For his message.
Our kids are important and we love them. We want to see them all come to faith and have a good relationship with our Lord Jesus Christ. We thank our teachers. But I also want to specifically thank Eric Schmidt because he gets it all together and he makes sure it happens. And it's been a real blessing this year.
He told me he had enough volunteers, but that there are enough of you that want to work with kids that he didn't have to go out and beg and plead or even invite. So I thank you all for that. But I also encourage you, if you don't have a ministry in the church, maybe you could help with Sunday school, because I'm sure they sometimes have a difficult child. Not to say it's your child, but somebody's that might just need someone to sit next to them or they might need substitutes. Most importantly, we can all be praying for for that ministry.
We're going over a series called Biblical Principles for Marital Success. We're in the book of Genesis and last week the main points were seek to understand the main character in the story. And just to see if you remember, are you the main character in the story? No. God is.
You need to seek to understand your role in the story, to know that you have purpose. God made you with all your warts and faults and beauty, shoe size, toes, whatever you have, He. He made you specifically because he has something special that only you can do. I talked about seeking to understand your place in the story, that wherever you are right now, God knew that you would be here and he has a reason for you to be here in church today. But where your job is, the community that you live in, where you go to school, there's something there that only you can do.
You need to seek to understand the other characters in the story. And. And because we're talking about marriage, that's especially about your spouse. And the last one is you need to understand what God's rules are in the story. And we're going to develop that more today.
Obeying the rules. I have four questions for you. Do you ever wonder why relationships are difficult to maintain? Has anybody ever thought that? How many of you think relationships are super easy?
They are at times, but other times they're not. You know, they take a lot of energy and they take a lot of time to make them grow and to thrive. If you don't have a relationship with anyone or someone that is growing and thriving, it doesn't just stay here. When something isn't growing and thriving, what happens in fall, it deteriorates it, wilts it, it dies. So we asked the question, why did God make relationships, and particularly marriage, so difficult?
That's a trick question. Did God make it difficult? No. He made everything good. He provided everything they need.
Are there things that we can do to make our relationships and marriages better? When we come to talk about relationships, we're talking about a relationship with God, our relationship with our spouse, with our family, but we're also talking about our relationship with friends, especially in the church, that these principles all overlap to help us. So we're going to be going back to Genesis today. Then we're going to look at some theology in the New Testament about sin, because we really have to understand the role that temptation and sin play in our life that Adam and Eve brought into the world. Let's go back now, and first I'll read From Genesis, chapter 2, verses 15 through 17.
The Lord took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to work it and watch over it. And the Lord God commanded the man, you are free to eat from any tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of Good and evil, for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die. Then we go to chapter three. Now, the serpent was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made. And he the serpent.
But what we find out later, this is really Satan that's talking to Eve, that's using a literal serpent or the form of one. 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 tree in the middle of the garden, God said, you must not eat it or touch it, or you will die. Now, we're not sure if Eve just added in that touch it, or if Adam had included that. But it's not exactly what God had told Adam.
That's just a side point. The serpent said, 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 opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. The woman saw that the tree was good for food, delightful to look at. It was desirable for obtaining wisdom.
So she took some of its fruit and ate it. And she also gave some to her husband. There's a little caveat here. Who was with her, he had seen all this. He heard it.
He didn't stop her. He wasn't being a leader. Instead, he ate it also. Then the eyes of both of them were opened. They knew they were naked.
So they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze. And they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. So the Lord God called out to the man and said to him, where are you?
Adam said, I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked. So I hid. Then God asked, who told you that you were naked? Did you eat from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from? The man replied, the woman you gave to be with me.
She gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it. So the Lord God asked the woman, what have you done? And the woman said, the serpent deceived me, and I ate. So the Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, you are cursed more than any livestock and more than any wild animal. You will move on your belly and eat dust all the days of your life.
I will put hostility between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel. He said to the woman, I will intensify your labor pains. You will bear children with painful effort. Your desire will be for your husband, yet he will rule over you.
And he said to the man, because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, do not eat from it. The ground is cursed because of you. You will eat from it by means of painful labor all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you. And you will eat the plants of the field.
You will eat bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground, since you were taken from it. For you are dust, and you will return to dust. The man named his wife Eve because she was the mother of all the living. The Lord God made clothing from skins for the man and his wife, and he clothed them. Then Lord God said, since the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, he must not reach out, take from the Tree of Life, eat and live forever.
Just to explain that if they had eaten from the Tree of Life, they would have lived in this sinful world forever. So it was a good thing that God prohibited that. So the Lord God sent him away from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove the man out and stationed the cherubim and the flaming whirling sword east of the Garden of Eden to guard the way to the tree of life. May we pray.
Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the instruction that it gives us how we might live in such a way that we benefit from all the good things, things that you have provided help us to see in our own lives today, Father, where we're falling short of obeying your rules, knowing that it will honor you and that it will improve our relationships in this world. In Jesus name, amen. Why do marriages have difficulties that often lead to divorce? I found some statistics online.
40% Of marriages end in divorce. For a long time it was half of marriages end in divorce. So it sounds like that's an improvement. 40%. But I'll share in just a minute why that isn't so much of an improvement.
60% Of second marriages end in divorce. 73% Of third marriages end in divorce. Marriages after age 25 and higher education levels significantly lower the likelihood of divorce. If you get married younger than that, it's okay. But just this is what the statistics show.
Four in ten divorces happen in the first ten years of marriage.
Now, along the lines of, why is it not so good that 40% of marriages end divorce? It's because many are choosing to live together instead of getting married today. And that goes against God's word. In 1949, 78% of households were married couples, but now it's 48% that are married couples. So the divorce rate went down.
But people aren't getting married. They're living together. And one in three young adults say that they will never marry. The first thing I want to point out is if you think that you can find a spouse better than your present spouse, that will make you happier. What do the statistics say about a second spouse marriage?
You're less likely to be happy. And if you're not happy with that person and you divorce and you get married a third time, what are your percentage chances of that one being happy? It lowers to 27%. So divorce is not the answer to problems in marriage.
This is not part of God's intended plan. God designed and provided for Adam and Eve everything that they needed for a lifelong, peaceful, loving and enjoyable relationship. So the question is, what went wrong? We go back to Genesis 2 and we read again. The Lord God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden to work it and watch over it.
And the Lord commanded the man, you are free to eat from any tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die. What went wrong? God gave a rule. We tend to focus on the 10% instead of the 90%.
The 90% is great. You can eat from how much? Any tree that you want. But we tend to focus on. No, we focus on God's terrible.
He's mean. He says, don't eat from this 10%.
Imagine how simple life would be if there was only one rule to follow in this world. Imagine raising your kids if all you had to teach them is not to do one thing. How simple life would be. That's how it was. That's all Adam had to remember.
He was free to eat of the abundance of the other trees in the garden. God wasn't trying to make Adam's life difficult. He wasn't trying to make it miserable. And he didn't make the rule because it made God feel better. He made the rule for the benefit of Adam and Eve.
He didn't want them to know what evil was. Now, Adam may not have fully understood the reason, but he certainly understood the rule. And we understand that as parents. Our kids don't understand why we tell them do this and don't do that a lot of the times. But they do know what the rule is to follow.
What went wrong first, John 5, 3 and 4. I just want to reiterate that God's commands are good, John said, for this is what love for God is to keep his commands. And his commands are not a burden because everyone who has been born of God conquers the world. The commands are not a burden for those who have conquered the world. This is the victory that has conquered the world.
Our faith for the unbeliever. The commands of God are seemingly a burden for them because the unbeliever is under the control and the rule of sin. They're under the control and the rule of this world and Satan's ways. But for the believer, we're no longer in this world. We live in a new kingdom.
We live in the kingdom of God. It's a different world, but it creates this problem because it's difficult to obey the rules of one country. If you are really a citizen of another country. Imagine you go to China or you go to Russia and you live your life like you're an American under our rules. What's going to happen to you?
There's going to be conflict. You're going to be arrested. There are going to be problems. Believers and unbelievers have citizenship in different countries. The unbeliever is in this country, and he lives by these rules.
But for those of us that are believers, we live in this country, we're exposed to these rules, but we need to be following those that God has for us. When we place our faith in Jesus Christ for salvation, then we are removed spiritually from citizenship in Satan's country to citizenship in the kingdom of God. And at that point, Scripture tells us we enter a struggle between the country that we live in and the country that we have our allegiance to. And once again, unbelievers don't have this struggle. They live in the country where they have their citizenship.
Now I want us to go to the Book of Romans, just so we understand theologically what is going on here. Why is sin a problem, and what has God done about it? In Romans 5, we read, for just as through one man's disobedience, that one man is Adam. The many. That means everyone that was born after Adam were all made sinners.
When Adam sinned, he moved from this kingdom of God. He moved all of his descendants into this kingdom of Satan. But the great promise is that so also through the one man's obedience. This is Jesus Christ. Those same many can be made righteous in God's sight.
The one man was Adam. We can blame him for our becoming citizens of Satan and slaves to Satan. In essence, Adam gave Satan the right to reign over him in the garden. He said, I'm not going to obey God anymore. I'm going to obey you.
You set the rules. I will follow them.
If we place our faith in Jesus Christ for salvation again, our citizenship is transferred from Satan's world to the kingdom of God. And it's not that we have a dual citizenship anymore. We've renounced the citizenship of the world and we've chosen to be part of God's country. That's where our spirit resides. But where is our body living today?
Our body still lives in this world, and it's a conflict that's created there. Romans 6 We read in verse 4. Therefore we were buried with him by baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life. We don't have to live in this world because Jesus died on the cross. And when he died on the cross, part of us died that lives here so that now we can walk in a new way over here.
For if we have been united with him in the likeness of his death, we will certainly also be in the likeness of his resurrection. For we know that Our old self was crucified. That's the part that was controlled here in this world with him, so that the body ruled by sin might be rendered powerless. Meaning that what's in this world, Satan and sin, they don't have power over us anymore. And the reason for this is so that we may no longer be enslaved to sin.
And slaves have to do what their master tells them to do. And Jesus Christ frees us. So we don't have have to obey the master anymore. Because a person who has died is freed from sin.
We have spiritually died with Christ. Therefore our former citizenship is no longer in effect, just as a dead person no longer has to pay taxes and follow the rules when they drive their car.
As believers, we walk spiritually in the kingdom of God. Our old self was put to death on the cross with Jesus. But there's this conflict that arises, that our bodies are still in the kingdom of this world because of what Jesus did for us on the cross. Our body does not have to obey the desires of this world, but our physical being still has to deal with temptations, and we still have to deal with the consequences of sin. Praise the Lord.
One day we won't have to do that.
We have a new master. We don't have to submit to the old master. But sadly, there are believers who choose at times to return as they did, to obey this old master. I want you to imagine that you've gone to a third world country and you see this child that's 11 years old, and the child's up for sale to be a slave. And the price on that child is enormous.
So you take everything out of your savings, you sell your home, your car, you get rid of everything so you can buy this child's freedom. You bring them back to America and you say, you're no longer a slave to that master here. You're going to be loved and you're going to be fed, and we're going to educate you. You're going to have great opportunity. That's what Jesus does for us by his death.
He purchases us out of the world.
But imagine now that that child at some point at age 18, says, you know, I really like the food better in that third world country. And I had a friendship over there that means a lot to me. And I used to enjoy doing such and such activities. So I'm going to leave America. I'm going to fly back there and I'm going to tell my old master I want to serve him again.
We think that's ridiculous, but that's what we sometimes do as believers. We want to keep a foot in this world and this world and still enjoy some things over here. We may no longer be enslaved to sin, but we give up our new position of freedom. And by choice we sometimes choose to live by sin again. Sin changed a perfect nature to a perverted nature.
In Adam and Eve. Before that sin, they were living. In Galatians 5, 22 and 23, they were living by the fruit of the spirit, where there was constant love and joy and peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. But as soon as sin entered the world, all of a sudden they had enlightened eyes about all these terrible things that now they desired to do. These things are mentioned partial list in Galatians 5.
The works of the flesh are obvious. Sexual immorality, moral impurity, promiscuity, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and anything similar. Suddenly all these problems in what had been a perfect marriage become a possibility. And if you look at the list, even two or three of those things are going to destroy a relationship in the church, with people in. In your family, in your home.
It's amazing how problems in the relationship of Adam and Eve just sprang up immediately. Once they made Satan their master. No one had told them how not to behave toward one another. They had no knowledge of evil, they only knew what was good and wonderful. They were all about the fruit of the Spirit.
But all of a sudden they're living in the flesh. So now we have kind of a better understanding of sin, how it entered the world and what Christ has done for us, and how do we continue to battle with it. Let's see what happened in Genesis after sin. What were the immediate things there that created these problems for the relationship of the only couple alive on earth? We go back to verse seven, and the first two things that we see is that when there was sin, immediately there was guilt and there was shame.
How many of you like the feeling of guilt? How many like the feeling of shame? It's terrible, you know, it's this burden. And it just came on them and they'd never experienced it.
The eyes of both of them were opened and they knew they were naked. They were ashamed. So they sewed fig leaves together and they made coverings for themselves. Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze. And they hid from the Lord God among the Trees of the garden.
It's kind of ridiculous. You can't hide anything from God. And he had seen them before when they were naked, had he not? He created them. So there's more to this.
It's about their relationship with God was broken at that time. They felt guilty and they felt like, I can't talk to him because we feel guilty and we feel ashamed. This broken relationship with God created an inability to walk comfortably with God. It was separation from God. And I want to say that the main cause of conflict in marriage is either having no relationship with God or it's having a detached relationship with God.
The main cause of conflict in any relationship is not the other person. It's if you are not fostering and growing in your relationship with the Lord. If you've never placed your faith in Jesus Christ for salvation and healing, relationships, especially marriage, are going to be particularly difficult. If you marry somebody else that doesn't have a relationship with Jesus Christ, and you do have a relationship with Jesus Christ, it's going to make things difficult. That's why Scripture says you should not be unequally yoked.
You shouldn't date someone who is not a follower of Jesus Christ. You certainly should not marry them. But also, if you are not abiding daily in Jesus Christ, if you only abide with him on Sundays for one hour or five minutes, three times a week for devotions, Jesus says, we have to be connected to the vine in John 15 all the time. And thirdly, if you are grieving or quenching the Holy Spirit, the way that you live, it's going to create conflicts in your marriage. And when we say grieving or quenching, grieving means you're doing things the Spirit tells you not to do.
And quenching him means you're not doing things that he tells you to do. Problems in relationships always go back to. And you should think this, if I'm having difficulty with someone, how is my relationship with the Lord today? Shame and guilt led to fear. All of these are results of separation from God.
So it tells us in verse 9, the Lord God called out to the man and said to him, where are you? And he said, I heard you in the garden. I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.
Verse 11, God said, who told you that you were naked? Did you eat from the tree I commanded you not to eat from? You know, it is with your kids. You know, they took the cookie out of the cookie jar. But instead of telling them, what do you do?
You. You want them to admit what they did wrong? Did you do this? The man replied, the woman, what you gave me.
What we see here is unwillingness to accept responsibility for one's actions. Instead of just saying, I ate from the tree, he's not willing to accept the responsibility. Who does he put the blame on? Puts it on God. He doesn't say, the woman gave it to me.
It's the woman. What is there that you gave? He's questioning God's goodness. The woman you gave to be with me, she gave me some fruit from the tree and I ate it. So the Lord God asked the woman, what have you done?
The woman, just like Adam said, the serpent deceived me. Now, it's not implied directly there, but who made the serpent? God made the serpent.
When you don't have a right relationship with the Lord in any relationship, especially in marriage, you have to watch out for these three things that Satan moves in and he tempts you to be unwilling to accept responsibility for your own actions and the problem. He's going to tempt you to blame your spouse, your parents, your grandparents, whatever, and he's going to make you defensive. And whenever any of those things come up in any type of disagreement, it doesn't lead to good.
As sinful beings, it is our natural tendency to think that we are always what right?
Mary and I watch Hallmark movies. That's our secret. Don't tell anybody. We like mysteries. The one we watched the other night, there was a husband and wife.
They were having problems.
They asked the husband, do you really want to get this divorce? And he said, well, I thought that I married Mrs. Wright, but I didn't know at the time that her first name was Always.
The wife came in, they kind of asked her the same question. She said, well, I thought that I married Mr. Right. And I didn't know at the time that his first name was Never.
So when you have always right married to never Right. Through a struggle, an unwillingness to accept responsibility, to blame the other person for one's own actions, Adam blamed God, Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed the serpent. No one took responsibility. We must all learn to look at ourselves first for sin. When there's problems in a relationship, when you point one finger at someone else, what's pointing back at you?
Well, your thumb doesn't. Three fingers. So when you point at somebody, do it like this, okay, you are guilty, you are wrong.
When I point one finger at you, I need to pay more attention to the fingers that are pointed at me. In all relationships, we must accept responsibility for what we have done wrong to contribute to the problem or to add to it. Yes, the other person might have done something wrong, but usually we do something wrong too.
We must use our defenses against the power of sin, not against our spouse. Your spouse is not your enemy. Satan is. But he would like you to think that it's your spouse. God created us together to be companions and to fight together against the evil of darkness.
Verse 14. Your spouse is not the enemy. Satan is the enemy. When it comes to marriages, you need to realize that all problems are spiritual warfare. Says the Lord.
God said to the serpent, because you have done this, you are cursed more than any livestock and more than any wild animal. You will move on your belly and eat dust all the days of your life.
Now, it may be that the serpent agreed to let Satan use him. It doesn't say. But I think that the point here is that God gave us his visual representation throughout the rest of history, that whenever we see a snake crawling on the ground, we're reminded of what happened in the Garden of Eden. And then God speaks more directly to who's empowering the snake here or the serpent. And that is Satan.
He says, I will put hostility between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring.
Yes, many, if all, women don't like snakes. The more important issue here is that he's saying that there's going to be this hostility that the serpent, meaning Satan, is always going to be in conflict with anyone who's an offspring of Eve, and that includes all of us. All of our difficulties in relationships go back to Satan is behind it. In spiritual warfare, your spouse is not the enemy. Satan is the enemy.
Learn to recognize it. Every time that you're irritated, bothered, upset, angry or hurt, Satan is at work. And he is trying to use all negative emotions and negative situations and disagreements to cause division and to cause destruction in your marriage.
Come to verse 16.
Then God said to the woman, I will intensify your labor pains. You will bear children with painful effort. Your desire will be for your husband, yet he will rule over you. I need to stop and get a drink.
What we see here is there's going to be, because of sin, increase in pain and effort in childbirth, and there's going to be a struggle for control in marriage. Why did God say that it's going to be harder for you to bear children? Why is it going to be so painful? I'm not real certain, but I would like to think that it's a picture of what sin brings into the world and that what new life brings after that, you think about the pain of delivery, the illness and being sick. But we keep looking forward to the joy and the happiness of new life.
That's what it means to be a believer. We're going through all of this pain and suffering, but we know one day there's going to be joy and peace and it's going to be removed. So every time a child is born, I think there's a reminder of the pain and effort that sin brought into the world and. But there's also a promise of new life and joy.
And we experience that every time a baby's born. What does it say about struggle for control in marriage? We'll be talking more about this when we get to the New Testament. But God laid out that men are called to be the head of the marriage. Men are called out to to be the head of the family.
And because we are in a spiritual battle, Satan is tempting wives to take that control away from their husbands. It's a spiritual battle. Now I want to start out by saying, husbands, if your wife is dealing with this problem, it's not your responsibility to make her submit to your leadership.
It is your responsibility to be the type of leader that your wife would want to follow. So husbands can help their wives in this battle by praying for them, but also being loving leaders. It's way easier for a wife to follow a husband who is a loving leader than to follow a husband who doesn't appreciate her as a gift from God. When you think about in the workplace, if you have a supervisor who cares for you, it's a lot easier to follow them. If you have grandparents that are nice to you, it's a lot easier to love them.
In the same way. Husbands should be loving leaders who always put the needs of their wife before their own needs. We're not talking about giving your wife 50% and you 50%. Scripture doesn't say give her 90% of what she needs and keep the 10% for yourself. Because you have to remember this is what Jesus Christ did for us.
Jesus put the needs of himself completely assigned to meet our needs. And a loving husband will do that for his wife. A loving husband who is a loving leader will always do what is best for his wife. There's a lot different meaning to good and best. Jesus Christ didn't do good for us.
He did what best.
Always putting the needs of your wife before your own needs. Always doing what is best for your wife. Next one is even harder. Always dying to self for his wife. That means the things that you want the Things that you desire, the things that you need, you're putting those to death if it's keeping your wife from getting what she needs.
Because that's what Jesus did for us. A loving leader always expresses his love and appreciation of his wife to his wife and to other people. I'll say that again. A loving leader always expresses his love and appreciation of his wife and to his wife and to others. Someone said, have you told your wife that you love her?
And the man said, yes, I told her that on the day that I married her. Okay, that's not enough.
Once a day is not enough.
I don't know that seven times a day is enough. Your wives really need that, and they need to hear you expressing that to others as well, especially your kids. If your kids don't see that you're a loving leader, their picture of Christ is radically changed from what it's supposed to be. A loving leader always being for her as Jesus Christ is for his bride. The church, that is our model.
That is what we are to strive for.
Verse 17, result of sin was difficulties in all work. He said to the man, because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, do not eat from it. The ground is cursed because of you. You will eat from it by means of painful labor all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.
You will eat by the sweat of your brow. There is no easy life in this world. Even for people that seem to have everything, sometimes their lives are more difficult and more awful than those that don't have much. There are always going to be problems, and there are always going to be stresses.
Satan uses this in a spiritual battle against us because when problems and stresses affect our lives, it tends to unravel and destroy marriages. You have to be prepared to fight the enemy when you're weak, when you're ill, when you're poor and finances aren't good, when you're tired, when you're embattled, when you're. When you're distraught. You have to be prepared and recognize that Satan is going to use these times in your marriage to cause confusion, conflict, disagreement, and resentment. Just some examples, I think, of times when there's been a death of a child in a family.
Sometimes it destroys that marriage. The loss of a job, a serious illness, cancer, financial problems, your house burning down. Satan can use all those things to separate couples instead of them coming back together.
Whether we're going through problems or not, as Outsiders, we can always pray for couples when we see they're going through these significant challenges in their life, because Satan, we know for certain, is going to be at work there. To couples, I say today, God has put you together to strengthen one another, to encourage one another to work together, and even if necessary, to fight together. Your spouse is not the enemy in difficult times, but Satan will, in very devious ways, work to make you think that they are. Verse 19. Physical death, a result of sin.
You will eat by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground, since you were taken from it. For you are dust and you will return to dust. Sin brought an end to the good world that God had made immediately. It brought death immediately to the spirit of the man and the woman that they were separated from God. It brought death immediately to the soul of the man and the woman, that it caused separation between them.
And eventually we find out that sin is going to bring death to our bodies and we're going to be separated from the earth and the home that created by God for us. But praise the Lord, we know that he is long suffering. He's patient, he's kind, merciful and gracious. He could have wiped out Adam and Eve and started all over again. But he didn't do that because the whole story is about how much he loves people.
And on that day, he did three things to demonstrate how much he loved them, the people that he created. He promised this them a savior who would solve the problem of sin. He sacrificed an animal to shed its blood, and he made clothes for them. Let's go back to the verses. Verse 15, the second one.
There he makes this promise. He will strike your head and you will strike his heel. He's saying that this conflict will come to an end one day when one seed of the woman, Jesus Christ, comes and he's going to crush the serpent's head. And in the process, he's going to be wounded. That's what God did for us.
Jesus Christ died on the cross to destroy the power of sin in our life. But God did something else that day. In verse 21, the Lord God made clothing from skins for the man and his wife, and he clothed them in order to make skin clothing from an animal. What did he have to do to the animal? He.
He had to kill it.
Blood was shed that day so that there could be forgiveness of sin. Scripture tells us without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sin. Jesus Christ shed his blood on the cross so that you could be forgiven. We say we're justified. It's made as if.
Just as if we had never sinned. But God didn't leave them naked. They still had this problem of feeling shamed that they were naked and feeling exposed. So what did God do to solve that problem? He made them clothes.
He forgave their sin.
He made a covering for them. He destroyed the power of sin. This is what he's pointing out. And so it is with with us. Jesus died on the cross.
He shed his blood. But now we are clothed in his righteousness. Just as God made garments for them, Jesus becomes our garments. Now Jesus covers the faithful with himself so that we are forgiven and justified. And so we can now stand unashamed and be righteous in our standing before the Lord.
Verse 23.
Where the first problem with sin started, God reiterates it at the end. It's all sandwiched in between this fact that sin causes separation from God. So the Lord God sent him away from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove the man out and he stationed the cherubim and the flaming whirling sword east of the Garden of Eden to guard the way to the tree of Life. Sin begins with separation from God.
And if it's not dealt with, sin ends with eternal separation from God.
Do you want your marriage to succeed? So I make four points here at the end. First one is, recognize that the battle for your marriage is spiritual. Satan is the enemy, not your what? Your spouse.
Read that one more time. Recognize that the battle for your marriage is spiritual. Satan is not. Is the enemy, not your spouse. Almost said that wrong.
Second statement there. Do you want your marriage to succeed? The main thing to focus on is to maintain an abiding personal relationship with Jesus Christ. That means there has to be a point that you establish that relationship with Jesus Christ through faith. But you're going to work on it.
You're going to abide with him. You're going to live with him. He's going to walk with you always. John chapter 15 talks about the branch being connected to the vine. And you can't take a branch off a plant and take it away for a week and then put it back in for 30 minutes and take it away for a month and put it in.
You can't even take the branch off a plant and put it back for 10 minutes every day. What's going to happen to the branch? It's going to wilt and die. Maintain an abiding personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The third statement is there.
Do not be caught off Guard by the difficulties in marriage that are a result of sin. And we've looked at several of those today. When those temptations come up, recognize and resist the tendencies that the world still has its control on our body and wanting us to have. Last thing is, choose daily, not on Sundays, but choose daily to live by the Spirit of God and put away the ways of the world, the temptations of the world, the consequences of the world. They don't have power over us, but they are still present.
It's up to us to make the choice to put them aside. I end with Galatians, chapter 5, verses 22 through 26. Going back to the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. Just want to point out how many fruits is it?
Trick question. It's only one fruit. If you have the Spirit in your life completely and you're abiding in him, you're going to have all of these. You can't say, well, I'm loving today and peaceful. I'm not very patient and I haven't been very kind.
I'm filled with the Spirit. No, that's not the way it works. The law is not against any of these things. Now, there's a message here to believers, not to the lost, but those who belong to Jesus Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit.
Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another. What we see here is that Christ has done a great work for us, but there's still a responsibility on us. There are three things in particular. You have to crucify the flesh with its passions and desires. You have to say, no, I'm not going to do that.
No, I'm not going to eat that. No, I'm not going to go there. No, I'm not going to say that. You have to put that to death. You also have to live by the Spirit.
And you live by the Spirit by understanding what the Spirit wants. And you do that by speaking, spending time in God's word, spending time in prayer, asking him. And you're saying, I want to live by you. I mean, I live by my wife. And I see all of you occasionally.
Okay, some people I see even less. Some people I never see at all. Living by the Spirit means, where is he all the time? He is right there and you are keenly aware of him, talking to him. And the next thing, what is underlining red.
It says to keep in step with the spirit. It's like an army that's marching. They're in step. Right, left, right, left. And if one person gets off, what happens to everybody?
It falls apart. The spirit wants to walk beside you, side by side. He wants to hold you close and guide you. And he does this so that we won't be conceited, so we won't provoke one another, so we won't envy one another. And all those things make what kind of marriage a wonderful marriage?
A good one. May we pray?
Heavenly Father, we thank you for your instruction. Touch our hearts with.