Well, hey, everybody, I'm Adam Schell, the pastor at Melbourne Heights, and welcome to our sermon podcast. And as we get going in this episode of our sermon podcast, we're kind of unofficially into the beginning of summer because Memorial Day has passed, school has let out, amusement parks are up and running, summer camps are happening, vacations are going on, so we are into the flow of summer. But as we get busy with summer, it's easy for us to forget about some other things in our lives. Our schedules start filling up and other things go on the back burner.
And unfortunately, one of those things that we can easily forget about is our relationship with God. So over the next couple of episodes of our sermon podcast, we're going to be talking about how you can get back at it in your relationship with God. And this series is going to be preached by our youth minister here at Melbourne Heights, Joe Nolan. So let's go ahead and get right into the sermon, and I'll turn it over to Joe.
So I have a hobby that I have thoroughly enjoyed since I was somewhere between three and five years old. I can't remember exactly when I got started. But it was something that had stayed with me until I moved out from my parents' house after college. And this hobby will challenge me to think differently, to be creative, but I got stuck.
But after moving out of my parents' house, I had to leave it behind because there wasn't room for it to be part of the Pantoo. And it would be several years before I could get to come back to it. And what was that thing? What he wanted to do with me very well, and I just heard it out there, was, yeah, it's Lego.
That's my hobby. When I was only about five years old, I got my first Lego set from my uncle. It was a set of four or five fire trucks. It was one of their first sets, or never really the first sets, but it was one of the special sets they had for Christmas that year.
And he got it for me, and I had so much fun playing it together. And that's what got me started. It was half-makes in the P-system, too. But I remember growing up with Lego that my dad and I would build these huge houses on the living room table, or we would build lanes I would get to leave on my dresser and plane with whenever I wanted to when I was younger.
I remember recreating the fishing trawler for movie jobs, and then taking a large rubber toy and replaying the final scene of the movie in the bathtub. It's still in me. But through the years, I've been able to figure out how to build cities and starships. And at one point, when I was still at my parents' house, I had a Canadian city built up inside of a desk, complete with a skybridge, an elevator, at least three landing platforms for spaceships, and a Stargate.
For those of you who know what a Stargate is, I don't know. A little weird. But once I moved out of my parents' house after college, I moved into an apartment where I had to leave Lego behind for a minute. I had to leave that part of me behind.
And it wasn't until I got married and all of a sudden I bought our first house together that I was able to get back into creating Lego again. Except this time I snuck more two Lego sets than actually building my creations because it's space and time. And so I got to enjoy that again. And then Patrick came along and I gave him up again because he needed a room to live in.
Yeah, it is what it is. But again, those Legos ended up in a closet for several years until we moved into our current house. But now that we're in our current house, I get to play with Lego with both of my kids now, too. Once again, I get to build cities and ships mostly for them.
And what's even better is I get to watch them do the same alongside. And there's something special about being able to share something I love with my kids. It's something that brings us closer together. And for those of you who don't know, I have two kids.
One of them is now five years old and they'll be starting kindergarten in the fall. The other one will be turning nine in just a few short months and starting third grade. And it is nuts. But I love them with all my being and I would do anything.
They are wonderful children most of the time. And the relationship that you have with your children is one that is very intimate, very nice. But what does it have to do? What do my children and playing with Legos have to do with you?
Well, during these next two weeks that I get to fill in for Adam, we're going to be talking about what it means to get back at it and our relationship with Christ, like I got back into it with a Lego. And we're in the middle of the summer where our schedules aren't from out of whack because of vacations and because of, uh, camps and kids being out of school. And those disruptions can lead us away from what we're used to. And it can lead us away from Jesus.
So today, next Sunday, we're going to be talking about, uh, or be taking a short look at how you can rebuild your relationship with Christ. And in our first step to doing that and rebuilding that into a relationship with Christ, we have to look at what broke it in the first place. That means going back to the beginning, back to the garden where God gave Adam and Eve one rule, don't eat from this tree. Adam and Eve put one rule and they broke it.
So I know most of this is probably the story of the fall, but we're going to take another look at it again this morning. So if you have your Bibles with you, go ahead and we're going to be starting in Genesis chapter 3, starting in verse 1. And here's what that says. Now the servant was more crafty than any of the wild animals more God had made.
He said to the woman, did God really say that you must not eat any tree in the garden? The woman said to the servant, you may eat fruit from the trees in the garden. But God did say, you must not eat fruit from the tree that's in the middle of the garden. You must not touch it, or you will die.
You will certainly not die in a certain sense of the woman. For God knows that when you eat from it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some of the need. She also abused some for her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they could naked, so they sewed fit good leaves together and made coverings of their sons. So Adam and Eve had one rule. Don't eat from the tree. They had one rule, and it was pulled by a servant.
There was one rule in the entire garden. Somehow they managed to break it. But if that wasn't bad enough, after breaking it, they tried to hide from it. Let's continue the story, first name.
It says that the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden, in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, where are you? He answered, I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid. God said, who told you that you were naked?
Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from? The man said, the woman, you brought here with me. She gave us some fruit from the tree, and I ate it. But the Lord God said to the woman, what is this that you've done?
After they ate the fruit that they knew they weren't supposed to eat, they hide from God as he enters the garden. And God asks this question, where are you? Where are you? See, God's not asking this question, it's a plain game of hide and seek.
He already knows exactly what's happening, exactly where Adam and Eve are. But at this point, his heart is breaking because he knows what this means, where Adam and Eve. And the big matter is worse, they're trying to hide what they did from God. And that's exactly what happens here.
Following this passage, God lays down punishment for Adam, Eve, and the serpent. But he probably would have had a little lesser punishment if they'd just come up to God and said, hey, I made a mistake, we gave the firm, we told us not to eat, instead of trying to hide it. Now, if you're a parent, you probably know exactly how God is going to do it. See, my son has a tendency to do kind of the same thing.
He will get into trouble, and instead of just messing up what he did, he'll try to hide it by lying to God or saying something like, I'm crying. It drives me crazy. But he doesn't. And for some reason, it doesn't matter how many times we tell him just to tell us the truth, he thinks that if he can hide it, he can get away with it.
And he won't get punished for it. Well, obviously that doesn't work. And anyone out there who's raised Jonah knows exactly what I'm talking about here. But God's call to Adam and Eve wasn't to scold them or because he didn't know where they were.
God's call to Adam and Eve was to let them know that they didn't have to hide. God's call to Adam and Eve was to let them know that they didn't have to hide. See, I don't think the tree was set in the ark as a temptation to sin. I know when we talk about it that that's how we do it, is that it was a temptation for Adam and Eve to set in the ark.
But if we look at it from a slightly different point of view, the tree wasn't there as a temptation, but as an invitation to be more handsome in God. The tree was there to give Adam and Eve an invitation to give us the choice of whether we wanted to be with him or not. So God asking us, where are you? It's more of God calling us to him, letting us know that he is always looking for us and just have to be willing to come out of hiding.
He knows where we are, he just wants us to realize that we don't have to hide from him. He wants us to know that if we want to have an intimate relationship with God, all we have to do is to come to him. What comes next in the story of the bread is something that we call it to as well. This is when Adam answers God.
He says that he was hiding because he was brave because he was naked. Adam realizes that everything about him has been laid out to bear in the world, to see, and he's afraid of it. Adam was ashamed the first time. He felt the need to hide who he was from God.
Adam was starting to feel like he wasn't good enough for God. And God's response to him is one that goes for centuries in the day. Who told you that you were naked? And if we look at it in the sense of the context of Adam hiding, God is really asking Adam, who told you that you weren't good enough?
Who told you that I didn't love him? And it's those two questions that we're hearing today, too. God is still asking us, who told you that you weren't good enough? Why do you think that I don't love him?
So these questions that we have here have been once issued us from getting back to God and making him our priority in our life. We don't need to hide from him. He already knows what's going on. He already knows where we are.
We just have to get out of our own ways and come to him. There's another group that we meet in the Bible and the New Testament that feels kind of the same way that Adam and Eve did back in the garden. In the letters of the Ephesians, the target group that we see here is a group of Gentiles who were starting to think that they didn't belong to the church because they weren't adhering to Jewish laws and customs. They were starting to think that because they weren't Jews, they weren't welcome in the kingdom of God.
And they thought that they weren't mean enough because of their upbringing. And so in this letter to the Ephesians, in chapter 2, Paul writes this starting in verse 8. He says, So Paul is trying to comfort these believers and let them know that it doesn't matter your upbringing or whether or not you were a Jew. You are welcome in the kingdom of God because you believe in Jesus.
That was all there was to it. A few years ago, I did a sermon series called God's Masterpiece. In that series, I talked about verse 10 of that passage quite a bit, that you are God's Masterpiece. But the whole idea of the sermon series was to let you know that you are enough, that you are already who God wants you to be at this moment.
You see, like all masterpieces, you're not finished yet. God is still for you. See, famous works like the Mona Lisa, the statue of David, or the 16th Cow. They were created overnight.
They took time. And just like them, you are still being formed, still being chipped away at like a stone sculpture by God, being sculpted into who God wants you to be. All you have to do is to let God have that chisel, to let him have the control of chipping away at you, and to be following him. That's what created an intimate relationship with Christ.
It's all about. And in our own ways, let God have control of how we're formed. How did he think that they thought they weren't enough? They didn't realize that God still loved them, even after breaking the one world they had.
See, they were still good enough. And you were good enough to just by being you. You were good enough to just by being you. You were loved because of who you are.
You were loved because God loves you. And you were able to create a relationship with God because Jesus saved you from your own sins. Because he wants to be close to you. He wants to have that relationship.
So if you want to make Christ your priority again, or for the first time, it starts by coming out of high. It starts by accepting that you were good enough. It starts by believing that God loves you. And it starts by becoming intimate with him again.
That's right. God, we thank you for your willingness to be with us and your persistence in seeking us out of your day. Help us to realize that we don't need to hide ourselves from you. In fact, we need to do the opposite.
Open ourselves up and think before you. Prepare ourselves to be good and bad. God, thank you for being our guide and our teacher and how we are to love you and to love each other. Thank you for your love and letting us know that we are good enough for you.
Continue to remind us that we are your masterpiece and that we only have to hide from the day long. And be right. Well, hey, it's Adam Gannon. I just want to thank you for tuning in to this episode of our sermon podcast.
And I hope that this episode has shown you how you can get back at it in your relationship with God whenever you start drifting away. Because one thing we need to remember is when our relationship with God changes, God's not the one that moved. We are. And we need to remember that no matter what's been going on in our lives, that God still loves us, God still cares about us, and that God still believes that we are good enough for him.
So if you're straying in your relationship with God, it's never too late to get back at it. Well, in our next episode, Joe's going to wrap up this sermon series. And he's going to be talking about the next step that you need to take if you're getting back at it in your relationship with God. So you hope that you'll come back and join us when our next episode drops next Tuesday morning.
As always, if you subscribe to our podcast, that episode will be sent straight to your favorite podcasting app. And don't forget, you don't have to wait for next Tuesday to roll around. You can also come and worship with us live every Sunday morning. You can join us on our church website at mhbclouisville.com slash live.
We worship every Sunday morning at 10.30 a.m. Eastern time, and we would love to have you come and join us. Well, until next time, I hope that you guys have a great week. I will be praying for you, and we'll see you back here soon for another sermon podcast.