You're listening to Mountain View Church Audio, Christ-centered teaching from the Wilderness City Whitehorse UConn. Here's this week's message. Hi, my name's Aaron, and I'm a pastoral apprentice here at Mountain View Church in Whitehorse. I'm almost done my apprenticeship, and as part of finishing that up, I have the honor of preaching the entire month of July. And for the first time, I've had the opportunity to choose and build a sermon series from scratch to preach over the next four Sundays. When thinking about what to preach, I went through a few different ideas. I knew I wanted to speak in depth about some area of faith and Christianity that I think we all really need to understand.
I knew I wanted to glorify Jesus. That is the entire point of why I'm here. I am to be a signpost, pointing eyes and hearts towards him. First, I thought about talking about covenant and the bond and promises between God and humanity that we see throughout scripture. Then I thought about origins. Everyone likes a good origin story. And I thought about speaking about how the church came to be. Both are subjects that I had studied in depth, but in the end, I landed on what I think is perhaps the most important thing for us to grasp and reflect on in our lives as Christians.
Also, it's the most important thing to grasp and reflect on for anyone who is not yet a Christian. It's something they need to know. It's the gospel and basically what led up to Christ coming to save us. So the whole picture of the gospel. Here at Mountain View, we intentionally try and point to some aspect of the gospel in almost every sermon on almost every Sunday. We do this because the gospel or the good news shows us who God is to us and who we are to him. And though we as humanity in general have strayed from him, the gospel shows us all that he has done to save us and bring us back to him. The gospel shows us God's immense love for us.
the gospel shows us our immense need for him. With all that being said, welcome to Mountain View Church. We're glad you could join us for this preaching series called The Story of the Gospel. This is the first of four. We'd love to connect with you. So if you're watching online and you'd like to reach out to us with any thoughts or questions or prayer requests, simply click on the connect tab at our website. That's mountainview.church or you can text connect to the number on your screen. For those listening on the radio or podcast, that number is 867-322-8001. That's 867-322-8001.
On Sunday mornings in-house, we offer a full base camp program for kids. But if you're watching online and you want to access the teaching materials and activities, you can, again, go to our website, mountainview.church slash children, and you can find all the materials there. Or text CHILDREN to the number 867-322-8001. Last but not least, we also have a youth program running for students every Sunday evening in July. This Sunday, it's junior youth. We alternate between junior and senior youth. So to find out where you fit, again, go to our website, mountainview.church slash youth, or text YOUTH to the number 867-322-8001.
Now it's time for this week's scripture reading. Hello, my name is Jeremy and I'm going to be reading from Genesis 2 verses 15 through 17. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man saying, you may surely eat of every tree of 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.
Over the next four weeks, we're going to take an in-depth look at the different factors and truths that make up the story of the gospel, the whole story. We're going to walk through many different portions of scripture, and there are many different subjects that could be looked at, but even in four weeks, honestly, we can barely scratch the surface of this. It's the greatest love story in history, the present and the future. This is a story that we each need to hear, understand, tell, and retell. It's a story we need to include ourselves in and to preach to ourselves over and over again throughout our lives. I tell my community group, when you preach the gospel to yourself, and that's a when, not an if.
Make sure you put your own name in there. It is Jesus' story, but it's also your story and how you fit into his. I want you all to keep coming back to this idea and remind yourselves again and again, this isn't a legend or a fairy tale or even a narrative or just a teaching. It is as real as we are, and it is where we can begin to understand the gravity of the truth about who we are and the ground upon which we stand. I hope you'll bear with me for this month, and I will do my best to be clear and concise about a subject that, when I really deeply still think about it, it still baffles me. It probably always will.
This is the story of creation, sin, law and grace. It's the story of history, theology and eternity. This is who we are. And more importantly, it's who Jesus is. So to tell a story properly, we need to start at the beginning. So we're going to go to the beginning. I'd like you to take your Bibles and turn along to Genesis chapter 1. Now, if you don't have a Bible, you can download a Bible app or contact us and we'll get you one. And if you're not familiar with how to look things up in the Bible, that's okay. You just go to the table of contents right near the beginning. The first book of the Bible is Genesis, and you're just going to go to chapter 1 in Genesis. Now, a little about Genesis, just to set some context. Genesis means beginning. And chapter 1 is the overview of the beginning of everything that we know.
When we read Genesis, we need to try and put ourselves in the place, in the position of an ancient near Middle Eastern person, as this is whom it was originally written to. See, God used people to write the scriptures, but he used people in their own time, in their own language, in their own knowledge of the world, and in their own context to do it. And so when we read a book of the Bible, it is best understood through the lens and understanding of someone who was around at that time. Now, it's difficult for us at this time to put ourselves in that time, but the better we do that, the better we can understand what's being said and why it's being said that way. Genesis is not a science textbook. It is not a detailed history of all things. It is not a detailed history of every single thing. It is not going to provide answers that it's not intended to. But it does tell us a lot about us. Firstly, it tells us how we exist. We are created by God. Then it tells us what we are. We are physical and spiritual beings in one. It tells us who we are, that we are God's own, God's most blessed creatures in this physical realm. It tells us why we're here. We are made to glorify God, to bring glory to God, to worship him,
and to serve him. And remember that that comes up later. We are made to serve God and have a relationship with him. It also establishes time and space, where and when we exist, the context within which we exist. We need to remember God's outside of all that. He's outside of time, space, energy, matter. He's not bound by any of that, but that is where we exist. Genesis 1 is like an overview of God's work of creation. It is broad. It covers a lot. And it doesn't get too detailed on any one thing. But let's look at a few verses that tell us about God creating humans.
So Genesis 1, 27 through 28 says, so God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. Skipping ahead a couple verses to verse 31, it says, and God saw everything that he had made and behold, it was very good.
This tells us quite a bit. It tells us, first of all, that we are created. It tells us that we're created as man and woman, equal before God. So neither has more value to him. Both of us are made in his image, but we are created differently. It tells us that we are his imagers, made in his image. We reflect something of who God is. Now, this can be looked at in a couple of different ways. Firstly, we're higher than any of the other physical beings that he has made.
And like him and not like them, we have certain capacities and traits like reason, logic, love, the ability to imagine, to decide, to create. Although we create from that which already exists. But we do have an innate desire to do that. It's because we're images of God. God can create from nothing. Secondly, image bearing is like a designation or a status or a position or appointment, whatever word you want to use. We are made to be his representatives, his subjects. He's the king. We're his subjects. We're here to serve him and represent him on earth. We reflect him.
We have relationship with him. We are his subordinates in every way, but we are beloved and valued. He is our God and we are his creatures. Period. That statement cannot be oversaid. He is God. We are his creatures. That fact is not up for debate and everything that comes next in a long history of humanity must be brought back to relate to that basic truth. He is our God. We are his creatures. He is God. We are not. It also tells us that God did everything right. Things were very good. They were complete. They were as he intended them to be.
he could now step away from making and enjoy what he had made. Now, Genesis 1, as I said, is a kind of a broad overview of a whole lot happens there. And this overview, remember when the Bible was originally written, there weren't chapters and verses. So this overview kind of extends into Genesis 2. It actually ends somewhere around Genesis 2, 4, or 5, depending on how you read it. Starting Genesis 2, verse 5, is more specific details, including our humanities, mandate, and our limitations. What we're here for and what we can and can't do.
So Genesis 2, 8 and 9 says, and the Lord God, and now whenever you're reading the Bible and you see in the Old Testament, the word Lord with all caps, that's actually a word in place of the name Yahweh, which is the name of God. So we could read it as, and Yahweh God planted a garden in Eden, in the east. And there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground, the Lord God, Yahweh God, Yahweh Elohim, if we want to be correct in our translation, made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Now, if we skip ahead a couple of verses to Genesis 2, 15 through 17, we read again, Yahweh God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. That is key right there. That is our purpose. That is our mandate. That's what he gave us to do. Made us, put us in the garden, work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man saying, you may surely eat of every tree in the garden, but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. For in that day you eat of it, you shall surely die. That one tree was not meant for us. The knowledge of good and evil was not meant for us.
God sets us up for success. The tree of life represents immortality. It is the source of eternal life for us. So long as we had access to that tree, eternal life. And God gave us free access to it. In other words, we were made to be forever, not temporary. We have an innocence in the garden that allows us to be in the presence of God. We've communed with God. The Garden of Eden was this place where the heavens and the earth met. It's a place where God kept his presence. There's a tree from which we draw life, but there's also another tree.
Abstinence from this other tree maintains our innocence, but partaking of it changes everything. Partaking of the other tree is a direct rebellion against God and his intention for us. And through that rebellion, so much happens, but our innocence is lost. It is in fact the one thing that he told us not to do. But given that he made us with the ability to make choices and not as mindless robots that simply follow direction.
We made that choice to eat of that tree. Humans eat of the wrong tree, and the consequences affect everything from that point on. This whole story of our fall from grace is known as the fall, and it's an account of humanity's failure. It's an account of the cause or the beginning, the genesis, if you will, of everything that is wrong in this world. All the suffering, all the pain, everything we know that isn't quite right starts there.
Now, we don't have time to read that chapter, but I encourage you to go read Genesis 3 and note God's presence with Adam and Eve in the garden. That is something that we lost. To sum up the consequences of this fall, basically life will no longer be easy. We will no longer be in relationship with God, direct relationship with God as an automatic sort of thing, and enjoy his presence. Conflict and struggle ensue, both between us and God, but also between people. Innocence is lost. The knowledge of good and evil, once we know that, once we have that knowledge.
then we try and start to decide what's good and what's evil. God didn't mean that for us. That's not what we were made for. We were made, remember, to serve, to watch over his world, his creation, and to keep it. There's a quote from a man named David Dockery in the Holman Concise Bible Commentary. He says it this way, the privilege of dominion also carried responsibility and limitation. Being placed in the garden to work it and watch over it represented human responsibility. In other words, that's what we're there for. The tree in the midst of the garden from which the human should not eat represented those areas of dominion reserved for Yahweh alone.
The man and woman however disobeyed God and ate from the tree. They died with respect to their covenant privileges and suffered the indictment and judgment of their sovereign. There's a spiritual death that goes on there. This entailed suffering and sorrow and eventual physical death. God had created man and woman to enjoy fellowship with himself and with each other. Their disobedience alienated them from God and from each other. Remember that tree of life in the middle of the garden. We lost access to it and along with that sin has now entered the world.
I hear a lot about sin in Christianity and church circles. What is sin exactly? It can be expressed in many different ways, but the simplest way that it's expressed in scripture, in the Hebrew is the word chata, in the Greek it's hamartia. Simply put, it is to fail or to miss the mark, to miss the mark that God has assigned, to fail, to live up to the standard or the purpose that God has given us as his imagers. So sin, if we want to look a little deeper in how it's defined in the lexicon, research lexicon of the Hebrew Bible.
Sin is defined as an act or feeling that transgresses something forbidden or ignores something required by God's law or character, whether in thought, feeling, speech, or action. It is literally us falling short and failing to live up to what God has given us to live up to. Now... It's all a part of the fall. Again, read Genesis chapter 3. But sin can be read and understood as both a verb, but it is also used in the Bible as a sort of a noun. So it is something we do. We sin against God. We sin against our fellow man. But it's also spoken of in certain places as like a force, like a presence that devours and enslaves. Definitely our susceptibility to it is something that can devour us. Our desire for it is something that can devour us. In Genesis chapter 4, God is speaking to Cain, and he says, if you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well...
Sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it. In other words, sin wants to destroy you and turn you away from who God made you to be, who you could be. Now, sin can be thought of as the means of the forces of evil to rule over us. Humanity without God is enslaved to sin.
And sin leads to death. We are stuck in that sort of paradigm or that condition. In the fall, we see the cost of our failure to act in accordance with God's direction. Separated from God and his presence, we serve sin in our own desires and impulses. And the cost of this is high. The cost is death. And every human being is in chains until we're rescued.
Now we're going to move really far through most of the Bible. We're going to end up in the New Testament because we got to get to Jesus in the sermon. Over the four weeks in July, we're going to kind of go back and forth. We're going to talk about the law. We're going to talk about priests. But right now, let's move ahead. So Paul in Romans 3.23 establishes that we're all in the same boat.
that fall that happened in the garden is still affecting us. He says, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. All of us fail in that way. Paul calls us, however, later in Romans to resist this, to resist these chains. In Romans 6, 12 through 13, he says, let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members, your body parts, to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life and your members to God as instruments of righteousness. From death to life is about as far as you can get.
Now, remember everybody sins, everybody's chained. So Paul's calling us to resist this. How is this possible? How can we defeat such a spiritual dictatorship? The answer is Jesus. The answer is we can't defeat sin, but Jesus can. In fact, he has. In Romans 6, 23, Paul again reiterates the cost of sin. He says the wages of sin is death. Sin causes death. Sin leads to death and none of us can escape those chains. But the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus, our Lord. He is our hope. Humanity has a sin problem.
The consequence of this is a life separated from a loving God who made us, and the eternal consequence is death and an eternity of suffering, eternal separation from God with no hope of salvation and reconciliation with God. However, God has a plan. God has a rescue plan. While we still have breath in our lungs, it is not too late for us. The chains of sin and death that hold us down, that cause us to be stuck in this cycle, can be broken, but only by the one who is greater than the forces that bind us.
Jesus, in his death on the cross, broke the grip that sin can have on us. We are no longer forced to serve that master. Jesus holds out his hands to us and welcomes us to a restored relationship with God that was lost way back in the garden. He invites us to serve him as we were made to serve, as he intended from the beginning. Christians are free to do what is good, not just what sin would have them do. They're now free to do what God wants them to do. We all serve something or someone. Remember, we were made as servants. We were made to serve. We were made to work and keep the garden.
In the end, we either serve Jesus or we kind of have this illusion of serving ourselves, but in doing that, we serve the forces that oppose Jesus. In fact, we oppose Jesus. We like to think of ourselves as our own masters, but make no mistake, we were created to serve and serve we do. The question that we all need to ask ourselves and honestly answer is whom do I serve and how do I know? Do I serve myself and by doing so bow to the forces of evil who currently rule this world?
Remember, the serpent in the garden, when you read through Genesis 3, you'll notice that he didn't try and get Adam and Eve to openly worship him. He just got Adam and Eve to reject God's rule. In doing so, in trying to put themselves in the place of God, remember, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They were trying to put themselves now in a place where they could decide what was good and what wasn't. They made their choice to oppose God. Today, we find ourselves with a similar choice. Because of our sin, we are at enmity with God, separated from him and in rebellion against him.
We are in the enemy camp. In our rebellion, we are aligned with the forces of darkness. The force of darkness is, they currently dominate this world, the forces of darkness. But as C.S. Lewis puts it, and I love his wording, an invasion is coming. Jesus is coming back. He is coming to finish what was started on the cross. He's coming to finish the destruction of evil once and for all. He is coming to land in what is currently enemy-held territory. And he will not be withstood. We need to make sure that we know that we're on Jesus' side and to seek our safety and security and eternity in him.
We must understand that when he does return, the time to choose him will be past. And we need to accept his grace while it is freely offered to us. Good will prevail. God will prevail. And Jesus is calling us to his side. He's saying, I see you over there. And I know you stand against me. I know you're in rebellion to me. And furthermore, I know you are chained there by your sin. I know you have a debt that you cannot pay. But do not let that debt hold you in opposition to me. For I've paid your debt on the cross. This is what Jesus is saying to us through his word, through the gospel.
And you could be free this very day. He is calling us to be Christians, his servants, his subjects, his followers, his redeemed, his fellow heirs in the kingdom of God. Let's pray. Thank you, Father, for today. Thank you for the chance to just to be able to preach your gospel. Thank you for the chance for people to be able to tune into this, Lord. The leverage of technology is an amazing gift, Lord, and we're grateful to be a part of this. But Lord, I pray that everyone that hears this
would take it and deeply consider it, deeply consider their part in this story and that the story is focused and centered on your son and the grace that he gave us through his sacrifice, Lord. And help us all see and be reminded of the fact that you made us for a purpose and you are renewing that purpose, Lord. You are bringing us back to what we were made for. Help us recognize our sin, Lord. Help us recognize the chains. Help us accept that if we're not serving you, we're serving something that we were not made to serve. And Lord, help us understand the grace.
and the love that comes through the sacrifice of Christ to set us free. I ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you for coming. This is week one of four, going through the story of the gospel. Next week, we're going to meet a man named Abraham, and we're going to look at God's ongoing relationship with humanity, the ups and downs. And more specifically, we're going to look at covenants, laws, and priests. Now, as we do at Mountain View, we always like to ask a discussion question for you to work through, to talk to each other about. So my question this week, it's tough.
do you find it difficult to discern whom you serve? Remember, we all serve someone. We all serve something. Do you know right away who that is or do you find it difficult to discern? And if so, why do you think that is? And then our prayer focus for the week is just pray that God would allow us to see both the seriousness of rebellion against him and to truly understand the amazing grace that he offers us through Jesus. Thank you for tuning in and God bless you.
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