Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] You're listening to a live recording from Westside Church in Bend, Oregon. Thanks for joining us.
[00:00:06] Morning, everybody. I'm Ben Fleming, one of the senior pastors here. We're in the final installment of our sermon series that we're calling Sunday School. This is the fifth week of it, and we're going to go into a really familiar story. But just a quick refresher. We want to go through these Old Testament stories that are really familiar to you if you grew up going to Sunday school or if you grew up attending church. They're probably even familiar to you if you're not a Christian and you haven't been reading the Bible a whole lot. These. These stories have reached our cultural zeitgeist. They're part of the tapestry of who we are in many ways. And so we want to go through these stories to create some clarity about what they're really for. And ultimately, we want to understand more about the nature of God and the nature of ourselves through them. So Genesis 3 is where we're going to be. We're going to talk about Adam and Eve and the fall of man, many call it. And this is one of those stories that can become so familiar to you, by the way, that you can forget how strange and complicated and beautiful and interesting that it really is.
[00:01:07] So we want to make sure that we take the time to do this really, really well to understand the depth that the story is trying to reach with us, to help us understand something about our souls and not just an old tale from when we were young. And so a lot of, you know, the basic outline of the creation story in Adam and Eve. Right. God creates Adam and Eve.
[00:01:24] He places them in a beautiful garden. There's a tree from which they're not supposed to eat. In the middle of that garden, a serpent appears. They eat the fruit, sinner enters into the world, and Adam and Eve are then pushed out of the garden. Okay, congratulations. You did it.
[00:01:40] The lesson that I remember taking away and then maybe you did, too, was, okay, God gave them a rule, and then they broke the rule, and then everything went wrong from there all the way to where we're at right now.
[00:01:53] And that's part of it.
[00:01:55] But Genesis 3 is a lot better than that. It's a lot deeper than that. It's more complicated, really. It's about what happens when human beings stop trusting the goodness of God.
[00:02:06] It's about what happens when shame enters into the human heart. And it's about our instinct to hide, cover, and accuse and blame.
[00:02:15] And maybe most importantly, it's about a God who comes walking over to our hiding places and asks us a really important question.
[00:02:24] We'll have more on that here in a bit.
[00:02:27] Okay, so to understand what goes wrong in Genesis 3, the fall of man, we have to first remember what goes right in Genesis 1 and 2.
[00:02:34] And the Bible begins with this kind of overwhelming goodness. Light is good in the creation story, and land is good and plants are good, and animals are good, and human beings are very good.
[00:02:46] The scripture tells us.
[00:02:48] And so the first picture scripture gives us of God is not this like kind of angry deity God that's looking to part the clouds and look to judge someone. Instead, it's about this God that is full of goodness and beauty and abundance and life. And through that fullness then creates something beautiful from that place.
[00:03:08] And so then God forms man from the dust of the ground and breathes into him the breath of life.
[00:03:12] God plants a garden. God causes the trees to grow that are pleasing to the eye and good for food. God creates companionship, God gives meaningful work, and God gives Adam and Eve one another.
[00:03:26] Okay? And so you have to listen to the generosity in God's words as we jump into this text. Genesis 2, verse 16 through 17 says this. You're free to eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat from, from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
[00:03:44] And so again, if we allow ourselves to be a little too familiar with the story, we can begin to think that this is about this tree that we're just not supposed to. It's about this kind of prohibition that God has created.
[00:03:56] We could tell our story that God created this one beautiful tree placed in the middle of an empty field and then say, don't touch it. But that's not the truth of the matter. That's not the core of the subject.
[00:04:06] He says, you may eat from every tree in the garden except for this one.
[00:04:14] Now maybe if you have kids, you've experienced something like this before. I remember one of our kids, there's always one kid, if you have a couple of them that is just really intrigued by how hot the stove is.
[00:04:24] And I'm looking at this child that's three years old and I'm going, you can go anywhere in the house except by this hot stove right now. This is going to be my little dominion. And of course, where does that little 3 year old want to go? Ooh, heat and warmth. Shiny lights here at the top of the thing. Don't touch. This is the one spot.
[00:04:43] There's something in a lot of our natures, right, that wants to go in this direction, much like the story of Adam and Eve. But the emphasis, the emphasis in scripture is on freedom. It's about abundance and it's about gift.
[00:04:56] There's trees everywhere, there's food every everywhere, there's beauty everywhere.
[00:05:01] And God has withheld almost nothing. And the garden is this kind of picture of this trusting relationship that God wants to have with us.
[00:05:10] And so Adam and Eve aren't asked to understand everything.
[00:05:13] God doesn't over explain everything. They're asked to trust the one who gave them life and created them in the first place. And so God in essence, through the scripture, is saying to them and saying to us, trust me to define what is good, trust me to know what gives life, and trust that what I have given you is actually enough.
[00:05:39] And so that means that this whole story isn't about, you know, fruit and gardens. The central issue, the central theme of this story is about trust and trusting God.
[00:05:50] So can God be trusted? Would be the question that I've asked in my life many times. And maybe you have too, because that's what happens. Beneath my spiritual struggles is ultimately I'm asking the question, is this God trustworthy?
[00:06:04] And so can we trust God with all kinds of things, right? Your future, your relationships, your sexuality, your money. Can God be trusted to do.
[00:06:12] Can God be trusted when you don't understand exactly what God is doing? Or this is my favorite. Can God be trusted? When someone else seems to be receiving something that I don't have, that's when I have a hard time trusting God. If we're all miserable at the same time, I can trust God in that space.
[00:06:31] Have you noticed that?
[00:06:33] But if you're doing a whole lot better than me and I would deem myself to be a little bit more faithful than you, then I've got a God problem.
[00:06:41] I'm having a hard time trusting in the middle of that. Has anybody else ever celebrated someone else's faults?
[00:06:48] You know, someone does something wrong or they get in trouble for the thing and you go, well, my life's not great, but it's not yours.
[00:06:57] All right, I've got some kind of justification for how I've been living.
[00:07:03] But we experience this a lot. It's impossible to not compare ourselves to other people, to the neighbor down the street or the family member, to somebody on the other side of town or somebody on the other side of the world, right? Our connectivity through social medias and technology, we can see how other people are doing. We have a. A regular scoreboard about how well someone else is doing in comparison to us all of the time. And in that time, if I allow myself to compare myself to people that have more, are doing more, seem happier, in those moments, I will have a difficult time trusting that God loves me like he does others.
[00:07:40] And so Genesis 3 begins with Genesis 3, verse 1. It says, now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals that the Lord God had made.
[00:07:49] And so the serpent approaches the woman and then asks, did God really say you must not eat from any tree in the garden?
[00:07:58] So serpent's smart, right? I want you to notice what the serpent does. It doesn't begin with this direct denial of God. God's not real, doesn't exist, all these things. Don't even worry about it. That's just a myth. Instead, the serpent begins with this simple distortion.
[00:08:10] God had said, you're free to eat from any tree except for one. And then the serpent reframes it.
[00:08:16] Did God really say, you can't eat from any tree?
[00:08:20] So he begins to create this idea for Eve that God's abundance is actually deprivation.
[00:08:28] The serpent wants Eve to stop looking at everything that God has given and become fixated on the one thing that God has withheld, the one thing. Don't look at the abundance, look at the deprivation.
[00:08:38] And temptation does this to ourselves, too. It narrows our vision right in our own temptation. Here and now. We stop when we fail to see the entire garden that is available to us, and we see only the forbidden tree instead. And so then the serpent continues. He said, you won't. You will not certainly die. For God knows that when you eat from it, your eyes will be open, and then you will be like God.
[00:09:02] So there's this question of trust about God. And now enters the issue of pride for humanity.
[00:09:09] Because the serpent would say, make no mistake, God is holding out on you.
[00:09:16] God's command is to protect you. It's meant to control you. And so the serpent attacks what? The character of God. Not the existence of God, but instead the character of God.
[00:09:27] And here's the reason why. Because once you and I, and once Adam and Eve become suspicious of God's word, goodness, disobedience begins to look really, really okay and reasonable.
[00:09:41] Because if God's not good, then why should we obey Him? What's the point in the first place?
[00:09:46] And then if God becomes our competitor, right, instead of our Creator, then perhaps we actually need to take life into our own hands, which may be our greatest temptation.
[00:09:57] In Genesis tells us that the woman saw the fruit was good for food pleasing to the eye and desirable for gaining.
[00:10:05] So she took and ate it. And she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it. And this isn't as simple as the breaking of, like, some kind of arbitrary rule, you understand?
[00:10:14] This is the defining moment of humanity saying, we will determine what is good and evil for our own selves. We will define wisdom. We will take the place of the Creator.
[00:10:27] Because temptation isn't simply about doing something bad or wanting to do something bad. This temptation is to become our own God. That. That's the entire idea behind the story, and that is our effort when we make a decision actively to sin against God.
[00:10:42] That temptation hasn't gone away just because we're here. And now in 2026, we still hear the same voice that says, you don't need to actually trust God. We should secure our own future for ourselves. We should take what we want and what we can get now, because I'm pretty sure that God won't give it to me in the end.
[00:11:00] And so the serpent offers not just a temptation to Adam and Eve, but he offers this freedom from the bondage that God is offering.
[00:11:11] But here's the trick and what we know from the rest of the story, if you know the rest of the story, instead of becoming free, they actually become afraid.
[00:11:21] And even though sin has this promise, have you noticed this, this promise that you'll finally become all of yourself, you'll finally become who you really are, but it actually separates us from God, whose image we were created in in the first place.
[00:11:36] And Genesis 3 says, this says, when the eyes of both of them were opened, and then they realized that they were naked. So this is important because you have to remember that in Genesis 2:25, it says, Adam and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame.
[00:11:51] That's the most important description of human wholeness. Maybe in all of Scripture, they were fully known. They were fully known to each other and to God, and they felt no shame.
[00:12:01] Who among us in this room will be fully known to everyone else in this room? We don't have to talk about nakedness right now, but who among us will be fully known to this room and not experience a pretty substantial amount of shame?
[00:12:12] If we posted all of your doings and all of your thoughts from this last week here on this screen, would you not feel shame? Of course you would.
[00:12:20] So there's something sacred and beautiful about this. To be completely known to others and completely known to God and to feel no shame. And now this has gone away because there was nothing to conceal before. They were open before God and one another. And now they feel exposed and afraid.
[00:12:37] And so what do they do is they sew fig leaves together to then cover their nakedness.
[00:12:44] Now, I haven't checked this with Dr. Brandt Himes. This is my thought, is that this is the first human attempt at achieving salvation all on our own.
[00:12:56] I know what to do with my shame and my sin and my separateness. I will create a covering for myself that will manage my appearance.
[00:13:06] Now, maybe we're not talking about fig leaves for you.
[00:13:09] Maybe when you feel bad or you feel like you want to run and hide, maybe it's not fig leaves that you go and you fashion together. Maybe some of you, that's a weird practice, but maybe for you, it's like you can hide behind your accomplishments or your religious performance, or behind your humor and anger or busyness and your online identity, or maybe this kind of lofty idea of yourself as this incredibly independent person. We can hide behind all kinds of things.
[00:13:38] I'm one of those people that loves to make jokes when I'm nervous.
[00:13:42] I like to laugh. I like to hide behind humor so that sometimes you might think I'm a better person than I really am.
[00:13:49] That's what all these jokes that happen during these sermons are. They're just a total cover up.
[00:13:55] But you know it when you do it. You know what your mechanism is in order to cover up your vulnerabilities.
[00:14:02] When you feel exposed, you cover. And so because we do this, the reason that we do this, excuse me, is that we imagine that God loves far more the person that we pretend to be, as opposed to the person that we really are. We love this idea that if we just cover up enough and we put enough stuff on that God will then love the person who has covered up who he created us to be, and not the person that we actually are.
[00:14:28] And then it says in Genesis 3, verse 8, it says, then 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, as was his custom with Adam and Eve, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
[00:14:41] Now this, this is one of the saddest pieces of the text for me. It says they hide among the trees, right?
[00:14:48] The irony is that the trees were given to them as a gift. And now their joy is replaced with fear. Fear.
[00:14:55] And this place that they used to simply exist in and exist in with God has now just become a hiding shelter.
[00:15:03] And why is it it's because sin has changed the way that they see God. And sin does the same thing to us.
[00:15:11] And so as a, as a dad who is incredibly fallible, I imagine what my first words would have been to Adam and Eve after this.
[00:15:21] I remember when we had the pandemic lockdown. Stuff had just started and I was with my kids, My son was 5, my daughter was 3, and my wife was working as a travel nurse, going to different ers to try to help out with just all the overwhelm that was happening in hospitals. And so I was at home sometime for like a week at a time with my 3 and 5 year old all by myself.
[00:15:43] You know, feel bad for me, not the person that was working in the error.
[00:15:49] And I remember one of these times I was walking down this kind of narrow staircase that we had and there's this little door frame at the bottom and my kids did this thing. I don't know if you've ever seen kids do this. They will see that you are walking through a doorway or a narrow pathway and decide, this is a great time to pass.
[00:16:07] What are you doing?
[00:16:10] And usually it's like their little heads that get bounced off the door jamb and that feels like justice to me. You know, I'm like, well, this is okay.
[00:16:17] And this time my son cut me off and I moved over and my foot was right on the wall. And then I hit just my pinky toe on the door frame. And I never went and got it looked at, but I'm pretty sure it was broken. And right in that moment, I was not experiencing the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
[00:16:35] And I looked at Joel, you know, Fiverr said, what are you doing?
[00:16:39] You gotta think about it, man. And he's like, I'm thinking about running downstairs to go play with you. Like, what's on? Going, going on? I'm like grabbing.
[00:16:48] I can't.
[00:16:50] You know, all the things that I've said, every reaction that I have, sometimes I get hit in the nose. I feel a little extra sensitive when I get hit in the nose. Even if it's just gently. I can't. What's wrong with you? You know, have you ever said that to somebody? What is. What's wrong with you?
[00:17:04] I would say this. I would say, how could you? I would say, how. What is wrong with you? Why, why can't you ever understand this and get this right? I made this abundantly clear. Why can't you listen?
[00:17:12] But God doesn't say that. God calls out to the man. Instead, something else he Says, where are you?
[00:17:20] That might be one of the most important questions asked in all of Scripture. From God to a human being, where are you?
[00:17:28] Not this question of, where should you be, Adam? Or where do you pretend to be? Or not, where do other people think you are? Right? God's asking, where are you? Hiding in shame, afraid of being known?
[00:17:40] Because I want you to understand that God's question to them is not God being a really bad player of hide and seek. It's not God walking around in the garden going, well, I'll be darned.
[00:17:50] Those two, I always find them.
[00:17:53] Son of a gun Adam, you know, he knows.
[00:18:01] And the question is to reestablish this relational connection, it's God going out of his way to be connected to them again.
[00:18:11] And so this is a question that's asked all throughout Scripture, right? To Cain, God asks, where's your brother? To Elijah, God asks, what are you doing here? To Hagar, God asks, where have you come from? Where are you going? To Jesus disciples, he says, who do you say that I am? To, Peter, he says, do you love me?
[00:18:27] Now, maybe this is an important question because maybe we should ask it for ourselves today. And maybe we should see where we are.
[00:18:36] Ask ourselves, where am I right now? Not where do I wish I was? Not where am I pretending to be when I'm at work or with my family or my friends? Maybe we need to begin by telling the truth about ourselves. Because grace actually begins when we stop hiding and instead we understand the truth about ourselves.
[00:19:01] The greatest. And I think I've told a similar story to this before, so I'll make it quick. The greatest exposure I remember that I ever experienced as a kid was in high school when I played high school football. And we would play games on Friday and then we would have film study on Sunday.
[00:19:15] And boy, oh, boy, if you ever want to have the feeling that there's actually nowhere to hide except for under your chair, it's with a varsity football coach telling you everything that you did wrong.
[00:19:25] And he would pause the screen. You know what I'm saying? Everybody look at Fleming. Look at number 88 over here.
[00:19:32] Is he in the right place? You know, the whole room. No.
[00:19:38] I'm so sorry.
[00:19:42] It was this feeling of exposure, right? And I. Man, I never got used to that feeling.
[00:19:48] I never got used to that brutal honesty of seeing myself on screen, being in a place that I wasn't supposed to be.
[00:19:55] But what I learned, and Coach Steve Proc is one of my heroes to this day. And I think it's because of experiences and relationships like this, because he would tell me the truth about where I was.
[00:20:07] And then after the film was turned off and we would begin another practice week, he would show me exactly where I belonged. Now we have to have that kind of relationship with God, this brutal honesty. We have to be able to see ourselves for where we are, because. Because that's where grace begins.
[00:20:28] And so then sin turns this relationship into accusation. And this is one of my favorite parts of this entire story. Adam answers God after he says, where are you? And he says, I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid. Now, notice this new word to Adam's vocabulary, afraid. He hasn't felt fear before, and now he feels afraid. Fear's entered the relationship for the first time. He. And then God asks Adam whether Adam is eaten from the tree. And Adam responds, here's the thing.
[00:21:00] This woman that you put here with me, she gave me some fruit from the tree and I ate it.
[00:21:09] Now, I love that he doesn't just, like, confess, right? He instead makes the decision to blame Eve. But then he doesn't even just blame Eve. He also likes to give God some strays to catch, right? It says, this woman you put here with me.
[00:21:23] This woman that you put here with me.
[00:21:29] Look, there's three of us around here, and two of us are the problem.
[00:21:33] And I don't know God and Eve, but you guys gotta fix your stuff quickly.
[00:21:38] You gave me a bad partner, and you're a bad partner.
[00:21:46] In other words, he's saying, like, yes, I ate, but this is your fault.
[00:21:50] You gave me this woman. You created the circumstances. You did all this stupid stuff with the trees.
[00:21:56] You put me in this garden. And we, as humanity, have been repeating Adam's defense ever since he presented it for the first time.
[00:22:06] I know what I did was wrong, but you have to understand what they did.
[00:22:11] I know I hurt them, but I was hurt first.
[00:22:14] I know I disobeyed, but God should not have allowed me to be in that situation in the first place.
[00:22:21] And then the woman continues this on. She actually takes after Adam's lead, and she says, well, the serpent deceived me and I ate.
[00:22:30] The man blames the woman, and then the woman blames the serpent. And everyone looks for someone else to carry the guilt.
[00:22:40] And the big sadness, tragedy. That's a part of this particular piece is that Adam and Eve were created specifically to stand together.
[00:22:51] And now they stand against one another. They're enemies.
[00:22:55] Gosh, when we see this pattern, you guys, it's everywhere. It's in friendships, it's in marriages, it's in families, it's in workplaces, it's in churches, it's in politics.
[00:23:05] And we love this idea that maybe someone else, when they do something wrong, we love to blame them and expose them. For, like, this is their full character, right? I'll give you an example. When I lose my temper, I need you all to understand. And I never lose my temper, ever. I know that's easy for you to imagine I lose my temper. You guys, I love to say that when I lose my temper, it's because I'm under pressure. Okay, so you don't understand. The thing that all of you are doing to me is putting me in a position where I get to be angry.
[00:23:34] I get to be angry.
[00:23:37] When you lose your temper, I need you to understand it's because you're an angry person.
[00:23:45] When I speak harshly, I need you to know I'm having a tough day.
[00:23:48] And when you speak harshly, I need you to know this reveals who you are at your soul level.
[00:23:55] Man, we love it.
[00:23:59] I wonder today if Genesis 3 in the story of Adam and Eve is inviting us to stop blaming each other long enough for us to tell the truth about ourselves.
[00:24:11] Again. Healing begins when we stop giving God our explanations and we slow down long enough to give something that's far more valuable than our explanations. And that's our confession.
[00:24:24] Confession to one another, confession to God. Now that's for some of you today, I really believe maybe it's in your marriage or in your friendships, your relationships.
[00:24:35] God is asking you today to stop creating a better argument to defend yourself.
[00:24:46] Instead, God is inviting you into an opportunity to confess.
[00:24:51] And in those vulnerable places, we actually create long lasting relationships.
[00:24:59] Now, I want you to understand as we get ready to close that the consequences of Adam and Eve's rebellion are known. And they're severe.
[00:25:07] And the harmony of creation is fractured. Work becomes painful. Childbearing is now childbirth, excuse me, is marked by suffering.
[00:25:17] The ground itself is affected. Human beings are exiled from the garden. And then death enters into the human story.
[00:25:24] And so the Bible doesn't minimize the destructiveness of this. But I need you to understand again, the greater lesson from the story is that God does something beautiful in the middle of this that could be easy to overlook. And it says in Genesis 3:21, says the Lord, God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.
[00:25:45] And so Adam and Eve had made these coverings out of fig leaves that were insufficient.
[00:25:49] And so God covers them.
[00:25:52] And so Even after this rebellion, the one thing that I told you not to do, God doesn't abandon them.
[00:26:02] The God who they hid from is still covering their shame. And this is still the promise for humanity. So again, this entire sermon series, we're trying to help us understand something about the nature of ourselves. And we're helping to try and understand the nature of God. And so the nature of ourselves is that we have a tendency to be extremely prideful, to want to make ourselves God in our own lives. Lives. We have a tendency to blame other people and refuse confession. And so what about the nature of God can we learn in this?
[00:26:31] The simple lesson is this, is that he loves us.
[00:26:35] Now I'm going to tell you a really early 2000s Christian story as we close a lot of. You know, I started pastoring at the age of 19 in Klamath Falls. I was doing a young adult ministry. And, you know, and really I just did it because I made 200 bucks a month, which was my rent, if you can believe that. I slept in a closet with the clothes.
[00:26:57] It's great. It's a good time. College was great.
[00:27:00] And I remember we started, you know, I'm trying to pastor this thing and it's starting to grow and I'm trying to get people to do music and met this guy named Josh Hutchinson that was a really great musician. He was leading us in worship and.
[00:27:11] And he.
[00:27:12] He led a lot of the stuff that was kind of popular at the time. Right. It was big mighty to save time. God is able time. And, you know, for those of you who are around church in the early 2000s, maybe you know, some of the music.
[00:27:23] And then he sang the song that we sang last in. In worship today. He sang How He Loves.
[00:27:31] And I remember that first time that sloppy wet kiss thing came out and everybody about peed their pants.
[00:27:38] What did that. This is a explicit thing happened in a church setting. We're pretty far away from the old hymns of old, you know, like all this stuff. And I remember hearing it and being like, this is weird to me. I've never heard a lyric like this in all of my Christendom. And it sparked such a controversy again for us really hardcore Christians at the time. You can sit and laugh at us if you want, where people are like, well, we love the song, so we should probably sub out the that lyric maybe, you know. And so then the debate became unforeseen kiss and sloppy wet.
[00:28:12] And so you would ask, oh, you sing that song. Are you a unforeseen or a sloppy wet kind of person.
[00:28:17] You know, sometimes Christians are so dumb.
[00:28:24] I kind of got tired of talking about it, so we shelved the song at the time. We're like, oh, we're just not gonna play it. That's. I don't wanna. I don't wanna talk about it.
[00:28:33] And.
[00:28:34] And then I learned. And this isn't. By the way, I don't share these stories about, like, fatherhood and parenting and stuff, because I. That's a value statement. I want you to know, if you're single or you're married and don't have kids or whatever, that. That is incredible. And God is calling you into that purpose, and you're doing an incredible thing and understanding God in a way that I won't because of your lived experience. But for me, God taught me this lesson through fatherhood. So I heard this song in college. My wife and I got married. We ended up having kids, kids several years down the road. And I began to think about this song again.
[00:29:04] And what I noticed is I would do is I would play with my son and I'd wrestle with him on the ground, and, you know, we would do whatever. And then so many times in the middle of that, he'd be laughing, I'd be tickling, and I'd grab his face and I just go on his cheek. And what do the kids do? They go, ah.
[00:29:23] And I would go, yeah, I got you.
[00:29:27] I noticed this a little while ago. Like, a couple weeks ago, I was coaching my son's baseball game.
[00:29:32] You know, I'm the manager of the team, and my son hits a home run, comes off. He takes his helmet off, and I grab his face and I go on his cheek. And he does the same thing that he did when he was, like, three years old, you know, and what this is, there's something about this. This feeling that is the he and my daughter, they're the only ones, that there's just this real connection, this affinity, this ridiculous kind of love. Now, we sing songs that often sound like, you know, God on his throne and parting the clouds and dictating to us and all these things. And this is a song that's just about this raw, unfiltered, I love you so much kind of connection. And that's what Genesis 3 is telling us about. That even in all of our doubt, and even in all of our pride and all of our sin, sinfulness, that God would fashion clothes, that he would embrace us and that he would walk with us, even in the middle of our own exile, this is the greatness of God. With us and then expressed perfectly in the presence of Jesus on this earth.
[00:30:32] That's what this whole thing is about.
[00:30:34] And so I want you to see this connection with God that Adam and Eve have that you have today. It's not this, this uppity look down your nose at humanity connection. It's this sloppy, wet embrace, caring for. I will be with you in every single moment of every day. Call me anytime. I will pick you up. Whatever it is that is that relationship with God that we have, that's the nature of God.
[00:31:00] And so the story of Adam and Eve isn't about these two people that lived long ago. It's our story. And we can know this and experience this today.
[00:31:08] Maybe you know what it's like to mistrust God. And maybe you know what it's like to feel. Feel shame. This idea that you haven't just done something wrong, but that you are wrong and dysfunctional at your core.
[00:31:18] I bet you know what it's like to be afraid to be fully known.
[00:31:25] But Genesis 3 also reveals this thing about God, that he truly and deeply loves us.
[00:31:33] And so my challenge to you today as we close and we take. Take time for communion, my challenge to you today is that instead of explanation and argument, that when we hear God in this moment ask where we are, that we would simply walk from the trees and out of our hiding and all of who we are. And we would say, here I am.
[00:31:57] And that we would point to the things around us and we would say, and this is something that I cannot face on my own.
[00:32:05] I need you.
