In Genesis, chapter three, verses eight through 15. I'm going to read those in a minute and catch you up on what last week was. Because it's not that each week exactly builds on the last, but they kind of feed from one to the next. And so as we look at Genesis chapter 3, verses 8 through 15, what has happened here is God has created everything. We looked at that last week a little bit.

We didn't read it from Genesis, we read it from John chapter one. And in John chapter one, he tells us that Jesus, although not known by the name Jesus, he is the second member of the Trinity. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. And that Jesus, existing from eternity past to eternity future, he's always been and he always will be. Jesus, the second member of the Trinity was the one through whom creation came into existence.

He's the Word of God. The Greek word, since our New Testament was mostly written in Greek, was called Logos, L, O, G O S. And that means the full expression of something. So he is the full expression of God. Jesus disciples would say, like, hey, can you just show us the Father and that'll be enough? And he said, don't you realize after being with me this long, if you see me, you've seen the Father.

Now keep that concept in mind. If you've seen Jesus, you've seen the Father. Keep that in mind for what we're going to look at today. But right now, what we're going to look at, we're going to read this scripture. God created everything, created human beings.

There's the first two, Adam and Eve. He tells them, like, you've got free reign for everything. But he says there's some things that are off limits for you. There's one thing in particular that's off limits. This wasn't cruel or, or punishing to them.

He gave them everything perfect. It was paradise. It was more paradise than you can ever imagine. Have you seen, like, all over Florida, there's places that claim to be some kind of paradise. It's usually a mobile home or an RV park.

And I think that's selling paradise a little short. Like, no offense if you live in a mobile home or an rv. I have in both, like, not lived in an rv, but I've stayed in them. They're fun, they're nice, I don't mind them. But like, I think that's selling heaven a little bit short.

You know what I'm saying? It's kind of like that, you know, West Virginia, almost heaven or whatever the song says, not Quite. You know, like, I like West Virginia a lot. Some of the best parts of Ohio or West Virginia. You know what I'm saying?

Like, when you get through Ohio and you get to that part that's by West Virginia, you're like, oh, this part's nice. You know, no offense to you Ohio people. I just don't understand you.

I grew up in Michigan. It's kind of a rivalry thing. Yeah, there it is. So, without further ado. Genesis 3.

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God moving about in the orchard at the breezy time of the day, and they hid from the Lord God. Can you say that? They hid from the Lord God? How dumb is that? Trying to hide from God.

You do it though. Don't tell me you don't like. You try like, ah, I'm just gonna do this and pretend God doesn't know about it. You. They hid from the Lord God among the trees of the orchard.

But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, yoo hoo, where are you? Like, like normally they were like a. A dog. When you get home, your dog is just happy to see you. God would come visit them and they would be like, yeehaw, I get to be with God.

Like, face to face, Walk with him, talk with him. This time he can't find them. Not that he doesn't know where they are, but he says, well, where are you? It's a locating question. He's trying to locate them, but he's asking them to locate themselves.

Like, where have you gone? What have you done? The man replied, I heard you moving about in the orchard, and I was afraid because I was naked. So I hid. Oh.

And the Lord God said, who told you that you were naked? Did you eat from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from? The man said, that woman that you gave me, she gave me some fruit from the tree and I ate it. Man, the blame game. Like, he's already blaming the woman, you know, like, it's.

He blames God. You gave me this woman and she gave me the fruit. It's your fault. It's everybody else that's here right now is their fault, not mine. That's what Adam's trying to say.

Like, there's three of us and one is not at fault. That's me. How many of you live that way in your house? You're like, it's your fault. It's not my fault.

There is no way it could be my fault. So the Lord God said to the woman, okay, I'll play along. What is this that you have done? The woman replied, the serpent tricked me and I ate. Oh, okay.

The Lord God said to the serpent, I guess the serpent was dumb enough to be hanging out, like, behind a bush or something, waiting to see what happened. And God's like, front and center, you know, because you have done this, you are cursed above all the wild beasts and all the living creatures of the field. On your belly you will crawl, and dust you will eat. All the days of your life, I will put hostility between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. Her offspring will attack your head, and you will attack her offspring's heel.

Now, I used to think that that verse, that. That attacking the serpent's head, I used to think that that was fulfilled. When my mother had her garden, we were in Michigan. We were up on this hill, down in the bottom, There was this rich, black soil, just beautiful growing soil. And she had a humongous garden in.

In there, like, bigger than most people would normally have that are sane. But we had an insanely sized garden. It was humongous. We would have so much food, we would take garbage bags full of fresh produce to church to just hand out. It was wonderful.

And so we would have this. And one of my jobs and my siblings was picking off bugs from the potato plants. But one of the other jobs that we had, besides pulling some weeds and some of the thistles that would grow there, which is a sign of the curse, of course, God said there would be thistles and you'd have to work around them. One of the things that we had to do was anytime a garter snake came in there, that was the only kind of snakes we really had. We had to run and chop its head off with a shovel.

She didn't want snakes, you know, no matter how, like, beneficial they might have been, to control the bugs that I probably had to pick off the plants. Like, she wanted the snakes gone. And. And I figured it's an eternal struggle between women and snakes, you know, like it's biblical. And we had to.

She would just yell. Wherever we were playing outside, she would just yell, snake. And our job, when we heard that code word, was to run, grab a shovel from. We had an outhouse, okay? It was a legit old outhouse that came from a farm.

It didn't have the pit underneath it. It wasn't used as an outhouse. That was where all the shovels and rakes were. And so we run to the outhouse, grab a shovel, and find the snake and end its life. Now, that did not fulfill the prophecy that God spoke in the garden.

That's not what he meant when he said, you, you there will be enmity between the woman and the snake and between her offspring and yours. That's not what God was talking about. What he was saying is, that snake, that serpent is, is Satan. See, it's not that snakes in and of themselves are evil, but sometimes they do bite you. That seems pretty evil.

But snakes in and of themselves aren't evil. But the serpent, Satan is the evil one. And Satan is always there, Sometimes as a snake, sometimes as any number of different things, and always trying to get you to go away from the plan that God has had for you. And to follow really is not follow. Satan is follow your own selfish, sinful desires.

I remember years ago, a teenager here at the church said, well, Satan just wants you to follow him. I said, oh, no, that's not exactly accurate. Satan just wants you to leave God and follow your own heart. Have you ever heard somebody say, follow the desires of your heart? Ever heard him tell a young person that?

Have you ever told somebody that? Don't ever say that again. Your heart will lead you into all kinds of terrible, evil and wicked things. Like your heart will lead you down so many paths that are astray because of this thing called the sinful nature. Now, the sinful nature is something that started in this moment when Adam and Eve sinned.

It started in that moment. And it said that from there on, the offspring of the woman would have this struggle with evil. There would be this sinful nature. And we call it a few different things. We might call it a original sin, inbred sin or inborn sin, Adamic sin.

Like Adam. Like Adam. Adamic. Adamic sin. I'm probably saying it wrong.

I'll just blame the sinuses. But anyway, there's all these different things. But what it is is that sinful nature that is within you that kind of like bends you towards evil, like you're leaning towards it. Even if you're walking towards God, you still just kind of always have this lean towards the old ways, towards the evil. Or is it just me?

It's not just me. Is it? Some of you guys have been following Jesus a long time. Tell me it gets better. No, I'm not hearing any.

Yeah, Pastor, I'm perfect already. But you're getting there, right? Like, you're still progressing. You're still trusting that God has what it takes to make you holy. Amen.

And so what God is doing is he's taking you where you are. And even though you're leaning towards this sinful nature, he's saying, I want to cleanse that from you. So we were created in something called the image of God. The image of God, or the Latin version or term for that is imago DEI D E I Imago DEI Image of God. The image of God simply means that you were created to be able to like, represent who God is.

Think of somebody that makes a statue, a statue maker, somebody that's carving a statue, that's molding a statue, and they're making it to reflect or represent a famous person of some kind. When we went on our trip this summer, we took a ton of pictures. And Amy has this service she uses online where you can submit these pictures and they'll make a book just out of pictures. It's cool. It's really neat.

And we got several of these from different things along our lives. And I was looking through this book, it came in the mail yesterday. And there's all these pictures that were from us or scenery we took. And one of them was at a stop we made at this humongous sporting goods store up in the Plains states up in South Dakota called Scheels. And Scheels has these statues, these bronze looking statues that are sitting on these benches out front.

And one was like, there's Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, a few other old presidents and stuff like that just kind of hanging out there. And so we've got pictures of Emma at one and Amy at another just sitting there like they're in a conversation with George Washington. And it's kind of neat, except he's not there. But when I look at that statue and I read what the plaque says or I look at the thing that he's holding, it tells me a little bit about him. And if I could see more copies of that that are in some different way, it would tell me more about who George Washington is, what he did, what he stood for.

If you were created in the image of God, the Hebrew word that they use for image is Selim T S E L E M. They just added a T for no reason. You know, it's like adding a Y to Jace, you know what I'm saying? Like, who knows why they do that? I'm just kidding. We were talking about that earlier.

So it's like Salem is this word for what we are, this statue of God. We were made with the image of God stamped on us. Now, that doesn't mean that you look just like God looks, you know, like. Like like it's not to say that God looks like some homogenized picture. If you were to put all of us together and use a program that said, what would it look like if we made the average of all of our facial features?

That's not what it is. What it means is you were created to represent who God is and to be his representative to all of creation. Part of the job of human beings was to have dominion over everything God made. He created everything. Then he placed as the pinnacle of his creation mankind, human beings.

And he said, your job is to have dominion over everything else that I've made. That means to take care of it. That means to master it and understand it. That means it is here for your benefit, for you to live off of and to have both respect for, but also to utilize as needed. That was some of the charge that God gave us.

And as his image bearers, his imago dei, his selim, as those things, God has given us the ability to be his representatives here on this earth. So the problem is, or the question is, what happens when those who are bearing the image of God have sin that enters into their lives? There's a couple things that happened. Several probably. One, the sin that they had was a personal sin, an individual sin.

But now what also happened was this inborn sin, the sin that you're born into. Now it gets passed down. That sinful nature that I was talking about gets passed down. But the other thing, and the major thing that happens is that there is now this. This friction, this wall, this breakdown in the relationship that you and I have with God.

There's never a time in our scriptures after this. Like, if you turn the pages and look, there's never a time where God just comes down and walks every day with mankind until you get to the last couple pages where it talks about the new heavens and the new Earth. Sorry, you've got to wait 50 weeks for that lesson. You can flip ahead and read it if you'd like, but 50 weeks from now, we'll cover that, what that looks like. And I think we spent a couple weeks kind of dancing around that idea, the idea that God is creating a new heavens and a new earth, a place for us to dwell with him, where everything will be made right again.

And it says that we will walk with God every day, just like it had been in the Garden of Eden. But when they sinned, what God said was, there's a problem here. You see, there was two specific trees in the garden. One was the tree of knowledge of good and evil. That's what Eve ate from.

When she ate from it, it says her eyes were opened. When Adam ate from it, his eyes were opened. It didn't mean they were open to, like, more knowledge and more insight. God had already given them that command to take dominion over the world. That was not sinful.

What was sinful was the desire to be like God. Making your own decisions about what things you would decide were good and what things you would decide were evil. You see, so often we, rather than taking God's word for it, we say, well, I'm just going to decide what I'm going to do. I'm going to decide for me what's good for me. And then we start coming up with all this stupid stuff that people say today.

Like, well, that's your truth. You heard this. People think that there's your truth and my truth. No, no. There are lies that you believe to be true, but that does not make it true.

Just because you believe in it doesn't mean that it is true. It just simply means that you've believed a lie. And God has given witness to who he is, to who Christ is. He's given witness through both the scriptures and the beauty. Daniel called me last night and he says, dude, I just saw the most beautiful rainbow after that storm.

And I was like, dude, I don't feel good. I'm going to sleep. You know, Like, I didn't care about that rainbow that moment, but I did think about a rainbow that I had seen recently when we were out West. And it was just this perfect rainbow. And I was, like, remembering that as he was celebrating the one we just saw.

It's like, how cool is that, that we have this thing that God has created and we can just worship him when we see it? God says he has given us witness to himself in the things that he has created. Now, the creation is not God. He's not, like, part of nature, but he has given us the natural realm and as a witness to who he is. So he says that people are not.

They don't have an excuse to deny him because he has stamped his witness all over his creation. So nobody can say, well, I didn't know God existed. It's like, really? Did you open your eyes this morning? Like, unless you're blind, you got to be able to just see it.

And even if you are blind, he's got another way for you to know it. Like, it's just out there somewhere. I don't know. Like, you can wrestle with that one later. I can't think through the theology of that one today.

Sorry, where were we? So God made everything beautiful. He made everything to prove his own existence. And when we were. When we sinned, the sinful nature entered.

There was a breakdown in our relationship with God. And now his image bearers are no longer properly reflecting who God is. See, God is a holy God. God is a God where it's not that he can't sin or won't sin, it's just not in his nature to sin. Anything that God does, therefore cannot be sinful.

And so what happens when his human beings who reflect his nature start sinning? And it doesn't seem like we can really stop on our own? What does he do? Well, this is the beautiful thing. See, Revelation 13:8 tells us that Jesus Christ was crucified from the foundations of the world.

Now, I will nerd out a little bit for a second. There are arguments in different translations on how that was supposed to be worded, because it's talking about the Lamb's Book of Life. And was it saying that the Lamb's Book of Life existed from the creation of the world or. Or that the Lamb was slain from the creation of the world? And I'll tell you what, there can't be the Lamb's Book of Life from the creation of the world if he wasn't already planned to be crucified from the creation of the world.

It's just that simple to me. Like, I'll let the theologians and the Bible translators get as nerdy as they want about all that stuff and try to figure it out. And I'm going to take what might be a simple answer, and it might be the best answer possible. I'm just going to take that and say, you know what? You can't have one without the other.

There is no Book of Life without Christ dying for us. But it's because of his death and it's because of his resurrection that we are offered forgiveness and newness of life, that therefore our names can be written in the Lamb's Book of Life because it says that the great judgment of all of the people who have ever lived, that will occur one day in the future. There's books that were opened. Now, that's scary because it's not talking about, like a library of books. It's talking about records, records of your life and of mine.

And it says books were opened. And as people are brought forward before the Great Judgment, seat of the throne of God, the books were opened. But then there's another book that's opened and that's the Lamb's Book of Life. And if your name was found in the Lamb's Book of Life, these other books don't matter. God sees you just as your name is there.

And what that means is the blood of Christ. The sacrifice of Christ covers over all of your sin and it covers over everything that you've done. And that all God sees is the righteousness of Christ when He looks at you. For those of you who have been born again, who have, who have believed on Christ for salvation, all he sees is the righteousness of Jesus Christ in your place, because he died in your place. And he lives to give you new life.

So what happens? I asked the question a while ago. When, when the image of God is tarnished, when it's not recognizable. It's like if you look in a mirror and you see is a clean mirror and you cleanly see yourself, you recognize yourself. But if you start putting all kinds of dirt and dust and slinging mud on it, maybe some paint, and you start covering up that mirror and you just have little glimpses of yourself, you might not even hardly recognize yourself.

You might look at it a little bit and be like, I think that's me, but I just don't know. But if you allow somebody to come in and clean that mirror off and you start to see who you really are, that's what Christ has done. You were in the image of God. Sin has tarnished, that is stained, that is tainted, is painted, is dirty. It's unrecognizable.

And yet the image of God is still there within you. He hasn't let it become removed from you. Sin has covered it up. But you still were created in God's image. And what Christ is doing is as he is cleansing you and making you holy and pure is he is allowing that image to be visible in you.

He's allowing the image of God to be seen in and through you. And so as we look at what God promised here, as he's talking with Adam and with Eve and he's talking to the serpent, he says these words. He says, I will put enmity between you and the woman. This struggle between you and the woman, there's always going to be a struggle between your offspring and her offspring. You don't think there's a war going on all around you?

I'm not talking about all the wars we hear on the news every day. I'm not talking about those. Those are for sure a symptom of the bigger war that's at hand. See, there's a Spiritual war that's going on. And Satan is fighting desperately to make sure that the people God is redeeming don't properly reflect him.

He wants them to reflect the sinful nature that makes Satan happy. Satan just wants you to do you. There's a saying that people say you do you. I'll do what I want to. Do you do what you want to do.

Do you for short. That is one of the most selfish, sinful things we could say. Like sometimes I'll catch myself telling somebody, hey man, take it easy. You know, like, have a good day. Some people need to get encouraged, like, hey man, get off the couch and do something.

You know, like, some people are working too hard and they do need to hear like the take it easy. But just saying take it easy is not always appropriate to say to someone, but something that's always inappropriate is to say, do you? That is Satan's mantra. Oh, he loves it when people just do what they want to do. But you see, what God has called us to is to recognize the sacrifice of Christ on our behalf, to lay our lives down and submit to him and say, lord, what do you want to do in.

In me and through me? And so what God had promised to do, Remember we said that Jesus was crucified since the foundation of the world. He isn't a plan B. That was God's plan all along. He's God's number one plan.

Even before we had ever sinned, God knew that that would happen. People wonder, why would God create such a beautiful, perfect thing and give us the option of sinning against him, of turning our backs on Him? There's no choice. Is not like willfully following God. If you don't have a choice to turn your back on him.

You're just a robot, an automaton. You're just following programming. But if God creates you with the ability to have free will and to choose to turn your back on him in his perfect way, then he's also created the ability for you to decide to love Him. He loves you and he's given you the option to love him in return. And so what God says He's going to do is he says to them, he unveils the plan a little bit at a time and throughout, like all of this, these, these pages, as we go through them over the next months, we're going to see that a little bit at a time.

God has been revealing his coming Messiah to the people throughout over thousands of years. And he never gives anybody the whole picture. He gives them little bits At a time. And as it all adds up, we see he's been talking about Christ through the whole scripture from COVID to cover, is all about Jesus. And so as he's doing that, as he's showing this little first snippet of it to Adam and Eve, he says that there's going to be this friction between Satan, between all of his demonic warriors that he has, and between the, the.

The human children. There's always going to be this struggle. Paul tells us in the scriptures. He says there's no, our, Our. Our struggle, our battle is not against flesh and blood.

We're not fighting each other. Our struggle is against the spiritual forces and the darkness and the evil that's in this world. And so as we, as we look through this, what, what, what it says is that they're going to have this, this showdown that will one day happen between the offspring of the woman and the offspring of the serpent. Now, Eve, the first thing she does after they get out of the garden, I don't know if it's the first thing, but the next thing that we're told is that she and Adam get together, they have a son. And you know what Eve says?

Ah, now with the help of God, she gives God a little credit. She says, and catch this. I have brought forth a man. Oh, I mean, he's a baby, but he'll grow up to be a man. And you know what she believes she has done?

She thinks she has created her own salvation. Now she says God's helped with this a little bit. Adam had a minor role in it, you know, like. But, but. Oh, come on.

That was a little funny. But, but, you know, but she says, I have brought forth a man. This is going to be the solution to this sin problem. I think she believes she could. Like, that he would stomp on some snakes and they could get back into the garden that God had kicked them out of.

Remember I said there were two trees? I don't think I finished it. There was the one tree, the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The other tree was the Tree of Life, the tree that if you eat from it, it gives you life, it keeps giving you life, eternal life even. But you're only allowed to eat from that if you choose not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

And since they did that, they're cut off from both trees because it would be wicked of God to allow you to live forever as a sinful human being. Like, you can't keep eating from the Tree of Evil, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and evil or knowledge of good and evil and keep eating from the tree of life. That would be wicked of God to allow you to do that. So what he does is he creates his own salvation for us. But all along the way, we keep trying to define our own salvation.

So Eve did it first, right? She says, oh, I brought forth a man. He's going to be the one that brings salvation into the world. That wasn't what happened. In fact, quite the opposite.

She has another son. They grow older, one's holy one's not. The first son that she thought was the hope ends up murdering her second son. Like, we're not off to a good start just at all, you know, like, ah, how many times am I going to have to have more kids before one of them finally does what's right? You know?

So we tend to do this. We tend to, like, make our own definition of what we think our own personal hell looks like. And then we try to create our own salvation from that. Let me explain.

I don't like being unnecessarily sweaty and out in the heat. I don't like when the house is too warm and I'm a little, like, just a little damp just sitting there, right? Like when your air conditioner doesn't quite work. We were talking about that yesterday. You know, when your air conditioner doesn't quite put out enough, I'm like, oh, that's miserable.

We were mowing the grass yesterday at the church. I was drenched in sweat. That's fine. It's work. As soon as that's done, I want to take a shower and put on dry clothes.

That's what I wanted to do. If I have a car and the air conditioning doesn't work, I would rather just not have that car and get a different one. That's me. Okay? That's just my little thing.

To me, like, just being unnecessarily sweaty and hot is like, hell, maybe literally it is. I don't know. But that's, to me, that. And so my. My way of saving myself from that is like, I. I'll fix the air conditioning.

I'll buy a car that has air conditioning that works. Like if. If I'm shopping for a used vehicle and the AC doesn't work, I'm not buying that car, period. I just won't do it. It's not an option.

I decided that that's where I'm at in my life. But some of us, we don't want to live in, like, we define our own hells. Okay? I Don't want to live in bad food hell, you know, Like, I don't want to eat bad food. So I'm going to always find, like, good food to eat.

I'm going to make good food. These are still personal for me. I love eating good food. Like, Wanda brought me sofrito, and it's like a cooking base that you make. And I'm like, oh, she made this for us.

That's awesome. So like, Amy, don't let me forget to take that home, you know. And so I'm like, yes, this is great. In the Old Testament, people used to bring the priests and the Levi's, like, meat and bread. But I love it when people, like, I had somebody brought me venison before that.

He killed and butchered and brought me venison. And then they moved to New York and I'm like, man, there goes my source of venison, you know, And I have to go hunt myself for myself. So I love it when people bring the pastor food. It's biblical anyway. So we define our own hells.

Though for yours, it might be like, you know, I don't know, not. Not stylish clothes and you're like, my way out of this hell of looking like a nerd. Like, I grew up looking like a dork, you know, is like, I've got to buy, you know, cool clothes. And I never figured that out. I still don't know how to buy cool clothes.

So I just buy whatever I think is cheap enough that looks decent still. That's my order. Cheap enough. It still looks decent. And I'm pretty happy.

Some of you commented on shoes that I've had before. You're like, oh, I like those shoes. I'm like, turns out I like orangey, peachy colored shoes because they were like $25 at Bell's and that's my price range. It's good for me, you know, but whatever it is that you might have, you might say, well, I'm too skinny or I'm too fat, and that's hell for me and I need to change that. So I'll do whatever it takes.

I'll starve myself or I'll, you know, do. I don't know how skinny people gain weight. This seems like it's not that hard to do. I haven't struggled with gaining weight. I've struggled with not gaining weight.

So. But you. I. My wife had a friend that she couldn't gain weight. Also, I never saw her eat that much, so I don't think she was really trying but she was always cold, you know, so whatever it is, that was a joke too.

Anyway, so she. Or so we define our own personal healths. You might have one. You might be like, you know what? I'm broke.

But I also like to have every subscription to every TV and sports platform there is, and I'm spending $182 a month on my television. It's like, well, I guess you got to make the thermostat warmer. You know, like your hell is not having those sports networks and TV channels, and mine is the heat thing. So whatever it is, we try to define our own way out of hell. And that's what Eve was trying to do.

She says, I'm in hell, not being in paradise. We lost paradise. We're out here. God drove us out of the Garden of Eden, we, which was perfect. And now we're here, and there's thorns and thistles and all this other stuff, and we've got to work for our food instead of just going picking it off a tree and eating it.

And so now we're in hell. And if I have this son, he's able to stomp enough snake heads, we'll get back into the garden. Except it doesn't work that way. That's not what God said. And that wasn't God's plan.

See, too often, rather than looking to the salvation, instead of looking to Jesus Christ as our salvation, we. We look to all these things that we have defined as our own personal hells, and we try to create a solution to get out of them, rather than relying on God trusting in his plan and seeking salvation from Him. You see, at stake here is the image of God that's been distorted, that's missing. And instead of saying, lord, I have willfully engaged in a life of sin. I don't want to live a life of sin.

I want you to make me holy again. I want you to cleanse that tarnished image of God, that imago DEI that I have allowed to get messed up. I want you to cleanse that from me, and I want you to make me whole and holy and pure again. And rather than that so often, we would rather not listen to Holy Spirit of God, and we would rather listen to our own selves, creating our own solutions. Anything that I can do to keep from allowing Christ to actually be the Lord over my life.

See, we're good with him being our Savior. We're good with having a clean slate. But we don't want to let him be Lord over our life because that means we have to submit to him. God's plan for us has been that he would send Christ as our perfect offering, the perfect sacrifice for our sins, but also that he might become the King of kings in our lives, the Lord of your life. And what God's plan all the way back from the beginning was that Jesus would be born on this earth, that he would live and die perfect, sinless, that through that he would triumph over the power of death, and that he would be able to restore us into the image that God created us in.

That image is still alive in you. But if you don't see it very clearly, you need to go to your Creator and say, lord, can you? I know you can. Lord, will you cleanse me so that when people see me, all they see is Jesus Christ? The beautiful thing is that Jesus did all of this on the cross.

On the cross, he took care of all that and he provided for all that. The day that he rose again provided new life for you. And all that's missing at that point, all that that that has to be done, is that you must believe. You submit your life to Christ, and through that he will do the work of making you perfect and holy. Amen.

Allow the Holy Spirit to guide you and to make you new again.