It’s Not Good (Genesis 2:18)

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I feel like as long as we got a reception for people afterwards in the lobby, we’ll just make that a reception for Jake as well. So y’all have a chance to say goodbye to him. It was great having you here. You lasted longer than we thought you would. So on a serious note, though, do come say hi to Jake after the service, and perhaps Hannah as well. Maybe you noticed when she walked in she’s got a lecture bling on her left hand today. Congratulations. Yes, very exciting. Very exciting. All right. With that, please go ahead grab your Bibles, you can open up to page two. Page two. We will be in Genesis two today. We finished revelation right last page of the Bible, just starting over. I guess that’s that’s how this is working. No, that’s not what we’re doing, but still kind of fun. So we’ll be in Genesis 218, to 25 today. As you turn in there, if you’ve been to the zoo. You might never have heard the term, but you certainly know what the idea of zoo Kosis is. Zoo Kosis, which is when you know a lion, for example, paces back and forth in its enclosure all day, every day, wearing ruts in the ground. And they call it zoo Kosis because, of course, everyone knows watching this, that’s not the way it’s supposed to be like. This is not what this is not what the lion was made for, even though, ironically, of course, this little enclosure was made for the lion. Even still, though it’s not his home looks like Africa, but it isn’t. He got the wrong animals. You know, not supposed to have gray squirrels around now, supposed to hear the American robin singing and stuff like that. You got people staring, taking photos, talking loudly, you know, all day, all this is causing anxiety in the lion you’re smelling hot dogs and churros, which is not their diet, as best I can tell, fed well, of course, but at the same time, without getting to hunt. And so there’s like that piece that’s missing as well. Now, why do I bring this up? We are not caged in the same way, of course, as humans. And yet it is an apt metaphor for our contemporary existence. We are humans living in an inhuman culture. And the irony, of course, is that we built it. We’re the only species that could design an environment not meant for ourselves. But why is it that we have this inhuman culture now that we we’ve created, we’ve designed for ourselves, it’s because we have misconceived humans, who we are, what we are meant for. We have a bad anthropology. In other words, now this shows up in all sorts of areas. We could get into a lot of them, I’m sure, but we’re going to focus on just one in this series, which is the isolating effects of modern culture. The isolating effects of modern culture. We are no longer really living in community, doing life together. To borrow bonhoeffer’s famous phrase, we are individuals. Period. We’re individuals at this point, we are individuals living parallel lives in so many ways, not truly intersecting. And so yeah, maybe we show up at similar events, but next to each other, not really with each other, your kids baseball game at at a church service, maybe even and so our purpose today is to help us see the problem and just how dire it is, and hopefully then to motivate us to respond with urgency, to lean into community and really do life together. I’ll just say up front, by the way, I’m not talking specifically even about church community, although we’ll hit on that plenty, but I’m just talking about like people in community here. Now, if I’m talking about the problem, of course, that means that today’s gonna be largely negative. This is the diagnosis part, but we will then cast a positive vision in the next two weeks, looking more at the theory next week, and then the practice the week after that, each week, we’re also going to give you a very specific challenge, something to do, to kind of lean into community as we go, but to understand how who we really are. Because again, if it’s our bad anthropology that’s messed us up, we want to get a good anthropology to understand who we really are, what it really means to be human. We got to start at the beginning and how God made us, as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it in answer to its first question, what is our only comfort? It’s that I am not my own but belong body and soul in life and in death, to God, to Jesus Christ. So I’m gonna be reading Genesis 218, to 25 right now. Just a word about how this is happening here. I’m not preaching to 18 to 25 we did that already. Really important to go back, if you weren’t here, it was probably about eight years ago. We need the Genesis one to 11 series. So foundational. You cannot understand anything else in the Bible if you don’t have, especially these first three chapters down. So go back and listen to that, by all means. But just now, I’m gonna be pulling from all three chapters in a lot of ways, as we focus in on this idea of community. So let me read chapter two, though verses 18 to 25 here, the Lord God said, it is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him. And the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them, and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky, and all the wild animals. But for Adam, no suitable helper was found. So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. And while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. And Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. The man said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called Woman, for she was taken out of man. That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh. Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame. All right, so let’s look first of all at the need like how God made us. It’s a fascinating moment that I read there in verse 18. If you read from the beginning, read Genesis one as well, you’ll see that seven times. And that’s not coincidental. We just spent a lot of time in Revelation. You know, seven is important, right? That’s the perfect number, seven times. In Genesis, one God says it’s good, including the climactic seventh declaration, when he says it’s very good. It’s very good. In fact, all of Genesis. One is written to show, not a chronology a science textbook. This is how God made the world. That’s not its point. Its point is to show the perfection of the world that God made. And so it should shock us. Then when we get to 218 and all of a sudden, God Himself says, Oh, that’s not good. That’s not good. You’re going, What do you mean? You designed this perfect place? What is not good? There is something wrong in God’s perfect creation, and what is it? It’s the fact that Adam is alone and he can’t do what God made him to do by himself. He needs a suitable helper, suitable helper, and that phrase means somebody who’s going to help him, of course, do what he’s called to do in a complimentary way. Was a terrible analogy, the best one I could think of at the time. I was gone all week, so this was a rushed process, but like a pitching battery, like if you want to baseball pitching, you got to have a pitcher and a catcher you ever played, like outside his kids or something, you know, not the catcher. It’s really irritating, isn’t it, you throw the ball, they swing and miss, and then it’s like a four minute break while you’re waiting for this as bad as football at that point, you know, like, just all the I thought that get more reaction, okay? But no, soccer just keeps going, is all I’m saying. So, so you need both if you’re going to do what you’re meant to do, which is get the batter out, of course. Now what did Adam need help doing? Interestingly, we’re not told here we got it in chapter one. You can’t make sense of Genesis two without Genesis one. So we have to go back to the last chapter, where we were already told, here’s Genesis 127, and 28 So God created mankind in his own image. And the image of God, He created them, male and female. He created them. God blessed them and said to them, and here it is, Be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground. Now, Adam certainly cannot be fruitful on his own. We know how that works. Peepee just helped us, in fact, with that we can’t fill the earth either, though, because what’s meant to happen here is we got the Garden of Eden, which is almost like this temple that God has built where he’s going to dwell with humanity. We’re supposed to take that Adam and Eve are supposed to take that and cover the earth with it, so that the whole earth is filled with the knowledge of the glory of God. So that’s what we are supposed to do. We can’t going back to our opening analogy design at Habitat for ourselves. Though, if we don’t understand ourselves and understand what we’re made for, we see here that we have an other, centered, communal purpose. Does that make sense? I’m not meant to live by myself. God for myself, but I’m supposed to live in community for God. So an other capital O, other centered communal purpose, to see God’s glory fill the earth, to see his kingdom come. Now, God didn’t mess up, of course, wasn’t like he woke up on, you know, the sixth day, or sometime in the afternoon or whatever, and was like, oh, man, this isn’t going to work. Is it like? No, of course not. He’s teaching Adam his need. And so he brings them all the animals. He names them all. But at the end of it, we see, nope, that’s not going to work. None of these are good enough. No pet can replace a person. So God finishes his work, the work he intended to do all along, puts Adam into a deep sleep, fashions Eve from his rib, and she is like him, and yet a compliment to him at the same time, this is who he’d been waiting for. And so he breaks into poetry, and we get the first marriage, which is good as we talk about community. Of course, this is the deepest, the fullest intimacy that we can experience in this life, because it’s the only relationship that is a one flesh union. A lot of other important relationships. Of course, when we come to the church, that is a one spirit union, equally important as well. But we see here the importance of community and how powerful community can be in our lives. Because what do we hear about Adam and Eve? They’re fully known, naked. Nothing’s hidden, right, fully known and yet fully loved, accepted. There’s no shame. Because, of course, there’s no reason to be ashamed yet, so we gotta make sure we understand this. Then, if we’re going to design a habitat, a culture for ourselves, it needs to include people, community. We were made for community. We were made to be outward facing. Jesus himself sums it up, to love God, to live for His glory, and then to love our neighbor, there’s the communal purpose, which means any cultural tendencies that we have toward self centered isolation are contrary to God’s design and will mess us up. Will mess us up because we’re not doing what we were made for. It would be like using your lawn mower to cut rope. You think, why not? It’s a blade, right? Works. It’s fine, but what happens if you cut rope with a lawn mower? It tangles around. And because the blade’s still trying to spin, the engine is eventually going to literally blow a gasket, at which point the owner will figuratively blow a gasket. I know from personal experience, by the way, we’re not trying to cut a rope. Okay, I knew that wasn’t its purpose, but got one still, and that was the end of my lawnmower. But if we live as we were designed, well that’s much better. That’s like using a lawnmower to cut grass. And this has been confirmed for us over and over and over again. Here’s just one example, a famous grant study that was done at Harvard across decades studying the importance of people community, and they found one thing talk about marriage specifically, which again, fits our text, Genesis two and all that, but having a good marriage at age 50 predicted positive aging at Age 80, whereas low cholesterol did not isn’t that interesting? I’ve shared these stats before, too. That’s coming from a different study, but the same idea to be well connected, like having friends, despite living an unhealthy lifestyle, heavy drinking, smoking, poor diet. I hear all that by the way, you know what I’m picturing. Norm from cheers, right? Like the kind of person who hangs out in a dive bar, overweight drinks too much all the rest, but he had friends, didn’t he? So somebody like that will live longer on average than your vegan marathoner with no friends. Isn’t that fascinating? Do I get an amen right there? That’s amazing. Who’s in Lee’s journey group, we got some we got some work to do here. But isn’t that fascinating? You would be like, No, your diet, your lifestyle choices matter more than No. They don’t, not even for your health. In the end, that’s how important people are to people so George valent, who oversaw the grant study for three decades, he concludes this. He says the 75 years and $20 million expended on the grant study points to a straightforward five word conclusion, happiness is love. Full stop, happiness is. Is Love. Live the way God intended, in other words, and you will experience the blessing God intended. But what happens if we don’t you pluck a leaf from a tree, it withers. Pull a log from the fire, it burns out. And this is a great danger in light of current trends. Robert Putnam catalog, some of these in Bowling Alone, there’s been a 58% drop in club memberships, like, who belongs to a club anymore? What a quaint notion at this point in our culture. 43% drop in family dinners. 35% drop in having friends over all of this is about a decade old at this point, those numbers are not getting better, I promise you, that. And here’s the one that always scares me the most. In 19 93% of men reported having no close friends today. And again, this is a few years old already, that number has risen to 15% and 28% for men under 30, no close friends. You want to know why we have school shootings? That’s it, right there. Like that’s the answer. How important this is to us. That’s not how God made us, but it is how our culture is rapidly unmaking us, and we know it’s happening. I don’t think I need to convince any of you that these are our trends. So we need to know why if we’re going to really address them. So takes us to the second point, the problem how culture unmakes us. Now, what I read for you was a lovely passage filled with goodness, but there were tiny hints of what’s coming. For example, it says they were naked and felt no shame. Now, why would you mention that? Unless you knew shame was coming? That’s like saying they were naked and they were not blue and pink polka dotted. You’re like, right? That’s a dumb thing to say. No. We’re saying it because we know that everyone reading it goes, Oh, but we feel shame. We feel shame. And then we also saw, in verse 20, man gave names all the livestock, birds in the sky, and all the wild animals. Next time we read the phrase wild animals, chapter three, verse one, Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. So we know what’s coming when that serpent slithers in and seduces us. And how does he do it? By undoing God’s good design. I mean, right there. The fact that you got one of the wild animals ruling over humanity means we’ve flipped God’s design on its head, but we’re talking community today. So what are we talking about? We go from this outward facing, communal purpose to inward facing, selfish desires. Satan says, Eat the fruit and you will be like God. You get to decide for your self what makes you happy, no matter who gets hurt in the process. And by the way, everybody gets hurt in the process. Right after it happens, Adam’s blaming Eve. There’s marital conflict, first time in history. And then we get Cain murders his brother Abel, because Abel was a threat to his carefully constructed identity, and then you get Lamech by the end of the next chapter, chapter four, boasting in his murder. It is not good to be alone. And yet now humanity is bent inward. There’s this centripetal force, selfish sin that’s constantly pulling us away from people. So he did Easter egg hunt. I was here for that, and I at one point, spun the bucket. Always fun, right? It was some kid’s mind. I absolutely blew when I did this. I don’t remember who it was. It wasn’t my boys, but it was somebody like that anyway, and they were like the bucket was upside down, and none of the eggs fell out. Like, what? What dark magic is this? Of course, we know what it is, even if we forget the terms. There is a centrifugal force that’s happening right when you swing the bucket, all the eggs want to go, but there’s a bucket, right? And so that bucket is pushing back against us, the centripetal force pushing it back in. Okay? So that’s what we’re like now. Our design, the way God made us, is to go out like the A’s, and then sin is this bucket that entraps us keeps pushing us back in on ourselves. So what happens then, to community? Well, at that point, we begin to use people to meet our own needs. This is counterfeit community. And of course, it’s antithetical to everything Christ taught us. We’re supposed to have the same mindset as Christ, who looked not to his own interests but the interests of others. And now we go, yeah, but my interests are the most important one. And you’re sitting there going, I know all this, and yeah, I’ve seen people like that. That’s not me, though. I live in community. I’m here today, aren’t I? Let me ask you a few questions. You ever avoided someone who annoys you? Is there someone in the room right now that you avoid? You see him coming and you kind of go, I could walk through the Pew this way. Have you ever said what people want to hear instead of what you know you should say because you just don’t want to offend someone cause a big problem? You ever stopped pursuing a person once they couldn’t help you anymore? Or on the flip side, have you ever clung to an unhealthy relationship, like one you know is toxic because you just don’t want to be lonely. And we use people. We are made for community, but we have fallen from that original glory. We have warped God’s design. I am my own and I do what I want. Now I’m in Genesis two and three. That means this has been true since Eden, but something feels different now. So what is that and how does that hurt our pursuit of community? So we gotta do a little cultural exegesis at this point. We gotta interpret culture. If there’s one thing that marks our culture out, especially from cultures in other parts of the world, and of course, in history as well. It’s the culture of autonomy, autonomy, individualism, right? I am my own. This is very different. Again, you grew up, and there are plenty of them in the world today. Grew up in more of a traditional culture versus a modern culture. You know, it’s got a clan feel to it. So it has its own sin tendencies, of course, clannishness, cliquist kind of thing, tribal like these. A lot of these are negative words that we use, so it’s got that, but that’s not us for the most part, in the West. In the West, we are individualists through and through. So we’ve got this culture of autonomy, and we’ve got the crushing burden that it brings also, which is why we’re drowning in anxiety and exhausted all of the time. Here’s the way Alan noble describes it. He calls it the sovereign individualism. I like that the individual is king. In other words, he says, the freedom of sovereign individualism comes at a great price. Once I’m liberate, liberated from all social, moral, natural and religious values, I become responsible for the meaning of my own life. That’s the crushing burden, because you’ve got no god to judge. You think, Well, that sounds nice, fine, but you got no god to judge to say, yes, good. That’s right, that’s what you should be doing. You’ve got no god to approve. You’ve got no god to when you realize you didn’t do what you were supposed to be doing. You’ve got no God to save either. So you got to save yourself, judge yourself, save yourself. And what happens to people again in the process, we have to use them, because now we want, and I would argue, even need others, to recognize and affirm our created identities. That’s what people are for to say, yes, what you’re trying to do, you’re doing it right. And so that’s why we need to be seen. Which explains social media, of course, come back to that. So two trends that increase this isolating, self absorption we see in our culture today. I’m drawing from the work of Korean, German philosopher Byung Chul Han. He’s a philosopher. Get a little dicey. I’m do my best make it as digestible as possible. He talks about the achievement society and digitalization. Those are the two trends, okay, achievement society and digitalization. So achievement society, what do we mean by that? In a tradition, traditional or totalitarian culture, we live in a disciplinary society. So totalitarian culture. Of course, you can picture North Korea, Iran, China, something like that. Even today, that society disciplines its subjects through punishment. People just get, you know, taken away, kind of thing. And of course, this is true. You can picture like an Amish society today, and not that long ago, even in the West, like in a church or something where you excommunicate people, that’s society disciplining again. Excommunication means nothing. Today, in our individualistic culture, you get booted out of a church because of your sin. What do you do? Go down the street the other church, they don’t care. They just want their numbers padded. That means bigger budget, right? Right salary increases for the senior pastor. We love it in a modern culture that doesn’t happen anymore. In modern culture, we have to discipline ourselves through willing self exploitation. Let me say that again. That’s not my phrase. We discipline ourselves through willing self exploitation. We exploit ourselves, in other words, and so our achievement, this is where achievement comes in. Our achievement becomes a means to our identity. No one is saying you can’t anymore. There are like no taboos left in our culture, no one’s saying you can’t, which means not only that you can, but that you should, and that you must do more and be more. I mean, how many of you struggle to just sit that’s achievement society, right there. Well, you’re sitting there going, I should be doing something. I should be doing something. Why? Because my identity depends on my doing something right now, there’s the exhaustion and the anxiety, by the way. This is why you can chart this, all the statistics and stuff, why millennials and Gen Z have a terrible work life balance, even though it’s the first culture to talk about work life balance like that, wasn’t a thing that long ago. And yet these boomers, who didn’t talk that way or whatever, still had it. So why, even though we’ve got all of these policies and rights that give you this I mean, like, paternity leaves, like a year and a half now, like, when was that a thing? Right? You get up and you start farming again. The next morning, it goes on forever. You get more vacation days than ever. And guess what? They don’t take them. We don’t take them. I’m a millennial, so I’ll just say it that way. We don’t take them. I’m guilty of that also, by the way, why millennials, Gen Z much more likely to be answering emails Sunday night? Part of that’s technology, huge part of the problem. Of course, you get the email, you go out and answer it. It’s right here. You go, I can answer it. It’s right here. But part of that’s just this sense of like, I should be doing something, I should be doing something. I should be doing something. It leads to exhaustion. Burnout, just the name of Byun Hans book, by the way, the burnout society leads to anxiety and depression. It’s why we have a mental health crisis. It’s a new kind of health crisis. We conquered bacteria. I mean, we all still die, but, you know, we know what germs are and things like that. So now there’s this new health crisis, and with the explosion of these diagnoses that were just like word of thing earlier, ADHD, borderline personality and again, depression, a lot of causes I don’t like chemical stuff is real, like, don’t hear me say any of that kind of stuff. But byum, he quotes Elaine Ehrenberg here, he says, the depressed individual is unable to measure up. He’s tired of having to become himself. That resonate with any of you, it did with me for sure, tired of having to become himself, because what happens now, you no longer have a task to accomplish, but an identity to actualize and get affirmed every day. Let me give you an example. Just you know what? What I just said, I’ll take my own life here. It’s not I have to write a sermon this week, because I could go done did that, but I have to become a great preacher. When is that ever gonna happen? And how would I even know if it happened, right? And so that’s the difference, right there. It’s no longer I did what I’m supposed to do, but I have to keep becoming who I am, and I need to show it, and have people tell me it every day. Need that dopamine hit over and over and over again. Of course, that leads to that second trend, then digitalization. We express ourselves digitally so that others can affirm us, which means we are outward facing. It’s social media. We’re more connected than ever, right, but we’re not right because it’s outward facing only to meet an inward facing need for approval. Here’s the way chan says it, man, this one hit me hard, and I remember where I was when I read this sentence. That’s how much it hit me. The function of friends is primarily to heighten narcissism by granting attention to the ego exhibited as a commodity. I’m a commodity. Now let me put myself out there as a product, and I am looking for attention. Likes, no, I see people nodding like, Yep, that sounds right. It’s exactly it. I mean, isn’t that what we mean by Facebook friend? And that’s all. It is, somebody who will like my stuff. So I get that dopamine hit. It destroys community because we. Know that online interaction is nothing like physical interaction, and yet we keep going back to it like a dog returning to its vomit. Why? Because without those likes, we feel invisible. We’ve got no one affirming us, approving of us. And think also what that does to community here in that in a digital achievement society driven by sovereign individualism, you have no reason to gather just for the sake of gathering. You can only gather to achieve something if it’s going to serve some purpose, we have instrumentalized community. In other words, community is now just a means to an unholy end. We get together when it contributes to our main purpose in life, our own self absorption, which is why nobody just hangs out anymore, because that’s a waste of time that could be doing something. All right, make no mistake, we bring this into the church. Digitalization, yeah, we got a live stream, which is great, because it means you can fit church into your busy schedule on demand, church achievement society, right? I mean, it’s church is something we can just insert into that identity that we’re trying to create, that we want others to affirm. You know what I mean by that? Right? So big social media trend recently was, you turn yourself into like an action figure or a doll or something. I didn’t fully follow this, but I saw a bunch of them. I saw some of you, in fact. And so what church you know, and you want your again, by the way, that’s how obsessed we are with our identity. I’m gonna call you out on that. Okay, some of you were like, Oh, this is kind of fun, all right. But still, we’re obsessed with ourselves. And what makes me like, those are those little toys that came with the action figure. I got a soccer ball, right? Because that’s who I am, or I got books because I want you all to know I’m learning or something, right? Like, that’s how those functions. Okay, gotta have a Bible, because that tells you about what sort of I’m a church going person. That’s part of what I want you to affirm in me, which mean, again, means we’re gonna be using each other. You think, no, I don’t come to church to use people. Let me tell you a story. It’s from James Wilhoitz book, spiritual formation, as if the church mattered, which is a great title, by the way. He tells this story. He says he met Jose and his wife. They were a young couple. You know, young kids married, of course, successful, and he was especially kind of advancing, but it had put a strain on their marriage. All of this had why? Well, they moved away from family. That’s what you do in an individualistic society, of course, move away from family. So they didn’t have that support system in place, newer to the community, all that kind of stuff. And he’s putting in long hours because you’re achieving so that you can establish your identity, you know, all the rest. Right? So they’re in church, though, because that’s part of their action figure set. And so somebody’s talking to them, you’re hearing about the marriage strain, and they say you need to join a small group so you can find friends and the support that you need already, by the way, I’m concerned. Why did they join a small group to find friends and get the support they need? So we’re already exploitative. We’re already using people well, a few months later, sees Jose again, asks him, how’s it going? We dropped out. We’re not doing small group anymore. Why? We weren’t getting anything out of it, and it was a nuisance to find a sitter every week. Some of you are really uncomfortable right now, because that’s real. What I just said, Let me translate it, in case we missed what was just said. The people I gathered with weren’t helping me to become what I want to be, so they have no value in my life. That’s the problem. That’s how culture, our culture of sovereign individualism is actively unmaking us. You’re the product of the fall and our inward, selfish bent. Is there any hope? So glad you asked. Yes. Third point, the solution gonna shock you guys. I know it. It’s the gospel. You weren’t expecting that. Were you the solution? How the gospel remakes us. Now there is no gospel in this passage because there’s no sin yet, but we get two huge hints in Genesis one and two. I quoted Genesis 127, and 28 right before it verse 26 God says, Let us make mankind in our image. Now that’s the only verse we had. I’m not sure what we would do with that. Probably just a royal we right look when the king says, We are not amused, no, but that’s not what it is. We know from the rest of Bible that we are talking about the Trinity, that our God is one God who exists eternally in three persons, Father, Son. Son and Holy Spirit. Think about what that means. Here’s how Tim Keller says it. It means that ultimate reality is a community of persons who know and love one another. Ultimate Reality, before creation, before any people existed, there was already a community of divine persons. God did not have to create us in order to love, because God is love intrinsically, and he’s been loving since eternity past, the father loving the Son and Spirit, Son, loving the Father and the Spirit, spirit, loving the Father and the Son. So of course, he made us for community, because we were made by a God, made in His image, by a God who is eternally in community. Love is the very fabric of existence. Again, no surprise then that you had to spend $20 million to figure out what the Bible tells you on page one, happiness is love. Of course, it is because God is love and God is happiness. Now we know that God, this God, who exists in community, redeems us. You can see that in chapter three, we get a sacrifice. In 321 we get the promise of the coming Savior in 315 but God redeems us, not just from the punishment of our sin, but from the effects of our sin as well. Thank God. He’s remaking us. He is restoring us like a guy restoring an old, you know, rested over 67 Shelby GT or something like, that’s what he’s doing. He’s making us all things new. We saw the end of it in our last series. He is remaking us, not as individuals, but as a people. He is remaking us as a community. And there’s your second hint here. By the way, it’s so interesting that Genesis two ends with a wedding. What’s interesting about it is because Paul quotes that verse later, man leaves his father and mother, unites his wife to become one flesh. All that he quotes that in Ephesians chapter five, and then he says, right afterwards, this is a great mystery, but I am talking about Christ and the church. This is not about human marriage. This is about Christ and the church. It’s a picture of what’s coming. And this is the community piece, because, of course, I am not the Bride of Christ. We are the bride of Christ. And so that brings us back together. In fact, that’s what the church is. You know what the word church means, the Greek word that stands behind Church, the assembly, the gathering. You can’t be the church unless you gather, and that unbends us, so that we’re not inward any longer. Of course, the Gospel does that we have God’s approval now, we have God’s affirmation in Christ, only in Christ because what he did, not because of what we’ve done. But that means we don’t need to use people to get that affirmation anymore. And so we are freed to love, truly love, not use people. So by placing us in community, God overcomes the achievement society and the digitalization that we talked about. I mean digitalization? No, we’re called to gather. I’ll talk way more about this next week, not to run a digital PR campaign, but to gather. In fact, even our purposeless gatherings, just getting together, have great purpose, because we’re gathering for the sake of loving God and loving neighbor, and not for the sake of doing something, and then we’re called to love and serve. And that overcomes the achievement society, because it constrain love, constrains our freedom. When we talk about, you know, is the state going to discipline us? We’re going to discipline ourselves? No, it’s love, God’s love, that disciplines us for the sake of others in the passage that Hannah read for us earlier, in fact, Galatians 513, you’re called to be free,
but don’t use your freedom to indulge the flesh rather serve one another humbly in love. You notice, by the way, that verse takes care of traditional and modern cultures. And one fell swoop, you’re called to be free. You don’t have to do what your clan tells you to do. But that freedom is not for your sake. It’s you’re free to love now, which means we’re called to a positive freedom, not a negative freedom. Really important. Most of us today, we think of freedom in negative terms. I am free from the Bible conceives of freedom in positive terms. We are free to we are freed to do something, to do what we should. We’re not free from all constraints. No, we are now constrained by love. Let me just give you an example so you know what I’m talking about here. I want to be a good dad. That is a high on my list of prior. Ortiz, that constrains me. I am not free to be a great jazz pianist because I don’t have the time for it. If I’m gonna love my kids the way I think they need to be loved, I’m gonna love you like I think you need to be loved. And by the way, that’s so good you don’t know why, because if I weren’t constrained by that, then it’s just my fault that I’m not a good jazz pianist. I should have been doing more. I should have been doing more. Why did I take that break? Right? There’s the exhaustion, the anxiety. Again, love is the ultimate constraining force. If you’re married, you know what I mean? Once you get married, you don’t get to make your own choices anymore and then have kids, by the way, that really changes it, of course, and that’s what we most need. But here’s the thing, it’s true of all community, not just biological community, right? It constrains us. It remakes us in God’s image, restores us to our original purpose. How we say it here, made to magnify Christ, constrains me and then sent to serve others, constrains me in love. So here’s the big idea. Amy asked me yesterday, so what’s your big idea? I was like, I don’t even know. Okay, I really struggle to put this one together. If you don’t like it, it’s on. You don’t put it through ChatGPT. Okay, not good. I don’t want to know what that says. Figure it out for yourself. What you think the big idea is, here’s what I thought it was, let the gospel FREE you to constrain yourself in community. Or if you want the short, pithy version, live to love. Live to love. I mean, think how powerfully all of this that I’m talking about speaks to an anxious, exhausted modern culture. We are to be salt and light in this world, right now, in history, where we’re located, I cannot think of a way that we could be saltier or brighter than this, like this is what people are gonna go, you have something that I don’t, and I need to know why you have that, because it’s showing the bankruptcy of sovereign individualism and the joy of constraint in community, the freedom that comes with saying, with the Heidelberg Catechism, you are not your own, but belong body and soul in life and in death to Jesus Christ. Samuel James says it like this, the church has an opportunity to proclaim good news of great rest to a weary world, but this can only happen if we’re experiencing that rest for ourselves. So take stock even now we’re gonna have a moment to do it in silence and communion here in just a second, take stock of your life now. Are you experiencing the rest that comes with gospel freedom? Have you been freed to live and love in community? Are you still achieving to create an identity and using people? We all got that to some extent, of course, own it, confess it. And here’s my challenge for you. Then, as we go from here, I told you, we’re gonna have a challenge each week. This is just to help, like, put Dan’s steps on the floor so you kind of know what to do. Leaving here. It’s a weird one, but run with me on this. Okay, we’re commanded at a few different points in Scripture to greet one another with a holy kiss. Some of you are freaking out. You’re like, I’m done. I renounce my membership right now. I love it, though. Here’s why, because a kiss requires physical presence. It’s not an emoji. I know they got the kissy face emoji. That’s not good enough. You know, that’s not good enough, right? Requires physical presence. Also requires love. I experienced this lot in pastoral ministry. There are people who come into my office whose hands I do not want to shake. Not any of you. Some of your leg is me. No, like people come off the street and stuff, and I am, I don’t want to do it. I’m not even a germaphobe. And I’m like, You don’t smell right? And so it’s this willingness to love and to be inconvenient. So my challenge to you and the Holy kisses is, it’s a cultural expression, right? It happens here in Colombia, people. Is my former student. If you don’t know, if you guys knew that, Juan Felipe, you know, I greet his wife, I kiss her on the cheek. She kiss on the cheek. That’s how we greet in Colombia. You go to some other parts of the world, I’ve had one of our missionaries whose name I can’t say on the live stream and whatnot, keeps trying to kiss me on the cheek. He’s a guy. I’m like, okay, but that’s that culture, right? So cultural expression, it happens in different ways. What does it look like for you to greet in this way, physically, lovingly and with a willingness to be inconvenienced, and then do that, which means you can’t take off right away, right? We got some time to greet. We got a lobby. We got a reception going. You got some people to see. How are you going to greet one another? Prayer after the service today. How are you going to greet one another when you show up early next week? So you have time to greet one another before you come and sit down? Because the service not about you getting what you want, what you need from it, but about us gathering in community. That’s my challenge for you. Let’s pray.
We worship You, Lord as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, eternally existing in relationship, in love and then creating us in your image, to love like that, to be in community with you and with others like that, Lord, would you help us to do so more and more, to cast aside our sinful tendencies toward self, to be remade by the good news of what you have done for us in Christ, so that we can come together in a new and powerful way for our good and for your glory. Amen.