Welcome to the Valley Baptist Church Sermon Podcast.
We're so glad you're here, and we hope this message inspires you,
builds your faith, and moves you toward a deep relationship with God.
Today, you'll find great insight into the Bible
and learn how you can apply it straight to your life.
So welcome and enjoy the message.
If you have your Bible, please open it with me to Genesis chapter 3. We're going to be
looking at the second half of this chapter this morning in a message I'm calling Sin Messed
Everything Up. As we've seen over the last several weeks, God created a very good and beautiful world
where there was no pain, there was no sickness, and there was no death.
So the question is, what in the world happened? Well, sin happened. You see, God placed Adam and
Eve in the Garden of Eden, and He said, you can eat all the fruit that you could possibly want
from any of the trees except one. There's one tree that's poison, and if you eat it, you're going to die.
Well, we saw last week that the serpent, that is the devil, came and tempted Adam and Eve,
and they ate the poisonous fruit. And when they did, the virus of sin entered the world.
And the sin virus is really the root of all other viruses, all other disease. Now, as Adam and Eve's physical,
at that moment, their physical and DNA was altered, everything changed at that moment.
And it didn't just change for them, it changed for all of us. Their sin altered every single
aspect of creation. Even the ground itself was cursed. I assume
that's the origin of earthquakes and typhoons and all kinds of other natural disasters.
Now, up to this point in our study in Genesis, whenever God spoke, things happened exactly as
He commanded them. Over and over again in chapter 1, it says, And God said, and then it says, and it was so.
God said, and it was so.
Well, this is the first time that God said, and it was not so.
God said, don't eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
And his word was violated by Adam and Eve.
In the warning that God gave to them, it came to pass.
This world that was supposed to be filled with love, joy,
peace, and life was now filled with pain, suffering, and death. Now, we left off last week in verse
number 13, where God had just confronted Adam and Eve in their sin, and immediately they started
pointing fingers. Adam said, that woman that you gave me, God, she made me do it.
And Eve said, well, this serpent, he deceived me. Clearly they were not taking and owning
responsibility for their own sin. So for the rest of the chapter, God is going to lay out the
consequences of their sin in the rebellion. Now he addresses in this second part of the chapter, Satan, the woman,
and the man. Today, we're going to skip over God's curse of Satan found in verses 14 and 15. Lord
willing, we're going to have a message on those two verses next Sunday morning. So let's begin,
rather, in verse number 16. It says, to's our principle.
Sin is the cause of painful struggles for women.
To quote James Brown, this is a man's world. Now, I know that many women feel that way,
and I cannot speak from experience, but being a woman is hard. There are some unique challenges
that women face that men simply don't face. Now, I don't want to get into all of those challenges
today, but many of those challenges actually find themselves as a result of
sin. Now, if we back up in Genesis chapter 2, we see that God gave Eve two incredible blessings
in life, the joy of having kids and the joy of having a loving and fulfilling marriage. But
because of sin, both of those blessings, while not completely removed,
they will now be accompanied by pain and struggle, not only for Eve, but for every woman after her.
Now, the first struggle that God speaks of is the pain of childbirth. Now, men, let me give you a
word of caution here. If you're ever in a lot of pain for some reason, I would suggest not telling your wife that whatever you're going through is as bad as having a baby.
Because I made that mistake once, and I was looking for some sympathy, and I didn't get any of that sympathy.
You see, childbirth is excruciatingly painful experience according to God.
I mean, if God said something's going to
hurt a lot, that means it's going to hurt a lot. Kelsey and I have four kids, which means that
Kelsey went through four labors. One of them turned into an emergency C-section. Two of them,
Kelsey received an epidural that sort of helped her endure the pain. But with Ellie, our third
child, things were different. The labor, her labor went so fast
that by the time we made our way to the hospital, it was too late to get an epidural. And I'll never
forget the look on Kelsey's face when the doctor told her that. It was a moment of panic,
and then she faced what she had to face. And I'll tell you, that particular labor was intense. I mean, by the end of it, I was
worn out, right? I was exhausted. The whole experience was exhausting. The stress of the
intensity of that room, right? Now, in the midst of her pain, she screamed out at one point,
God must really hate sin to do this to women, to cause the pain
of labor. She was doing theology while she screamed in anguish. And you know, I think that's actually
what these judgments are spelled out here for, to remind us of how bad our sin really is, and to
remind us of our need for a Savior. Now, some believe that this verse
is also referring to raising kids. I'm not sure that's the case or not, but we do know that while
kids are a blessing, sometimes they're a sinful pain, aren't they? So maybe there's something
there we're not sure. Now, God points out another judgment or another painful side effect of Adam and Eve's sin
when he tells her that your desire shall be for your husband or towards your husband.
He shall rule over you.
Now, as a married couple, if you've ever wondered why you can't seem to see things eye to eye,
this is why.
Sin disrupted the marriage relationship. Now, we talked about
this a couple weeks ago that both husbands and wives, God made you to be compatible with your
spouse, meaning you're designed for each other. But because of sin, instead of a harmony,
there's discord. So if you're feeling incompatible with your spouse today, for whatever reason, you think, man, we're just not compatible.
That's actually not the case.
You were created by God to be compatible, but there's a problem.
Sin is the problem.
At the root of your problem, whatever problem it is,
I can tell you it's sin.
Gary Thomas said that marriage is one sinner living with another sinner
trying to get along. That's a pretty good
definition. But God actually said and designed marriage to be one perfect person living with
another perfect person perfectly getting along. But sin messed everything up. He says, your desire
shall be for or towards your husband and he shall rule over you. It's hard to understand the translation
here. It's hard to interpret it because there's disagreement on how to translate it. Is it to be
for your husband? Is it to be towards your husband? One translation is contrary to your husband.
Chapter four, there's the same linguistic construct in Hebrew that we won't have time to get into, but it leads me to my
particular interpretation. Some people say that this means that even though sexual intimacy is
ultimately going to lead to painful labor, the woman still has a desire for her husband.
Others say, no, no, this means that a husband's position of headship, his position as leader in the marriage, is a result of sin.
But we know that's not right because the New Testament roots headship not in sin, but in creation.
So I think perhaps the most plausible explanation or most plausible interpretation is that ladies, now that you've sinned, and men, now that you've sinned, you both have a sin nature,
there's going to be conflict in the marriage, specifically wives. It's going to be a struggle
at times for you to be content with the role that God gave you in your marriage. There's going to
be times when you want your husband's role of being leader of the family. Now, remember,
God created Adam and Eve in a perfect state. They
were in a perfect garden. They had the perfect life. They had this perfect love for one another.
They did not have a single marital problem. Can you imagine that? But the moment that sin
entered the world, Adam throws Eve under the bus, and this power struggle ensued.
Instead of focusing on what they could give to each other,
they began focusing on what they could get from each other, and self took root.
Now, with that power struggle within the marriage of who's actually in charge,
there's actually three basic ways that a husband will respond to that power struggle.
He can become a tyrant, establishing his dominance over his wife, which is unbiblical, and the wife loses.
Or he can become passive and disengaged, letting her take over his responsibility, which is also unbiblical, and the wife still loses. Or he can lead her with love, patience, and strength, which is biblical,
and now the wife wins. Now, for most of history, it seems like men have ruled over their wives
as tyrants. Today, it seems like many men do the opposite. They are passive and disengaged,
but there's a better way through Christ Jesus, our Lord. A husband and a wife who are both
following after the Lord and whose hearts are being transformed into the image of Christ,
they can learn how to live out God's created design with love and joy so that every decision
that's made, every disagreement that they have
is not a power struggle that ends with wrecking havoc, but instead there's love and respect in
the midst of it. There's patience and there's selflessness. In verse number 17, he moves to
the man and says, then to Adam, he said, because you've heeded the voice of your wife and have
eaten from the tree of which I commanded you saying saying, you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground for your sake. In toil,
you shall eat of it all the days of your life, both thorns and thistles that you'll bring forth
to you. And you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread
till you return to the ground. Here's our principle. Sin is the cause of painful struggles
for men. Now, some of you ladies are reading this verse and you think that us men, we got off easy
compared to you. But God's not giving us an exhaustive list here for Adam or Eve, either one
of all the ways sin messed up, messed things up, of all the ways that we're going to struggle. Instead, I think God is describing some specific ways he blessed them, Adam and Eve, in chapter 2, that now that
blessing is going to remain, but it's going to be accompanied by pain. For women, that is marriage
and having kids. For men, it was our work, our exercising dominion over the earth. You see,
work is not a result of sin. We were created in the image of God to work, to exercise dominion over the earth. You see, work is not a result of sin.
We were created in the image of God to work,
to exercise dominion over creation like God does.
But now, after sin, what used to be relatively easy and enjoyable
comes a lot of stress, a lot of strain.
Instead of picking some perfect fruit with very little effort, we're going to have
to really work hard to get just a little bit of a crop. There's going to be some stress involved.
There's going to be a lot of strain involved. The sweat of our brow, we're going to have to deal with
weeds and thorns and thistles. Growing up, we used to visit my grandparents in Oklahoma a couple
times a year. My papa was a dry land farmer.
That means they didn't irrigate the land.
It's relied upon the rain, which causes a lot of stress for our farmer, by the way.
But in his later years, he became a rancher.
Now, in that part of the country, grass burrs are really bad.
Now, we call them stickers around here, okay?
So ranchers, they've got to spray for graspers in the spring.
Now, if they spray a little bit too early or they spray a little bit too late,
the graspers have potential to take over the pasture.
So they're not able to run cattle, as many cattle as they could.
So it's a big deal, but sometimes the rancher misses the timing. When I was about three or four years old, our family was down at the pond in Oklahoma,
and we were fishing, and I can't remember exactly why, but I ran back towards the house.
And as I'm running, unfortunately, I tripped, and I fell,
and I tumbled and rolled through the biggest sticker patch you can imagine.
Now, I had, if I remember right, short sleeves on. I had
some of those short 80s shorts that my mom put me in. It was one of the earliest memories I can
remember rolling through that sticker patch, and then my mom and my mamie stripping me down, putting
me in the tub, humiliating me, and they both worked for what seemed like hours getting out hundreds with tweezers, hundreds
or thousands of these little tiny stickers. And if you're wondering, yes, I cried.
Every time I read this verse, 35 plus years later, I think about that sticker patch.
Listen, kids, if you're listening, there's no stickers in heaven. There was no stickers originally.
People, farmers, people who work in the garden, there's no thorns originally.
God didn't create the world that way.
The ground even itself produced a perfect crop.
But those things came along because of the hardships that come with sin,
the brokenness of our world. Work is now harder because of our
rebellion. And that's all forms of work. We get tired, don't we? We grow weary. We stress out and
we worry, are we going to have enough money to make ends meet to pay our bills? Are we going to
have enough food to feed our family? There's the stress and the pressure of working ground that is hard to work, of working a job that with
difficult people, life got harder. Verse number 19, he says, in the sweat of your face, you shall
eat bread till you return to the ground. For out of it you were taken, for dust you are, and to dust
you shall return. Now, I want you to remember with me that in chapter two, God made Adam from the dust
of the ground. And he says here that because of your sin, your body's going to go back and return
to dust. In other words, your body's going to die, and then it's going to decay, and then it's going
to turn to dirt. Here's our principle. Sin is the cause of the painful
struggle of death. I'm telling you, death is a painful struggle, mentally, emotionally,
physically. I'll tell you what, I hate death. I mean, I hate it with a passion.
And the older I've gotten, the more I hate death.
It grows.
My hatred grows of it.
When my mamie died, I watched the strongest, one of the strongest men I knew, my papa,
weep and wail for days, and my hatred for death grew.
When my dad died and his dead, lifeless, cold body laid there
and they willed his body.
Strangers from the mortuary willed his body out of the house.
My hatred of death grew when our family stood over his body.
As they lowered his body six feet underground,
my hatred of death grew.
Death is not normal.
It is not the way God intended it.
It's a result of the brokenness of the sin-filled world,
and it comes in all kinds of ways.
Sometimes death comes upon a family suddenly with sudden tragedy.
There's no time to say goodbyes.
Other times it comes slowly upon a person,
and there's a great suffering that happens.
Both ways are horrible.
All forms of death are not God's original intention. So I hate
it. But did you know, did you know that every single one of us are going to die? See, the stats
are staggering. It's one out of one. Every single one of us, our heart is going to beat for the very
last time with the Lord tarries. Every last one of us, our lungs is going to beat for the very last time if the Lord tarries.
Every last one of us, our lungs, they're going to be filled with air for the very last time.
Someday you're going to die.
Someday I'm going to die.
And honestly, it's not going to be that long from now.
Maybe a few decades at most.
The Bible says that life is like a vapor.
It's here for just a brief moment, and then it's gone.
You go out in the cold on a winter day, even here in Bakersfield, and you breathe out.
There's a little bit of fog that happens.
It's like a vapor, and then the fog's gone.
Then it's gone.
That's how life is, and death comes.
Did you know that we rarely, as a church, go a week without someone in our church dying?
That is very rare.
In fact, there's a very good chance that someone that's in one of our services this morning
will be dead and gone by this time next week.
I hope that's a humbling thought.
Because most of the time we live our lives as if death is never going to come our way.
But I'm telling you, death is no respecter of persons.
It comes for the rich and the poor. It comes for the healthy and the unhealthy. It comes for the
young and the old. It comes for the saved and the unsaved. Death is coming for us all. Why?
Because of our sin. The Bible says, for the wages of sin is death. God told Adam and Eve, if you eat the forbidden fruit,
if you violate my word, if you join Satan and his rebellion against me, you're going to die.
Now, you may not like that judgment. You may judge God at times in your heart, and you may say,
that's not fair. That's not right. But I want you to look around. What is the state of reality? The state of
reality is that death is a fact of life. Why? Because God is holy, and God is just, and he's
always right, and he punishes that which is evil and wrong. Verse number 20, it continues.
It says, and Adam called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all the living.
Also for Adam and his wife, the Lord God made tunics of skin and clothed them. We're going to
come back to that verse in just a moment, but let's skip to verse number 22. It says, then the
Lord God said, behold, the man has become like one of us to know good and evil. And now lest he put
out his hand and take also the tree of life and eat
and live forever. Therefore, the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground
from which he was taken. So he drove out the man and he placed cherubim at the east of the garden
of Eden. And a flaming sword was turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.
So God says here, he says, mankind's now become like one of us, knowing good
from evil. What does that mean? Well, it means that man has now experienced the effects of evil
as God does. You see, God knew what evil would do, and now man knows what evil has done. So God
kicks Adam and Eve out of the garden as an act of judgment,
but I also believe as an act of mercy. You see, it says that God sends them away because apparently
if they were to eat of the tree of life, they would have lived forever in that painful state
of sin. So God banishes them from the garden and he places these cherubim angels on the east side of the garden and a flaming sword going back every which way to guard Adam and Eve from the tree of life so they would not make a bad situation worse.
Now, this banishment from the Garden of Eden also, I believe, serves as a symbol of Adam and Eve's banishment from intimacy with God. Here's a principle.
Sin is the cause of the painful struggle of being separated from God, to be distant from God,
so that people, they know that there's a maker, but they don't feel like they really know him.
That's a result of sin. Prior to sin, Adam and Eve, they walked
with God. They had this special intimate relationship with him, but the moment they
sinned, they died, spiritually speaking, and that special relationship with God was no more.
The Bible teaches that all of us have been born in the image of Adam, corrupted by sin. We're sinners by nature
and also by choice. The Bible says in Romans 3.23, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory
of God. Every single one of us have sinned. And so because we're all sinners, we all experience the pain and the separation from God. It was Pascal that I think
originally said that within the heart of every human being is a God-shaped vacuum, a hole, a void,
and we all try to fill that hole and void, that emptiness inside. We try to fill it with all
kinds of different things, but nothing fits because it's shaped like God. When God departed from us in our sin, he left a void,
and it's shaped like the Spirit of God. And so we're all left wanting, and what we really want
is a connection with our Maker, the one who formed us, the one who loves us, the one that we were
made for, the Spirit of God. Now in Genesis Genesis 2, we see that mankind was uniquely created.
He was created differently than the animals.
The animals were also created out of the dust of the ground,
but there was something unique about Adam's creation.
In verse 7, it says,
And the Lord God formed man out of the dust of the ground
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. Now,
the word breath and spirit in Hebrew are the same word. So, this shows us that God, I believe,
breathed a spirit into Adam. Now, our spirit that God gives each and every human being is created to be connected to the spirit of God in a relationship, in a real life giving way.
But sin caused the spirit of God to depart from our spirit and judgment.
That's why that's why Jesus told Nicodemus in John chapter 3, he said, no one can enter the kingdom of God
unless he's born again of the Spirit. Unless his spirit is rejuvenated and comes back to life,
you cannot be born of the Spirit unless you believe in Jesus. Now, John chapter 20,
verse number 22 says, and when he said this, this Jesus, he breathed on them and said to them,
Receive the Holy Spirit.
Now, let me ask you, or you may ask,
Well, why doesn't God just breathe his spirit on everyone?
Why didn't he just do that?
Because of sin.
See, God is a holy and a perfect, just God. He can't tolerate sin. He's a good judge.
If we had a judge in our judicial system who looked upon evil, a pedophile, a rapist, a murderer,
whatever it is, and he looked upon the evil and he just said, hey, let him go. That would not be a
good judge. That would be an evil judge. God is a good judge. He cannot tolerate sin. Sin must be punished
and dealt with. Sin must be banished from his presence. It must be sent away. That's why Jesus
came. Jesus came because we couldn't do it ourselves, to pay for the penalty of our sin and
take our sin away from the presence of God, to banish it from His presence so His Spirit could
come live within us. Now, verse number 21 is a foreshadowing of what God would do for us
through His Son, Jesus Christ. I want to read it again. It says,
it also for Adam and his wife, the Lord God made tunics of skin and clothed them. Now, if you remember, when Adam and Eve sinned,
their eyes were opened to their shame and their nakedness, and so they went and
found fig leaves and made for themselves coverings. And now God looks on them, I think,
as an act of mercy, and He covers them with some more durable clothes that he had made from animal skin.
And this verse, this act of God, is pointing forward to the sacrificial system found in the book of Leviticus.
It's pointing forward even more importantly to the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.
We see here a picture of substitutionary
atonement. The animal that was killed for the skin as a substitute for Adam and Eve,
the animal's death in place of Adam and Eve's death. We also see atonement. The word atonement means covering. Here's our principle. We can't
possibly cover our sin and our shame. Only God can. That's the gospel. That we can't work hard
enough to earn favor with God. God's got to do a work for us. Adam and Eve made coverings out of leaves that probably wasn't all
that effective, but then God made them a covering that got the job done. It's the same thing
spiritually with our sin. Whenever we sin, it's very natural to try to cover it up, to not speak
of it, to not think about it, to try to hide it. But no matter how hard we try, we can't hide it
from God. We can't cover our sin the way it needs to be covered
so the justice of God is satisfied.
Only God can do that for us through his son, Jesus.
Here's our last principle.
Jesus came to fix and restore everything
that was broken by sin, everything that sin messed up.
The Bible says in John 3, 16,
that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Sin causes death, but in God's love, he desires to give us life. But that life can only be found through his son, Jesus, who paid for our death.
As we wrap up, I want to point out a few very important trees that we find throughout Scripture.
A couple of them at the very beginning in the Garden of Eden, we've looked at them,
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life.
That's at the beginning.
Then if you fast forward in your mind, in the New Testament,
there's another very important tree in a very important garden.
And Jesus was crucified on that tree, the cross. And the Old Testament says that cursed is the man who hangs upon a tree.
Galatians chapter 3, verse number 13 says,
Christ has redeemed us.
He's purchased us and freed us from the curse of the law.
Having become a curse for us, for it is written,
cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.
You see, Jesus hung on a tree, and He became a curse for us. Genesis chapter 3 records the fall of humankind, the fall of creation from the good state in which God created it in. But it also
records for us the curse of God upon sin. You're not going to tolerate it. You're not going to tolerate this brokenness.
The curse of sin must always be paid.
And here's the good news of the Bible,
that God sent his only begotten son,
and the son of God, Jesus,
willingly came to pay for the curse of our sin.
And then on the third day, he rose in victory.
Now, anyone can pay for their sin.
It'll take you an eternity to do so.
But anyone can choose that route to pay for their own sin.
But what you can't do is rise in victory. And yet, that's exactly what Jesus did. He rose victorious over the grave,
over sin itself, because it had been defeated, it had been paid for. Now, there's another tree I
want to point out at the very end of our scriptures in the book of Revelation.
We see, at the very end, we see a picture of heaven.
And placed in heaven is the tree of life.
The tree of life that we were banished from at the end of chapter 3.
No longer are we banished from it. We have access to it once again in heaven
because the Bible says that in heaven there will be no more curse because the curse has been reversed
through the blood of Jesus. In Revelation chapter 21 verse number 4, it speaks of heaven. I want you
to just imagine with me a world like this, because this
is our future. All those who trust Jesus as their Savior, it says, and God will wipe away every tear
from their eyes. There should be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more
pain, for the former things have passed away. We experience an incredible amount of pain
and heartache. The world is corrupt. We just look around. It doesn't take long to know that
things are turned upside down. And the result of that is a lot of suffering, a lot of loneliness, a lot of heartache, a lot of
struggle. Rest assured, for those of us who have received Jesus as our Savior, the curse has been
reversed for us. The Bible says, whosoever, whosoever, does that include you? Well, it does
if you're willing. Whosoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.
Saved from what?
Saved from the curse of sin and the curse of death.
Now I want to read and end our time by reading the words of Jesus found in John 11, verse 25.
Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he may die,
he shall live. Amen? Amen. Let's bow together in an attitude of prayer, both here and at Olive Drive. When we give our life to Jesus, something real happens,
not in the physical realm, but in the spiritual realm.
Our sin is paid for, and that means we're forgiven
when we receive Jesus as our Savior by faith.
It's by the grace of God. We're forgiven. It's not that we Savior by faith. It's by the grace of God.
We're forgiven.
It's not that we've earned it.
It's that we've received it.
So we really are forgiven at that point, and we're made clean.
The weight of our sin and our guilt and our shame is taken away,
and it's nailed to the cross.
And when sin is paid for,
we can be reconnected to God at that moment and our spirit is made alive,
it's regenerated
by the spirit of God.
Brought new life.
We become new creations in Christ.
All things that passed away, behold, all things become new.
But the truth of the matter is that while we receive spiritual life,
physically speaking, we still experience the consequence
of our sin.
Adam and Eve, they died spiritually immediately, but it took them a long time to die physically,
but their cells began to die.
They began to age. 1 Corinthians chapter 15,
beautiful chapter of Scripture that talks about
Paul connecting the dots by the Holy Spirit.
It lets us know that because Christ is risen,
we will rise too.
And he talks about how the mortal shall put on immortality.
That is, that our bodies are growing weaker towards death.
As Christians, at the same time, our spirits should be growing stronger towards life.
Someday, our bodies even will be immortal.
Because our spirit is going to be reconnected to our bodies,
whether that be a body that's dust or ashes.
It will be reconstituted someday, the Bible speaks of it.
Because the Bible says that Jesus is coming back no one knows the day or the hour we just know he's coming
and when he comes the scriptures say that he's going to come from heaven
I don't wherever that is another realm who knows he's going to come riding on the clouds and he's
going to come with a great shout the voice of an archangel and the trumpet of God and the dead in Christ shall rise first.
And those who remain when he returns will be caught up together with them to meet the Lord in the air.
And thus we shall always be with the Lord.
That's what we have to look forward to, that someday our loved ones, those of us that do die before Jesus,
our bodies are going to come out of the ground. A great miracle because Jesus came forth.
So I want to encourage you that whatever you're facing today, to know that you know that you know, that you have a confident expectation deep within you
that Jesus is your hope.
In fact, Jesus is your only hope.
Did you know that?
There is not a single thing this world offers us
for eternal hope except for Jesus Christ.
You were made for more than this life.
You were made for more than the brokenness that we live in.
I want to encourage you that today and every day that you live in the light of eternity.
None of us know how many days we have.
The Bible says it's appointed for men to die once and then the judgment.
Every one of us will face it if the Lord tarries.
Are we ready for it?
Are you ready for it?
Now, if you haven't received Jesus as your Savior, I want to invite you to do that today.
God loves you.
Oh, and he loves you more.
I'm telling you, he loves you more than you can imagine.
You say, how could that be true?
With all my sin and all the failure of my life, I'm telling you, it's true. The Bible says, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. He loves you.
And if you sense your sin and you have an awareness of it,
I believe that's the Spirit of God calling you out of your sin,
calling out of your brokenness,
calling you out of your death into spiritual life,
and it only comes through faith in Jesus.
I want to invite you to surrender your life to Jesus today,
here in just a moment, either campus.
We're going to have pastors and other leaders here at the front.
We're going to invite you to step down and walk down one of these aisles, walk down one of these
staircases and say, I want to give my life to Jesus.
I want to be forgiven. I want the curse to be reversed in my life.
These guys, these ladies,
all of them will know exactly how to help you.
Maybe you say, I want to be baptized like others today, or I want to become a family member here
at Valley Baptist Church. Let us know. We'd love to visit with you about that. Or maybe you just
want to come to these steps and pray. However God leads in just a moment as we sing, please come.
Let's pray. Father,
we recognize today and are reminded
about how serious our sin is.
And we're reminded, Lord,
and it's been revealed to us today
of how holy you are. Lord, the scriptures say that no one can look upon you and live,
and yet we also know because of the grace of God, we can come boldly before your throne of grace.
Thank you, Lord, for all your work in us.
And I pray, Lord, if that work has not yet been realized in some people's lives, Lord,
that you would tug on their heart, that you would open their eyes,
that you would clear their mind,
soften their heart to receive you and your word.
Lord, we love you and we are so thankful that in you there's life and there's forgiveness.
Lord, would you do a work that none of us can do, and that's a work of your spirit,
to touch people's spirit, to bring life, to bring conviction of sin, to bring an awareness, Lord.
Help them trust you. Help them see your beauty and your love and what you've done for them.
Lord, as a church family, would you strengthen our faith?
Would you make us bold and courageous to live for you?
We ask in Jesus' name, amen.
Thanks for listening today.
We hope you enjoyed this message.
And if you did, we would be so grateful if you left us a review.
Also, go ahead and subscribe to the podcast
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If you feel the Lord calling you
to take the next step in faith
through salvation, service, or giving,
don't wait.
Reach out to us by texting podcast to 88988.
That's podcast to 88988
or connect with us on one of our social media platforms.
You can also visit our website, valleybaptist.org,
to find even more great resources.
No matter where you are in your journey,
know that we love you, we're praying for you,
and we can't wait to see what God will do in your life.