:05
I mean, at that moment, they didn't know, would it have helped at all if they were bringing in Tylenol, or cough medicine, or Prozac, Or would that have helped at all? No.
05:06-05:11
They needed to know exactly what my problem was, so they knew exactly how to treat me, right?
05:16-05:19
In Houston, we have a problem.
05:20-05:24
Because something is severely messed up, globally.
05:25-05:26
Have you noticed?
05:27-05:51
People are just bad and horrible, and globally, and I can look at the world, I can turn on the news, and I'm like, "Well, people are messed up." But then I turn it personally, I'm like, "There's something wrong with me." There's something wrong with people, and there's something wrong with me.
05:52-05:55
And nobody's arguing that there's a problem, okay?
05:57-05:58
They argue the solution.
05:59-06:07
Maybe we need more or better or different rehabs, or medications, or therapies, or maybe CRT will help get us in the right direction.
06:10-06:11
None of these things are working.
06:14-06:18
And all of man's attempts really just amounts to putting a band-aid on cancer.
06:20-06:21
We have a problem.
06:21-06:23
We have a serious problem.
06:23-06:29
We are inherently wicked, bad, selfish people.
06:31-06:34
We just are. All of us.
06:37-06:40
In the last couple of weeks we've been looking at His Word, and what have we seen?
06:40-06:44
We've seen that God created this perfect world, right?
06:45-06:49
And then He created woman for man, so He created this perfect relationship.
06:52-07:01
And we're like, "Okay, well, perfect environment, perfect relationship, what happened?" Well, Genesis 3 happened.
07:02-07:03
Sin entered the world.
07:04-07:08
You're like, "Well, what is sin?" Well, there's a lot of definitions, a lot of ways we can define it.
07:09-07:17
Today we're just going to call it a personal lack of conformity to the moral character of God or the law of God.
07:19-07:21
And now it's a disposition.
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The heart.
07:23-07:31
It leads to thoughts and words and actions that dishonor God and His righteousness.
07:34-07:39
And this account we're going to look at today, the Garden of Eden scene.
07:40-07:54
And I know we've already talked about this, but I feel like if there's somebody new watching or somebody new streaming, I have to say it again, for the person that would ask, "Jeff, do you really believe this is literal, true history?" Absolutely, 100% I do.
07:57-07:59
That is how it is presented in the Word of God.
08:00-08:17
And, if this Adam wasn't literally true, and what he did literally happened, it's hard to make sense of the second Adam, Jesus Christ, and what he did.
08:17-08:23
So yes, I do believe that this is literally true as God told us.
08:24-08:34
So not only is it literal history, also this passage is deeply personal, because this shows us how sin started and something else.
08:34-08:38
It shows us that there is a definite pattern for sin.
08:40-08:44
So on your outline, the origin and the pattern of sin.
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So, write this down. First of all, letter A.
08:49-08:52
This is like Theology of Sin 101 today, okay?
08:52-08:55
But we've got to get this down, church. We've got to get it down.
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Letter A, sin starts when we disregard God's Word.
09:01-09:06
Sin starts when we disregard God's Word.
09:07-09:14
Now, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden had one rule.
09:15-09:18
Look at chapter 2, verse 16.
09:20-09:36
It says, "And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, 'You may surely eat of every tree in the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.
09:39-09:40
Okay, that's the one rule.
09:41-09:49
Now, when it says you shall surely die, literally in the Hebrew, that phrase is, dying, you will die.
09:52-09:57
And that's something, this is another reason I believe this is literal history, because this is something I watch every day.
09:58-09:59
Dying, you will die.
09:59-10:00
Do you know what that means?
10:01-10:06
Spoiler alert, when Adam sins, he doesn't just eat the fruit and drop over dead.
10:06-10:15
What God said literally was, "Dying you will die." If you transgress, if you disobey, it will begin a process that will end with something.
10:16-10:21
In other words, you will die and then die.
10:23-10:24
Can anybody give testimony to that?
10:26-10:26
Because I sure can.
10:28-10:28
Because I'm gonna tell you something.
10:30-10:31
I've seen pictures of myself when I was little.
10:32-10:33
I was a cute kid.
10:36-10:39
And you're thinking the same thing that I ask myself every week.
10:39-10:48
I look in the mirror and I say, "What happened?" "You had such a good start." You're in that boat too though.
10:50-10:51
Look, no offense.
10:52-10:53
We're all in that boat.
10:54-11:02
We are all getting old and wearing out and eventually is going to get to the point that we are going to be done.
11:02-11:03
Dying, you will die.
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Dying, I am dying.
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Right?
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What is death?
11:08-11:12
Well, death in the most generic term, death is separation.
11:14-11:15
Right? Death is separation.
11:16-11:19
Physically, our soul is separated from our body.
11:19-11:20
That's the casket type.
11:20-11:21
Death is separation.
11:21-11:25
spiritually, death is spiritually being separated from God.
11:28-11:47
And anytime you talk about this passage, somebody's going to ask the question, rightly so, justifiably so, "Well, if God didn't want man to eat off of that tree, then?" Go ahead, ask it. "Yes, why did he put it there if he didn't want him to eat it.
11:50-12:24
And I don't really think that's such a hard question. The reason God did that is it gave man a choice, right? It gave man a choice. God's like, "Look, here are your options. You can obey me or you can disobey me." You're like, "Well, why does that matter?" Because here's why. If God didn't give them a choice, it could It could have been said that man only obeys God, man only loves God, because man has no other alternative.
12:24-12:25
Right?
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That could be said.
12:29-12:31
Why does man love you? Why does man obey you, God?
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Because he doesn't have a choice.
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God says there is a choice here.
12:37-12:46
We're going to see that Satan enters the scene And his tactics haven't changed.
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That's why we call it the pattern here.
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The tactics that he uses here are the same tactics that he uses today.
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Do you know why he's been using the same tactics for about 6,000 years?
12:58-13:01
Do you know why he keeps doing the same things over and over?
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Because they work.
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Doesn't need to change a thing.
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And when we sin, this is really close to home, We get on the same path, right?
13:14-13:16
So here it is, step one.
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Sin starts when we disregard God's word.
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Step one, you doubt the authenticity of God's word.
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Look at chapter three, it says, now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made.
13:34-13:40
He says to the woman, did God actually say, you shall not eat of any tree in the garden?
13:42-13:58
And a 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.'" Stop there.
13:59-13:59
The serpent.
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We know later from God's Word, this is Satan.
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This is the devil.
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We know that, right?
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Revelation 12.9, Revelation 20.2.
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The serpent, this is Satan, this is an angel, Lucifer, who according to Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, he thought maybe he should be God.
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Like why should the Lord get all the glory?
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Because I'm pretty awesome.
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And not a great road to go down.
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And he attacks this new creation of God.
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And he brings what is the first question in the Bible.
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You realize that?
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Genesis 1 and 2, it's just declaration, declaration, declaration.
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This is the very first question in the Bible.
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Satan's first step.
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Did God really say that?
14:58-15:02
I mean, is that what he actually said?
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And that's how sin starts, church.
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That's how it starts every single time.
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It's when we ask ourselves the question, "Did God really say that?" And we begin to doubt the authenticity of God's Word.
15:23-15:30
You know, I want to commit this sin, I want to do this thing, but I think it's wrong, I think I shouldn't do it, but wait a minute, wait, wait.
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But is that what God actually said?
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And then we start to ask this question, to justify whatever it is we want to do.
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And you know, Eve's response adds, don't even touch it, right?
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God says, don't eat from the tree.
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Eve adds, yeah, we're not supposed to eat from it.
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We're not even supposed to touch it.
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Like, where did that come from?
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Is that something she made up?
15:59-16:01
Is that something Adam said to her?
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we really don't know.
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But regardless, sin, it always starts with doubting and questioning God's Word.
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Step two, not only do you doubt the authenticity of God's Word, you deny the accuracy of God's Word.
16:22-16:26
You've got to see this because this is so subtle.
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Look at verse 1. Look at the question again.
16:32-16:45
It says, "The serpent said to the woman, 'Did God actually say you should not eat of any tree in the garden?'" Just circle the word "any." Satan's like, "Is that what God said?
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Don't eat of any tree." Now, hindsight's always 20/20, especially hindsight for somebody else.
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But what Eve should have said was, That's not what he said!
16:59-17:00
He never said that.
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But you notice the slight little twist that Satan puts on God's command.
17:12-17:20
It's close enough to sound kind of right-ish, which makes it completely wrong.
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Satan is committed when we deny the accuracy of God's Word, because listen, close enough isn't enough.
17:30-17:33
With this little twist, you see what Satan was doing?
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And this is what's so subtle.
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This little twist was designed to make Eve think that God was restrictive.
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Do you see that?
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God's like, "Here, here's everything.
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Here, the most perfect, beautiful place I created, man and woman in the image of God.
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Here, you have everything.
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God was so gracious in giving, and Satan wanted Eve to think of God in a different way.
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God was restricted.
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Oh, so he said you're not supposed to eat off any of these trees, huh?
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Huh?
18:10-18:10
See that?
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And like Eve, we're deceived into thinking - don't miss this Like, I know what God said, but, gosh, don't you think God really just wants me to be happy?
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And we're starting to deny the accuracy of God's Word.
18:40-18:45
I thought I knew what he said, but maybe actually he meant something else.
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Not a good path.
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And step three, you disobey the authority of God's Word.
18:57-18:57
See the path here?
18:57-19:00
You doubt the authenticity of God's Word, you deny the accuracy.
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Now you're disobeying the authority of God's Word.
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Look at verse four, "But the serpent said to the woman, 'You will not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.'" That's just, at this point, that's just a flat out contradiction.
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You won't die.
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God just doesn't want you to be like Him, and He knows if you eat from that tree, you're going to be.
19:31-19:42
And again, Satan, he's fantastic at making his lies sound kind of right, but at the same time completely wrong.
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He left a big part out.
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You know, when it comes to knowing good and evil, there's a big difference between God and man, you know.
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One of the biggest differences is this.
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God is incorruptible.
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And man is not.
20:05-20:08
I heard a preacher say one time, it's like this comparison.
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God knows evil like a sunbeam shining on sewage.
20:15-20:19
You realize that the sewage doesn't affect the sunbeam.
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The sewage doesn't make the sunbeam filthy.
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That's how God knows evil.
20:26-20:30
Man knows evil like someone drowning in sewage.
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And church, if you're not settled by faith on the authority of God's Word, you have opened yourself up to anything goes.
20:42-21:16
In verse 6, it says, "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," emphasis added, "and he ate." deceived, apparently, from this verse, it seems to me that she sort of dwelled on it.
21:17-21:17
Right?
21:18-21:35
Like she stood looking at it, thinking about it, thinking about Satan's words more than God's. Huh, you know, that does look good. Sounds helpful. She was deceived.
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And and not deceived, they disobeyed.
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They bought the lie.
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Something's in it for me.
21:52-21:53
That's the way all sin is, by the way.
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The root of every single sin, you name any sin, the root of every sin is selfishness.
21:58-22:03
It's I want what I want, I don't care what God wants, I don't care how it's going to affect other people, I want what I want.
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The root of sin is selfishness.
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That's why right in the middle of the word "sin" is the letter "I." Right?
22:10-22:13
Because I am always in the middle of sin.
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It's always about me and what I want and my preferences, and who gives a rip what anybody else thinks.
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So have you ever walked this path?
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You don't need to raise your hand.
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You don't need to come up and give testimony right now.
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But I just want you to ask yourself, have you ever walked this path or a temptation has come before you.
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Something that initially you were like, "Oh, I should not be doing this.
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I know this is wrong." But you get on this path.
22:47-22:50
Like, "Oh, did God really mean that though?
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I mean, I know what He said, but is that really what He meant?" No, no, no. You know what?
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God couldn't have meant that.
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Because that's surely not what I want Him to have meant by that.
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Then we dwell on it and we think it over, and our conclusion is, "Well, I better do what I want to do anyways." The origin and the pattern of sin, it starts when we disregard God's Word.
23:23-24:01
Letter B, "Sin brings shame, we try to disguise." brings shame, we try to disguise. Look at verse 7. It says, after eating, it says, "Then the eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths." The first thing that they noticed after eating was that they were naked. Directly tied into the the very base of sin is a shamefulness connected to sexuality.
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Like, what do you mean by that?
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Look back at 2.25.
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It says, "And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed." This was pre-fall, obviously.
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This was right after creation of woman, the pronouncement of what the marriage relationship was designed to be.
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But it says that they were naked, but they were not ashamed.
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At that point, Adam and Eve didn't know any evil, and they didn't know, get this, that sexual desire could be used for evil purposes.
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And now, all of that's changed.
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And it is still this way until today.
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At the root of sinfulness is a perversion and a shame connected with sexuality.
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You can take any perversion you like.
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Whether it's adultery or fornication or homosexuality or gender confusion or pedophilia or pornography, all of these things.
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The very base of sin.
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Now, the only two people on earth who were naked and innocent, and by the way, up to this point, they only ever saw each other naked, you know that, right?
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Now they have this sense of, oh man, I need to cover myself.
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I need to hide my body.
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Because of the shame that's crept in.
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So what did they do?
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Well, your Bible tells you that they sewed fig leaves together.
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They made loincloths out of fig leaves.
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Now I think I've confessed before you that I'm no biologist.
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I'm also not a botanist and I'm not a seamstress.
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So I'm going to have to call an audible here and ask somebody maybe with more experience than me in this field, how long do underpants made out of leaves last?
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I mean the leaves are kind of soft and pliable at first, right?
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But what happens to a leaf when it's disconnected from the plant for a while?
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What happens?
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Do you see a problem?
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Here's the problem, man's attempts to cover shame fail.
26:59-27:07
Somehow sin knows somehow sin, and this is the stupid deception sin always makes us want to try to cover it up.
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That was Adam and Eve here, like, "Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're naked!" Like, "Yeah, I have been." Now all of a sudden there's this shame, and we, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, damage control, we can cover this, and we can hide it, and we can fix it.
27:24-27:30
Look, look, let's take the leaves, and we're covering up now, and look, look, out of sight, out of mind, problem went away.
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And you're like, yeah, that was pretty stupid of 'em, huh?
27:35-27:37
Oh, come on, we still do this stuff, guys.
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We still do this stuff.
27:40-27:54
When your pornography's hidden on your computer, when your email's in text from that secret relationship that you're trying to keep hidden from your spouse, you're hiding it, you're covering it, your bottle of addictive something hidden.
27:57-27:59
Are you trying to cover something up right now?
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Because your coverup's gonna be about as effective as leafy britches.
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All right, sin brings a shame that we have this, we gotta hide it.
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It doesn't work.
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Letter C, sin causes us to disengage from God.
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Look at verse 8.
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It says, "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.
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The Lord God called to the man and said to him, "Where are you?" You think God didn't know?
28:48-28:51
You think Adam was like first ever hide and seek champion?
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I don't think so.
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Well Adam replies, verse 10 says, "And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid.
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Because I was naked and I hid myself.
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See this perfect fellowship he had with God was now broken.
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Broken to the point that we were hiding from God in the trees, in the garden.
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And you know, sin makes us do all kinds of crazy things.
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And you know the absolute craziest thing that sin makes us do?
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The craziest thing by far that sin makes us do?
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Running and hiding from God.
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That's the craziest thing.
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People do that today?
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All the time.
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People settle on, "I'm not going to go to church.
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I can't go to church.
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I can't go to church and listen to Jesus Christ be exalted in worship.
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I can't go to church and be praying to the Father in the name of Jesus.
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I can't go to church and hear the Word of Christ proclaimed.
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I can't do it.
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I'm ashamed of myself.
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I can't face God." So people abandon church.
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And I've got to tell you, that's so foolish.
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Because if you're struggling with sin of any kind, who is the only person who can help you?
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Shout it out.
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Who is the only person that can help you?
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Then why are we running from Him?
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That's the shamefulness of sin.
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We need to be running to Him, not away from Him, because He can fix it.
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He has fixed it.
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But we don't want to face up to our guilt.
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Sometimes in church we're just like Adam and Eve, we're hiding in the trees.
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Letter D.
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Sin starts when we disregard God's word, bring shame we try to disguise, it causes us to disengage from God.
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Letter D, sin makes us want to deflect guilt.
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Look at verse 11, deflect guilt.
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Okay, now the Lord speaking again.
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Adam says, "I heard the sound of you in the garden.
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"I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself.
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"So he, God said, Who told you that you were naked?
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Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?" Ok, so the Lord asks two more questions, and again, I don't think He was looking for information.
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He was looking for a confession.
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Verse 12, the man says, "The woman whom you gave to be with me, He gave me the fruit of the tree, and I ate." Now this is obviously a very tragic story, but there is one little slight glimmer of something humorous to me in Adam's response, and that is simply this.
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At this point in Adam's existence, he literally knew two others.
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He knew God, and He knew Eve. And when He was confronted over His sin, what did He do?
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He blamed literally every other person that He knew. True or false?
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God's like, "What have you done?" and Adam's like, "Well, now that you bring it up, The woman?
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Notice he says that you gave her.
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That Adam's like, "Look God, I don't want to sound critical, but I'm sure in your sovereignty you noticed that this stuff wasn't happening before you created her.
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I mean I'm not saying, but I'm just saying.
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You know what I'm saying?
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I'm not saying anything God, but you know what I'm saying?" These are pretty quiet and sinless.
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Is that what he did?
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Yeah, that's what he did.
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The woman that you gave me.
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He tried to pin this on God.
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Like, there's got to be some kind of all-time audacity award for that.
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And we too live in a day where nobody is responsible for their actions.
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Right?
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We're confronted about our sin.
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And maybe you haven't said it in the way Adam said it, but you've certainly communicated the spirit of the same type of thing.
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When you say things like this, "I can't help that, that's how I was raised." "Look, I act this way because it's part of my culture." Or, "I have an illness." Or, "I have an addiction." Or, "My therapist said my sin is not my fault." I'm not denying for a second that we've all been, and some of us are currently victims of the sins that other people commit, sometimes directly upon us.
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That is absolutely true.
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But nobody is making choices for you.
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Okay?
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You've got to draw the line somewhere to say at some point, "I'm making decisions, and nobody's responsible for the decisions that I'm making." But my therapist said, "I don't really care what your therapist said.
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I care what God said." Our very popular mantra today actually does blame God.
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In the way that Adam did.
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I'm sure you've heard it before when people say, "I can't help it, I was born this way." Right?
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"I was born this way." Well, look, that's true.
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That's why Jesus said, "You must be born again." So God turns to Eve now and she is a little less deflecting.
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It says, "Then the Lord God said to the woman, "What is this that you have done?
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"The woman said, 'The serpent deceived me and I ate.' Okay, what does all this have to do with me?
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And the answer is everything.
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This story, the ramifications, the fallout, the effects of this account literally affects every single second of your life.
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Every single day.
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Because Adam's sin affects the whole human race.
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Romans 5.12 says this, "Therefore just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sin." We are all born dead and dying with a sin nature.
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We're born with that.
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We're born with a propensity to be selfish and disregard the Word, the righteousness, the law of God.
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Don't believe me?
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Take one of these toddlers home with you.
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Go up to harvest kids, get their parents' permission, of course.
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Just take them home with you for the afternoon.
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If you don't believe that we're born with this propensity for selfishness, we all are.
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Like, "Oh man, I see what you're saying Jeff, but you know, I've got a question.
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I wasn't there.
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I wasn't there.
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Why don't I get the same choice that Adam and Eve got?" Adam was the representative of the entire human race at this point.
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And you can not like the choice that he made, but that doesn't change the fact that his choice affected the entire human race.
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Okay?
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You were born a sinner because your parents are sinners.
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And you're like, "Man, you don't talk about my mama that way." Well, hang on a second.
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Your parents are sinners because your grandparents are sinners.
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Like, "Oh man, now you're talking about my grandmama.
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We're going to fight." You trace this all the way back to Adam and Eve.
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And you can't deny the result.
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We're born with a sin nature, self-centered, prideful disposition that lives in the pattern that we just saw in Genesis chapter 3.
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And look, you can redefine it, and you can ignore it, and you can just try to deny the guilt, but the problem remains. There's only one remedy for sin. It's forgiveness.
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The only thing that can fix death is life. So this Friday, we're going to continue in this passage and we're going to talk about the consequences that sin has brought. We're looking at some of the specific curses on the world that's now typified and defined as one of sin and death.
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This Friday we're going to see that just as the first Adam changed everything, we're going to see how the second Adam, Jesus Christ, again, changed everything.
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And you're like, "No, no, no, no, no, you can't stop here.
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Where's the hope?
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Where's the hope?" We're going to get there Friday.
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But the first step that we need to take is to properly diagnose the problem and personalize Only then, only when we do that can we see and embrace the solution that God has graciously provided through His Son.
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Let's pray.
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Our Father in Heaven, it is amazing to me that a passage that so many people deny is is so relevant and obviously illustrated and in my face all the time.
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This is what we see.
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This is the pattern that continues.
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And Father, we all by nature stand before You guilty.
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Because even if we didn't sin in the exact way that Adam and Eve did, We sure found other ways to sin.
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And before You we stand guilty and fallen and wayward and rebellious.
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We gather together to celebrate the fact that You have chosen to love us anyways.
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So I pray, Father, just simply this, I pray this Friday that You would fill this room as we come to not just reflect, but to just so deeply meditate upon and embrace the reality of what the second Adam, Jesus Christ, accomplished through His death on the cross.
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Father, I pray that in the days between now and Friday, You would let us meditate on this section of Your Word so that we have a greater a deeper understanding of this sin problem we all have.
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That dying we will die, but You've made provision for us.
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Thank You, Father, we pray in Jesus' name.
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Amen.
Small Group Discussion
Read Genesis 3:1-13
What was your big take-away from this passage / message?
Define sin, in your own words, how you would to an unbeliever.
In Gen 3:5, what did the serpent tell Eve God was withholding from her? In other words, “why was God restricting them”?
Why do you think we tend to blame others for our sin (Gen 3:12)?
Why did Satan first cast doubt on God’s Word (Gen 3:1), instead of just flat-out denying God’s Word from the beginning (Gen 3:4)?
Breakout
Pray for one another.