Youth & Outreach Director, Hunter Newton, preached this message on November 16, 2025. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Audio Transcript
Going to be good for you. And so every decision, everything we do, is rooted in a belief. And there’s no more important belief than what we believe about who God is and how that affects us. On Sunday mornings, during Communion Sundays, we are going through our special sermon series that goes through our statement of faith. This is not more important than the Bible, but it’s what we.
It’s a succinct statement of what we believe the Bible clearly, importantly teaches. This morning we’ll be looking at Article 3, the human condition. And hopefully we’ll see too that the human condition affects everything. What we believe about us, the human condition, it affects all of life. We’ll see that because humans are made in God’s image, they have value.
This sort of theology has really practical implications for us. So maybe if you’re a big idea person and every sermon we preach here at Lake Wisconsin has one big idea, because every passage of Scripture has one big idea. Our big idea is what we believe about the human condition. That’s it. What we believe about the human condition.
We’re going to walk through each line of our statement of faith. You’re used to, whether you know it or not, we preach expositorily here. And that’s just a fancy way of saying that we do exegesis, which is just a fancy way of saying that we take one passage of Scripture and pull the meaning out of it and see what is this passage teaching us? Was this passage showing us. Was it showing us about God, about ourselves, and then how should we live?
We’re used to us doing that with one passage. This morning we’re going to be in a lot of passages, and we’re going to kind of be executing line by line through our statement of faith. So it’ll be a little bit different, but it’ll be good because we’re looking at what we believe about the human condition and why that matters. We’re going to read our statement of faith altogether, and then we’re going to get to some scripture passages. So I’d like to turn your attention to the screen now.
It’s got our statement of faith on it. And let’s read this together, brothers and sisters. We believe that God created Adam and Eve in his image, but they sinned when tempted by Satan in union with Adam. Human beings are sinners by nature and by choice, alienated from God and under his wrath. Only through God’s saving work in Jesus Christ can we be rescued, reconciled and renewed.
Wonderful. This is what we believe. Friends, I think there might be some pictures in there, too, Ty. So nothing to do with the sermon, but she’s my firstborn daughter, so I’m going to tell you about her. So on November 3, Piper Ruth Newton was born at St Clair’s Hospital in Baraboo.
And you can see she’s got some personality and she’s a sweetheart. I think we’ve got another slide, too. And so she’s a joy. She’s a delight. Parenting is good.
Let me answer some questions. We’re getting enough sleep that God knows we’re getting the sleep we need. Okay, so he’s giving us the grace for it. Lee is happy, Leah’s healthy, so is Piper. We’re doing.
We’re doing all right. We’re holding our own. By God’s grace, we’re making it through. It’s an adjustment. So we need.
More than anything, we need your prayers. So we’re doing great. All right. Thank you. So we’ll be back to.
Back to your regularly scheduled programming.
So the human condition. First line that we believe about the human condition. We believe that God created Adam and Eve in his image. And our scriptural Support is Genesis 1:26 and 27. There’s more passages that support each of these lines that we’re going to be walking through this morning, but we’re going to highlight just one, one or a couple key ones.
God created Adam and Eve in his image. We’re going to be explaining this in each line. We’re going to be giving an illustration and drawing out practical implications. But Genesis 1:26 and 27 says, Then God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness. They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, the whole earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.
So God created man in his own image. He created him in the image of God. He created them male and female. I’m just saying it outrightly. God made Adam and Eve in the efca.
So if you didn’t know, that’s the denomination that we’re a part of in the efca. You have to, in order to be a part of the denomination, believe in a literal and figure or literal and historical Adam and Eve. You can debate. There’s an agreed to an agreement to disagree on the age of the earth. Some people believe in older, some people believe in a young earth.
But we say the essential and create. One of the essentials of creation is that God made everything, but he made Adam and Eve uniquely and in his image. Okay? They are real people from a real Time in a real place. To say that they evolved from a different species and were not or were not uniquely made by God is to lose the gospel.
And we will cover that later. Exactly why. But it’s clear that our first parents were made in God’s image. As their descendants, this is something that we share in. This is the theological principle known as the imago dei.
It just means that we are made in God’s image. All humans, all places, all times, forever and ever, made in God’s image. It has nothing to do with how intellectually gifted somebody is. It has nothing to do with how athletically gifted somebody is. That has nothing to do with.
With. Fill in the blank. If you are a human, you are made in God’s image. Before even we are sinners, we are image bearers. That is our primary identity.
Before even being a sinner, are we sinners? Of course, but we are image bearers. We are made in God’s image. We don’t physically look like him. And having certain traits or functions or capacities does not make us more or less made in God’s image.
And this is really important because it gives and shows inherent value to all humans and inherent dignity, including the mentally incapacitated and the unborn. And we know we don’t have to look far into human history and even some history going on right now, that those sorts of people who are mentally incapacitated or unborn are not always valued but the gods were word. The fact that we’re made in his image definitively, boldly and triumphantly declares, yes, they matter.
Since humans are made in God’s image, we have inherent dignity. We are worthy of respect. We are worthy of life. And to be treated as humans. Putting down fellow image bearers, murdering them, or treating them as a commodity through means such as pornography or slavery are not only to be avoided, but actively worked against.
Maybe think about it this way, friends. We could go down to the Lodi Mall, the Dollar General this afternoon, and you can’t buy much for a dollar anymore. So we’ll just. Those of us who are literalists, let’s say $2. And so you slide $2 across the counter to the cashier.
And those dollar bills don’t have value just because I want them to. Those dollar bills have value because. Right. Because of whose image is on them, President George Washington. And because of who made them, the United States government.
That’s why the cashier will accept. That’s why those dollar bills matter. And it’s right. It’s a. It’s a simple Illustration.
But how much more valuable are we because we’re made in God’s image? Because of who made us? Infinitely more valuable.
All image bearers have dignity. All image bearers should be treated as human. We believe that we are made in God’s image. We also believe that Adam and Eve sinned when tempted by Satan. Second point we affirm in our statement of faith is that Adam and Eve sinned when tempted by Satan.
There’s two passages that we’re going to point out. Genesis 3:1:6 and John 8:44. Genesis 3:1:6. Now, the serpent was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, did God really say you can’t eat from any tree in the garden?
The woman said to the serpent, we may eat the fruit from the trees in the garden, but about the fruit of the trees in the middle of the garden, God said, you must not eat it or touch it, or you will die. No, you will certainly not die. The serpent said to the woman, in fact, God knows that when you eat it, your eyes will be open and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. The woman saw the tree was good for food, delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate.
She also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it. We also look at John 8:44. You are of your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning. He does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him.
When he tells a lie, he speaks from his own nature because he is a liar and the father of lies. Adam and Eve sinned when tempted by Satan. When they were tempted by Satan. Friends, that’s at the core of every single sin that you and I have committed or anybody, anywhere is going to commit is the fact that we think we know more than God in any specific scenario. Why do we cheat on taxes?
Why do we. Why do people commit, like, adultery? Why do people do this? Why. Why do people put down why people gossip?
Because we think when we do such sorts of things, not to say everybody’s committed every single sin, but when we sin, friends, we think that we know more than God. That’s a lie as old as the garden. Adam and Eve, when tempted by Satan, sinned. God told them not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Yet Satan, who’s also described in the Scriptures as the devil or the adversary who is a fallen angel twisted God’s words.
When he spoke to the first humans, he said, did God really say that? And he made them doubt God. Unfortunately, Adam chose to believe the Father of lies rather than the Father of Truth. Because of that choice, they brought sin into the world. Because Adam and Eve sinned, they brought the presence of sin into the world.
And some of us wondering why. Right now we’re wondering, why would God create humans with the capacity to sin? That’s a question they’ve probably been asking since the garden. Why would God make us with the ability to sin? There’s two popular theories from throughout church history.
They think they do a decent job. I don’t think they cover the full spectrum. These are not technical, these are not academic terms. But I think the first one we could call God didn’t make us robots theory. And so this basically exposits that God wants us to have a real choice and loving him.
And that bears some weight. At least how we understand how love works, that makes sense to us. It loses legs a little bit and we’ll get to that in a second. But okay, God, we have to have a real, real choice. I think that makes sense.
It satisfies some intellectual curiosity. The other one is that we are. The second theory would be broken to made whole that basically this posits that a certain amount of bad has to happen to bring about a certain amount of good. Why would God allow tsunamis? Why would God allow babies to die?
Why would God allow economic crises? Well, a certain amount of bad has to bring about a certain amount of good. And that makes some sense.
Makes some sense. But I think they both lose a little bit of legs. So my question, my answer after thorough research and praying and thinking about it quite a bit is we don’t know. We don’t know why God would make humans with the capacity to sin and something that’s going to bother you. But I think that that’s really the most humble approach.
Yes, we can try to give answers for God here. We don’t know why he did what he did. We have an idea. The issue with the robot theories that are puts our concept of how love works and projects it onto God saying that that’s how he had to do it. And in the same way the broken made whole theory, it’s what’s ultimately they’re both just guesses.
And so I think that the right posture, yeah, those both capture part of it. And maybe the right posture is saying, yeah, I’m not sure why God did that. The way he did, but I’m going to trust him by faith, knowing that he ultimately knows what’s good, what’s right for me. We don’t know. But we do know as a result, sin is present in the world.
And we do know that the question should not be, okay, why did they bring sin into the world? The question should instead be, why would God make us in the first place? But also why would God choose to redeem anybody in the first place?
We believe that Adam and Eve sinned when tempted by Satan. We also believe that in union with Adam, human beings are sinners by nature and by choice. It’s the next point. We affirm that in union with Adam, human beings are sinners by nature and by choice. Passage we’ll turn to is Romans 5:12,14.
Therefore, just as sin enter the world through one man and death through sin, in this way death spread to all people because all sinned. In fact, sin was in the world before the law. But sin is not charged to a person’s account when there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who did not sin in the likeness of Adam’s transgression. He is a type of the Coming one.
In a similar way that my parents passed down my brown hair, my brown eyes, our first parents passed down to all of us this inherent sin nature. Human beings are sinners by nature and by choice. Parents, you understand that you did not have to teach your children to sin. They came pre programmed knowing how to do that. We don’t have to look far into the world to see the evidence and presence of sin.
And if you say, I have no sin in my life, well then you at least have pride. Sin is present in the world today. We are born sinners and we freely choose to send the Psalms. David wrote that in sin his mother conceived him. We don’t have to look hard to see that this world is broken.
Everything we do is affected by sin. Isaiah 64,6 puts it this way. All of us have become like something unclean. And all our righteous acts are like a polluted garment. All of us wither like a leaf in our iniquities.
That’s another word for sin. Carry us away like the wind. Even our best efforts are like filthy rags. And let me just be really frank with you here. This, friends, this morning, the English translators of the Hebrew here are just being polite by calling it filthy rags.
The Hebrew, really, I’m not trying to gross you out, but it means filthy menstrual rags.
That’s. That’s the point, it’s not meant for shock value, but this is how it looks compared to trying to. To earn our way to God. Even our best efforts, even our best attempts fall so hopelessly short. That’s the state we’re in because of our sin choices and because of our sin nature.
We believe that in union with Adam, human beings are sinners by nature and by choice. Maybe think of it this way. I like the color blue. You can insert whatever color you want in there, but human, human beings like. It’s not as if before we know Jesus, anything we do is just like some.
There’s a splash of blue here, splash of blue there. No, it’s like before we know Jesus, friends, everything we see, do think, eat, touch is blue. All of it. Before we know Jesus. Because Hebrews 1 or Hebrews 11:1 says that without.
Without faith, it’s impossible to please God. It’s not something that we just kind of sort of do sometimes. No, it’s. It’s all we do. It’s who we are.
We believe that in union with Adam, human beings are sinners by nature and by choice. We also believe that because of our sin we are alienated from God and under his wrath. The next point we affirm is this, that because of our sin, we are alienated from God and under his wrath. Jeremiah 17:9, Ephesians 2:1 3 and Romans 1:18 teach this. Jeremiah 17:9 says, the heart is more deceitful than anything else and incurable.
Who can understand it? Ephesians 2:13, or 1 to 3. And you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you previously walked according to the ways of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit now working in the disobedient. We too all previously lived among among them in our fleshly desires, carrying out the inclinations of our flesh and thoughts. And we were by nature children under wrath, as the others were also.
And lastly, Romans 1:18. For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth because of our sin and before Christ, all humans everywhere at all times are natural enemies of God. And if that’s bumming you out, I’m sorry. It’s just what the Bible says. I’ve heard people say things like, well, I know when get to the end, when you get to judgment day, God will see and look at his heart that he’s a naturally good person.
Friends, that’s just not the case. It’s never happened. It won’t happen. It can’t happen.
God will not look at someone who’s not repentant, who’s not put their trust in Jesus and say, yeah, you get a pass. That’s just not how it works.
The Bible is very clear in Romans 3, 9, 18, when I was a young sinner and needed to be arrested by grace, needed to be pulled in and convicted of my need for grace. Romans 3, 9, 18. It just pulls no punches, says what then? Are we any better off? Not at all.
For we have already charged that both Jews and Greeks, and that’s the Bible’s way of saying everyone, either Jew or you’re Greek and Greece, just a way of saying everybody’s not Jewish, are all under sin as it is written, There is no one righteous, not even one. There’s no one who understands. There is no one who seeks God. All have turned away. All alike have become worthless.
There is no one who does what is good, not even one. Their throat is an open grave. They deceive with their tongues. Vipers venom is under their lips. Their mouth is full of cursing and bitterness.
Their feet are swift to shed blood. Ruin and wretchedness are in their paths, and in the path of peace. They have not known There is no fear of God before their eyes. By nature, we are not born indifferent towards God, sitting on the fence posts or shrugging our shoulders. By nature we are enemies of God.
We never choose to please Him. Can we do good things before we know Jesus? Of course. Atheists and people of other faiths do good things all the time. It’s an element, an aspect of common grace that doesn’t mean that they’re pleasing ultimately, like living, earning their way to God.
To think we can earn salvation is to have a very small view of God and a very small view of our sin. The thing we can earn our salvation is to have a very small view of who God is. A holy creator, maker of all things, knower and lover of our souls. And to think that we can earn our way to him is to minimize him and to minimize how offensive our sin is to Him. As a result, if left on our own, we are destined for hell.
We believe that because of our sin we are alienated from God and under his wrath. We also believe that we can only be saved by God’s saving work in Jesus Christ. So next you kind of see you’ve got some ellipses in the bulletin and you can see some ellipses on the screen. First, we’re going to work through how it’s only through Jesus and that then we’ll work through the R words of rescued, reconciled and renewed. But we just want to focus right now on it’s only through God’s saving work in Jesus.
Acts 4:12 and 1 Timothy 2:5. Acts 4:12 says, There is salvation in no one else. For there is no other name under heaven given to people by which we must be saved. First Timothy 2:5. For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind.
The man, Man, Christ Jesus. If there were any other way to be made right with God, except for the Father sending his Son to live a perfect life, dying innocent death and then rise again, if there was any other way for us to be made right with God, he would have done it.
There’s no other way. And sometimes people ask the question, why do bad things happen to good people? Then, friends, the issue with that is it’s only happened once. Only one time in human history has a bad thing happened to a good person. And he went and he signed up for it.
He went to the cross voluntarily. And you can’t even, maybe you could even say it wasn’t a bad thing because it was for us. But he chose to go to the cross. And he’s the only one who can honestly ever say, I didn’t deserve this. But he went there for us.
He went to the cross and he rose again three days later. So that you and I might become righteous or we might become good in God’s sight, because his work now counts on our behalf. And that is the good news. Friends, you want the Gospel in four words, Jesus in my place. We are made right with God by placing our trust in Jesus for payment of sin.
In the Gospels, Jesus is constantly describing this kingdom of God, especially the Book of Matthew. He’s constantly describing the kingdom of God. So maybe it’s helpful for us to think about. Okay, what does it look like to trust in Jesus? To trust in no other name?
Well, to trust in Jesus, maybe it’s helpful to think about it in the kingdom of God terms, because that’s the language Jesus speaks of. And so it’s turning away from. And he says, repent and believe, for the kingdom of God is near. He says that in Mark 1, turn away from and turn to entrust in Jesus alone. And so if we’re thinking of him as King Jesus, we should think about faith in him as swearing allegiance to him, trusting in him.
Jesus, would you take my sin and my guilt and my shame? I know. Would you pay for that? For Me. And he says, yes, if you hope and trust in him, he will not turn you away.
And so if we’re swearing our allegiance to him, it’s turning away from this and turning to and trusting Him. Then also it’s putting on new clothing, acting a certain way because of a soldier in the army of a king, you know, they’re not allowed to. They’re going to have certain code of conduct, certain actions, certain dress code. It’s a swearing allegiance to King Jesus, repenting of our sin, turning away from it and turning to Him.
Once our allegiance is sworn to him, we will live like it. We will be. And we should be noticeably different. Are we okay obeying Jesus to be accepted by Him? No, not by a long shot.
Right? The Gospel is, I’m accepted by faith. I am accepted by grace through faith, and therefore I obey. And it’s not I have to obey to be accepted. It’s no, I’m accepted by grace through faith, therefore I obey.
It’s only through the saving work of Jesus that we can be rescued, reconciled and renewed. Only through Christ we can be rescued first. Thessalonians 1:10 says, and to wait for his son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath. To be rescued is to be saved from God’s wrath. All sin will be punished.
For those who trusted in Jesus, then he took that punishment for us. And if your trust isn’t in Jesus, you’re going to pay for it yourself. Maybe people wonder, how can a loving God punish people? Well, God’s also. He would be not loving if he wasn’t a righteous God, he wasn’t a just God.
Every injustice must be paid for.
He cares about it. He hates sin because of what it does to his people, what it does to his creation.
Only through the saving work of Jesus can we be rescued. It’s also how we can be reconciled.
Only through Christ can we be reconciled. Romans 5:1 2 says, Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We also obtained access through him by faith into this grace in which we stand and we boast in the hope of the glory of God in Colossians 1:27, and through him to reconcile everything to himself. There are things on earth, are things in heaven. By making peace through his blood shed on the cross before Jesus, our relationship with God, as we’ve seen, has been totally broken because of sin.
Only through faith in Christ, we can be restored to right relationship with God the Father. That’s the only way we can be. That’s also the only way we can be renewed. For scriptural support, here we have Romans 8:29, 2nd Corinthians 3:18, and 1 John 3:2. Only through Christ can we be renewed.
Romans 8:29 says, for those he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, so that he would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. 2nd Corinthians 3:18 says, we all with unveiled faces are looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord and are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory. This is from the Lord who is the Spirit in First John 3:2. Dear friends, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that when he appears, we will be like him, because we will see him as he is.
We are renewed by the transforming of our minds as Romans 12 talks about, and not conforming to the patterns of this world as the Holy Spirit makes us more like Jesus. In other words, the Spirit of God transforms us to become continually more like the Son of God. It’s a progressive process. The theological term is sanctification. We are progressively made more like Jesus, and we won’t be.
We are all works in progress until he returns.
That’s not to say that a Christian comes to know Jesus and stops sinning. The Scriptures don’t teach that. But we should hopefully be sinning less and less as we become continually more like Jesus.
This is what we believe about the human condition, and we’ll get to what it means for us in just a moment. But I want us to read this wonderful statement again together. Brothers and sisters, would you read this with me? We believe that God created Adam and Eve and his image, but they sinned when tempted by Satan in union with Adam. Human beings are sinners by nature and by choice, alienated from God and under his wrath.
Only through God’s saving work in Jesus Christ can we be rescued, reconciled, and renewed. So we’re going to get to what it means for us. Just a second. Let me just throw out a word of caution, a loving word of caution, but it’s fairly stern. Some of us are gonna be tempted to think, okay, great, I know that I’m a sinner.
I know that the only way I can be saved is through faith in Jesus. Whoop dee doo. And I can say that because I’ve been in those shoes. So I’m not saying this is somebody who’s got it figured out, but Just somebody who loves you, cares about you, cares about us. Friends, we should never be bored with statements of faith like this or think it’s like just for pastors and theologians.
Because to think that this sort of doctrine is just meh, whatever, that’s one of the primary commands that were given to church leaders in the New Testament. Because this doctrine is wonderfully rich, it’s wonderfully deep. The problem is not the doctrine, the problem is us. It’s the study of God, friends, and the things of God. I loved my time in systematic theology.
I had to perform that, had a very nasally voice and he would just made a distinct impact on me and he would just stop mid lecture and go, guys, we’re studying God like that’s a gift, that we can not only know God in His word, but we can study who he is. And so if we’re tempted to be bored by this or to think, yeah, whatever, I know this, let me just say, I think, because we can just say real briefly, there’s pride in your eyes if you just say so what to this? It’s time to do some self examination. Because we will never plumb all the depths of who God is. It is a privilege to study what God has revealed to us.
Let’s just real briefly go over some applications from each line. I know we’re running along, but let’s just bear with me through these. So because God created Adam and Eve in His image, we should treat humans with respect and value. Things like pornography, abortion, trafficking and slavery should be actively fought against because we are made in God’s image. Adam and Eve sinned when tempted by Satan.
And we should work to push back the effects of sin in the world today, both in our lives and in the lives of those we minister to. Friends, you know that throughout church history, throughout just human history, the Christians have been the first front lines of caring for those that the world would say are worthless otherwise. Starting hospitals, starting schools, caring for those of the world would count as nothing. Because in union with Adam, human beings are sinners by nature and by choice. We should tell everybody about Jesus.
Everyone needs him. Because of our sin, we are alienated from God and under his wrath we should then know that nobody but he’s naturally a good person. We should tell people about the saving work of Jesus because only through God’s saving work in Jesus, we can be rescued, reconciled and renewed. We should put our trust in no one or nothing else and plead for others to do the same. Those are wonderful applications.
I invite you to pick one and Start there and work on it. But let me just offer you a succinct big takeaway. Our big idea, what we believe about the human condition. It’s a big takeaway. Maybe something that you succinctly can apply.
Remember who you were before Jesus. Remember what Jesus has done for you. And now live like both those statements are true. Remember who you were before Jesus. Remember what Jesus did for you.
And now live like you know both of these things are true. As we get ready to take up our last song, as Bill and team get ready to lead us, just want to invite you. There’s gonna be people in the back who want to pray with you. Like if you want to learn more about who Jesus is or if you have, if you came in carrying something this morning that’s like this is way too heavy for me to bear. I just need to tell somebody.
You can. Everything you share back there is going to be confidential. Let’s. It’s a matter of self harm or something like that. But we, we want to pray with you.
There’s gonna be a team in the back, they are gonna have name tags on to pray with you if you want to hear more about Jesus or if you just need somebody to pray and just somebody to listen. So as we get ready to take up that, as we get ready to do our final song, as we’re ready to proclaim this is who God is. Just feel free to stay seated if you want to remain seated and ask God, how do I need to respond? Think of this as you chance to do business with him. I’m gonna pray.
I’ll give you the chance to do just that. God, you are gracious, you are kind and we thank you that you didn’t leave us in our fallen condition. But you sent a savior who loves, who sees, who knows, who can make way possible to be saved from our sin, be saved really from ourselves and the coming wrath that we so deserve. We pray for hearts in this room that haven’t trusted in Jesus that they would do that this morning in hearts in this room. They just need to tell somebody something.
We pray that they would go and talk to the prayer team and feel no shame as they do that. God, we pray that your word would do what you need it to do. We know that your word won’t return void to you. We trust that we thank you that we can come to our good and gracious father with everything. It’s in Jesus name we pray.
Amen.