The Problem Is Sin

Silicon Valley Reformed Baptist Church

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Well, good morning. Do you have a Bible? Turn to Genesis chapter three.

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It's page two in your pew Bible. We're gonna be reading Genesis three, seven through 10.

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And we're gonna continue our study on basic truths. The basic truth that God has for us today is the truth that the problem is sin.

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When you have Genesis three, seven, go ahead and stand for the reading of God's word. Genesis three, seven.

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Then the eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made for themselves loincloths.

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And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the

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Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, where are you?

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And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself.

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Amen. You may be seated. Let's pray.

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Lord, we do come before you today knowing that you have given us your words which are life to us. Pray that you help us to understand the scriptures today and help us to understand you and your purposes for the world.

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In your son's name I pray, amen. I think

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I've mentioned this before, but when I was a younger man, I used to ask married couples for advice about marriage.

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I wanted to have a good marriage. I wanted to know what the unique problems that most couples faced.

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And so one of the questions that I would routinely ask Christian couples that I knew,

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Christian couples at my church, Christian family members and friends who were married,

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I would go up to them and I would ask them about the most significant problem that they faced in their marriage.

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And I got a lot of predictable answers with this line of questioning.

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I mean, most of the answers I got were the same things that I read in your standard books on marriage, marriage counseling, psychology -related books.

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Most people would tell me that the main problems that they faced in their marriage were related to in -laws, finances was a big one, sex was one that came up on a regular basis.

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Many people would point to the nature of the differences between males and females to be a significant source of tension or conflict in their marriage.

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So they would point to those kind of differences. Inevitably, when I asked what kind of solutions that people had for the problem of marriage that they mentioned, inevitably the solution that they presented to me was often the solution that you just need to be very careful.

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You know, picking a spouse, because there's a lot of difficulties that happen in marriage, and you're not gonna be able to predict all of them.

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The solutions they gave to me were the same kind of solutions that I was accustomed to hearing, and those typically were the result of just the way the world thinks about this topic in general.

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They would tell me that common interests were the key to having a happy marriage.

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So as you're looking for a spouse, you might wanna try to find someone who has shared interest with you.

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Compatible personality was a big thing that was meant to help overcome some of the problems that they mentioned. Shared values, you know, those are the big three that most people mention.

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So common interest, compatible personality, shared value. Now, I remember I asked my brother's father -in -law at the time, who was a pastor,

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I asked him this question. I asked him the question, what is the biggest problem that you faced in marriage?

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And I would say that I probably asked the 50 people this question, and all of them were professing

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Christians, but I asked my brother's father -in -law at this point what the answer to this question was, and he gave me an answer that I'll never forget, and it's an answer that in the course of my own marriage with my wife, as we've encountered a variety of problems, it's an answer that really has haunted me and stuck with me and really has been an answer that's helped me to better understand the nature of the difficulties that I was facing.

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But he looked at me and he told me that the problem, the biggest problem that he and his wife faced in marriage was the problem of sin.

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And I kind of chuckled when he said that. I mean, I remember I kind of chuckled because I knew my

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Bible well enough to know that, of course, that's obviously the answer, but it was an answer that I really wasn't expecting him to give, and part of the reason why

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I wasn't expecting him to give that as the answer to the question is because no one else seemed to give that as the answer to the question, so I wasn't expecting that as the answer that he would give.

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And in some sense, it seems just patronizingly obvious as an answer. I had, at that point, trained myself to think that the real answers were the different answers were a lot of the answers that the other people had given me, and I remember his wife kind of looked at him and she was trying to help me out because she could sense my lack of satisfaction with the answer that he gave me, and she said to him,

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I think what Tim wants to know is how has sin manifested itself, very particularly in our marriage, like what are some of the most significant ways that it has manifested itself?

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And he wasn't having any of it. He basically said, no, I mean, the best advice

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I could give to you is to remind you to think about your marriage in light of the major categories in the

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Bible, the categories that God has given us in your word. The thing that's gonna keep you together in marriage is not going to be found in all the things that people think that are the keys to having a happy marriage.

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The things that are going to get you through, the difficult times in your marriage are not gonna be issues of technique.

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It's not gonna be me giving you communication strategies. The way you're going to get through your marriage, particularly through the difficult times, is by realizing that you have a fundamental problem.

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You are a sinner who is married to a sinner, and the biggest problem you're gonna face is the fact that you both are sinners, and there's a solution to that sin that's found in the

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Bible, and you're only going to draw upon the solution that God gives you if you diagnose the problem correctly, and I would say that there's obviously a lot of wisdom to be found in what he said, and that answer has been an answer that's rung in my ears as my wife and I have gone through all the normal variety of problems that anyone goes through as they try to experience marriage in a fallen world, but why do

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I bring that up? Well, because we're in Genesis right now, and one of the purposes of Genesis is to answer a lot of the basic worldview questions that we might have.

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These stories that we're reading, they're not just stories meant to tell us about Adam and Eve in particular.

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The stories that we're reading in the Bible, they're not just explanations given to why

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Adam and Eve strangely behaved the way that they behaved. The stories that we're finding in the

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Bible are stories that are meant to describe the basic human story.

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Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, they're representatives for humanity. The Bible presents

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Adam as our representative, our federal head. When you understand what's happening in this passage, the point is to say that you'll understand so much of what is going on in life.

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You'll understand so much of why human beings behave the way they behave, and you'll have, brothers and sisters, real answers to give to people who are facing real problems, but I promise you that if you don't identify the problems that you see through the lens that the scripture gives you to identify those problems, then you're gonna have nothing helpful to say to people who are facing the problems that they face because you don't understand the source of those problems in the way that the

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Bible wants you to understand it. Now, one of the things that we see when we open up this passage of scripture, particularly in Genesis 3, 7, is that we see the main theme here is that sin results in shame, okay?

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So Adam and Eve, they eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They eat of the tree that God commanded them that they should not eat, and their instantaneous response to doing this is to be filled with shame.

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The text says in Genesis 3, 7 that the eyes of both were open and they knew that they were naked.

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Now, this is meant to be a contrast to what you see in Genesis 2, 25. So in Genesis 2, 25,

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God creates man, he creates him good, he puts him in a garden, puts him in a very good world. There's no problems at that point, okay?

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So when God creates man, he makes him upright. He gives him all the blessings that anyone could possibly imagine receiving.

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Man and his wife are created good, they were created upright, they were put in a good creation.

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There were no problems at that point that they had to face. I mean, Adam and Eve, they were married, so this is the first human marriage that you can imagine, and for a brief period of time, this was a marriage without any of the problems that all my family members and friends told me to expect, okay, so they entered into marriage experiencing none of that.

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They experienced marriage in all of its perfection, as it was designed to be experienced, and you see that in Genesis 2, 25,

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God makes man and woman. He presents woman as a gift to man, and the Bible says the man and his wife were both naked.

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They were not ashamed, and the first thing that you see after they eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is that their eyes were both open, and they knew for the first time they were naked, and what that tells you is that tells you that this is a passage that's meant to give you some insight into the nature of shame.

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So what is shame? Webster defines shame as a painful emotion caused by the consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety.

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So I'll read that again. What is shame? A painful emotion caused by the consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety.

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It may be helpful at this point to distinguish guilt from shame. Guilt is an objective reality, so when we fail to meet a particular standard, particularly the standards that God has given us in his word, we are objectively guilty.

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We may feel the feelings of guilt in response to that objective reality, but guilt is something that's objective.

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When you violate God's standards, you're guilty, whether you admit it or not, whether you see it or not.

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Shame, what might be described as shame, shame is the experience of that guilt. So shame is the painful emotion that accompanies the knowledge of one's guilt in God's court of law.

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When you think about shame, shame really is an emotion that doesn't make sense in an evolutionary worldview.

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So think about that for a second. If you're just a naked ape, if that's what you are, just an animal, you're just slightly higher on the evolutionary ladder than all the animals, then it really doesn't make any sense to experience shame.

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I mean, shame is distinctly a human emotion. There's no indication that animals feel any kind of shame whatsoever, because shame is a moral word.

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It's a moral emotion. So shame, as I said, is a painful emotion caused by the consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety.

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Now, if there is no God, if you're just an animal, it doesn't make sense to have shame. Why? Because there is no transcendent standard that you've failed to achieve.

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What is morality? Morality doesn't make sense in an evolutionary worldview. Apart from the knowledge that there is a

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God who made us, who has objective standards for how we should live, that we fail to live up to, there really is no sense in which shame makes any sense.

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In fact, I mean, if you do experience guilt and shame, it's reasonable to conclude that that guilt and shame is false.

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That's not to suggest that most unbelievers understand shame to be a fiction of your imagination.

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I mean, they understand emotions are real, and you live in a world that thinks the chief duty of man is to validate everyone's emotions, and so if you fail to meet a standard that you've set up for yourself, certainly, living in the world, you're going to get a lot of counsel that tells you to try to live up to the standards that you set for yourself, but you have to understand that those standards are arbitrary, decided by yourself.

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They're not based on anything objective. They're not based on anything outside of yourself. You know, and we do live in a very schizophrenic way as it relates to the subject of shame in general, in which you live in a society that is so filled with iniquity at this point, that's shameless in their pursuit of evil, that are actively seeking to get you to suppress the shame that you should rightfully feel, and at the same time, want you to feel great and deep shame over the areas in which you transgress their standards that they set up for you.

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So in coming to California, it is funny to notice all the rules related to recycling, and you do see that you're living in a particular society that has made recycling way more important than it is in other parts of the country.

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So in Alabama, we don't have recycling bins that you're supposed to fill.

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You don't have to meticulously sort through your trash and put it all in the appropriate bins, and you're not gonna receive kind and helpful notes by the trash collectors telling you of all your violations of their standards of how to sort all of your trash, but the point here is just to say that you're living in a world that certainly has standards that they want to impose upon you, and values that they want to enforce your behavior.

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They have shame that they're trying to produce when you don't live up to the standards that they want you to live up at times, but at the same time, when you read the

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Bible, what you find is you find that God, in his word, has given us an objective standard of right and wrong.

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The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of God lasts forever. God's standard of morality, it doesn't change.

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It's not arbitrarily decided. It won't change in the next few years, as you see rapidly changing standards of society today.

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God's standard is objective, and when we fail to meet God's standard, the natural response that human beings experience is to experience shame.

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Now, that's not to say that people universally experience shame in the way that Adam and Eve did here, meaning you have a conscience that goes off when you violate

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God's objective moral law, and the more that you excel, like if you wanna train your conscience to no longer work, and I don't recommend you do this at all, but if you commit the same sin with impudence, what you find is that you are hardening your heart, you're searing your conscience.

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The conscience mechanism itself will cease to function as a mechanism, and you will get to a point where you're past feeling in the language of the

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Bible. You no longer experience the shame that comes from violating God's standards, but the point here is just to say that God's made you.

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He's put his moral law within you, and when you violate that moral law, you're going to experience the shame that comes from the recognition that you are a flawed human being who's failed to meet

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God's standards, and you're gonna have choices about what to do with that shame at that point.

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So here's the point. Shame, shame is a painful emotion caused by the consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety.

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It obviously does not make sense in an evolutionary worldview, but shame is a basic feature of a biblical anthropology, and it's impossible, brothers and sisters, to understand the world that you see apart from understanding shame.

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Again, Genesis 3, 7, this is a passage on shame, and this is a passage designed to help you to have eyes to see, to better understand the world that you live in.

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It's meant to help you to understand why you behave the way that you behave, and why your fellow human beings behave the way they behave, and if you don't understand the answers that are given in this passage, you won't be able to help other people, and you won't be able to help yourself deal with the basic issues of life, and it's impossible to understand a more basic issue in life than the fact that we are all sinners living in a world that God made who are hopelessly unable to fulfill

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God's standards for us. Point here is just to say that sin results in shame.

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The eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. So not only does sin result in shame, but shame is destabilizing, okay?

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So shame is destabilizing. Shame causes us to hide from each other. So Adam and Eve, after they sinned, after they did what

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God commanded them not to do, it says the eyes of both of them were opened, they knew they were naked, and so what do they attempt to do?

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What is their impulse? What is their instinct? How do they respond to the reality that they have violated

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God's standards? The first thing they seek to do is they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.

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What do they do? We notice that shame is destabilizing. It causes us to hide from each other.

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The basic human story is a story of man, by his own effort, trying to fix his fundamental problem of shame.

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Shame is destabilizing. It causes us to hide from each other. If you have any kids,

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I'm sure that you've encountered plenty of situations like I've encountered, and a common example of something that you might find is that we had a child, they were nameless to protect the guilty at this point, who came up to us strangely one time and told us that they did not eat the brownies.

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And as parents, I mean, you understand, you understand that if your child randomly decides to come up to you and tell you that they did not eat the brownies, then that's probably a good indication that they did try to eat the brownies.

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You might conclude that because of the fact that that would be a very strange thing to say, particularly if you're a parent who's not interrogating anyone about their brownie eating.

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You're just sitting there minding your own business. Your child comes up and tries to assure you that they did not commit a crime that no one is trying to prosecute.

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You might understand something about the nature of shame if at that point you begin to speculate that perhaps there was a crime committed and perhaps this denial is indeed a confession.

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Point here is just to say that shame is destabilizing. It causes us to hide from each other.

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And I think we all understand this as it relates to children in general. I'm sure that many of you, if you've interacted with kids to any length of time, you'll realize that they frequently have a way of confessing to their crimes without confessing to their crimes.

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You know, kids, they think that their parents have a superpower that enables them to have a form of omniscience to where whenever they sin in ways that they know that because they're moral beings, they sin against you, they think that you're omniscient and you see all that you're gonna find them out.

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And the reason why they think that, in part, it's grounded in reality. It's grounded in the reality that as a parent, you've lived life a little bit longer than they've lived.

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You've learned the lessons that adults learn from pattern recognition.

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You've learned to be able to tell the difference between when someone is acting weird and strange and suspicious and when someone is acting in a normal way.

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Now, despite the fact that kids think this, I mean, it isn't objectively true. You aren't omniscient, you aren't a mind reader.

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But at the same time, one of the realities of being a kid is that you haven't discovered all the ways in which adults have learned to hide their sins and mask their sins.

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And so you frequently find yourself being caught in your sins by your parents and you don't really have a wonderful explanation for why that's happening.

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But the point for our time here today is just to say that shame is destabilizing you. Shame is destabilizing.

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You see it when it comes to children. You see it very clearly when it comes to children.

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There are examples that you could probably multiply if you have any experience with children at all about all the ways in which they, in their actions and in their mannerisms and in their behavior, seem to be totally destabilized when they do something wrong.

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It's easy to see at that point, but then at the same time, I think we fail to see the many ways in which adults are running this same script.

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And the reason why adults are running the same script is because this is the script that the human race runs because we're moral creatures who are created in the image of God.

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When your spouse sins against you, what do you see? So often in marriage, you're tempted to think that when your spouse sins against you, you process it through the lens of how it makes you feel.

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You process it through the lens of your own personal convenience, what you want to happen. And yet, there is a common temptation to fail to see the underlying realities that are at work in their behavior, things that are completely and totally unrelated to you.

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The point is just to say that Adam and Eve, when they sin against God, their first impulse is to hide themselves from each other.

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And in a certain way, that impulse is reasonable. It's reasonable when you think about it.

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So if Adam and Eve are the types of individuals who could sin against the

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God who made them, the good God who was their creator, who gave them nothing but good gifts, if you could sin against a perfect person who's never done you anything wrong, and everything that that person has given you has been for your blessing and for your good, then fundamentally, what you realize is that, you know, if you're

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Adam, you're looking at your wife, you realize, man, if she could sin against God, she could sin against me. And if you're

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Eve in that moment, you look at Adam and you say, if Adam could sin against God like that,

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God who does not deserve that at all, then he could sin against me in that way, too.

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So what shame does, shame is destabilizing. It causes us to hide from each other. As I said, when your spouse sins against you, what do you see?

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When a church member sins against you, what do you see? Is all that you see when that happens, do you just see an act of betrayal against you?

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Is that all you see? Or do you see that every horizontal problem that happens in the world is a result of a vertical problem?

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You know that all the marriage problems that you might experience in the world, all the relational problems that you experience at work, all the problems that you experience as a child between your brothers and sisters are not just related to you and the person who is sinning against you.

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There is another whole dynamic that's happening in every single one of those encounters. I mean,

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David tells us that against you and you alone have I sinned. He says this after sinning against Bathsheba in a big way.

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He sends this after killing Uriah. He says this after sinning against the whole nation.

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David looks at that encounter and to the Lord in his prayer he says against you and you alone have I sinned. The point here is just to say that there are more actors in every single sinful act than the two people who are horizontally sinning against each other.

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So shame is destabilizing. It causes us to hide from each other.

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One of the reasons why young men today don't have the boldness that they used to is because so many of them are addicted to pornography at this point and because they're addicted to pornography at this point, it fundamentally destabilizes them.

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It takes away their courage. It takes away their boldness. Instead of viewing the opposite sex as someone to honor and respect, they feel a great sense of shame that they're weighed down by.

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And if you wanna know why young men today have problems looking young women today in the eyes is because they understand their internet history and they're having a very difficult time not responding as one of my children might respond when they steal something that they shouldn't steal or they eat something that they shouldn't eat.

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They're having a very difficult time processing that shame which is destabilizing, which is causing them to hide from each other.

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It's causing them to hide from fellow human men, from women made in the image of God.

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Instead of viewing them with honor and dignity, they view them as a source of shame that is going to find out.

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There's this fear that your sin, you're gonna get found out, that someone's gonna discover it, someone's gonna uncover those things that you're doing in secret.

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You're fundamentally destabilized. So many of the psychological disorders today are psychological disorders that are just describing the dynamics of shame.

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What do you think social anxiety disorder is? Why do people hide themselves in their house, refuse to go out?

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Why are they filled with such guilt and shame? We're predisposed to think that, oh, it's because of their personality.

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They just have an introverted personality and that's why they have difficulty with social interactions. And I'm not suggesting that there's no difference between introversion and extroversion and different orientations and temperaments and everything else.

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I'm just trying to say that much of what you're trying to describe with these materialistic categories is the dynamics of shame.

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That's what you're trying to describe. You're trying to put words to the way shame affects people.

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But here's the point. When your spouse sins against you, what do you see? Do you think, oh man,

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I wonder how they're doing with God right now. You know, the times in my life where I've given myself over to particular vices.

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I haven't been reading my Bible like I should be. I haven't been praying like I should be. There's times in my life where fundamentally

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I'm shorter with my wife than I should otherwise be. I'm ruder with my wife than I would otherwise be.

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I, like when she sins against me, I magnify it way more than what I should, blow it way out of proportion.

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And you have to understand, she can just look at me and she can think, oh man, I'm being a real jerk lately. And if she were to think that, that may be true, but it may not be the most fundamental truth to the encounter.

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She might address it by trying to get me to stop being so rude, and reasonably so. But the point here is to say there may be something else going on.

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And the only way you'll learn to think that way is if you see the story of Adam and Eve as your story. This is the story of all human beings.

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How do human beings respond to their sin? How do human beings respond to the knowledge that they violated the standards of a holy

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God who sees all? How do you, how do they respond to that? Well, they frequently respond to that by being distrustful of their fellow human beings.

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So they frequently respond to that with shame. Shame is destabilizing, it causes us to hide from each other.

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So notice, I mean, you barely get through Genesis and you'll realize that these same kind of dynamics play themselves out.

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So Cain, immediately after killing Abel, he understands that he's objectively guilty.

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In Genesis 4, 14, he says, behold, you've driven me today away from the ground and from your face I will be hidden. I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth and whoever finds me will kill me.

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Immediately, he knows that he sinned. And immediately, it causes him to distrust everyone around them, because he understands that if he could sin in this way, other people are gonna take vengeance upon him.

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And at that point, he's fleeing when no one is pursuing. The point here is just to say that shame is destabilizing. It causes us to hide from each other, but also causes us to try to hide from God.

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So notice in verse eight, they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And the man and his wife, they hid themselves from the presence of the

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Lord. They tried to, Adam and Eve, they tried to hide themselves from the all -present

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God among the trees and the garden. Can you imagine how insane that actually is?

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And I'm using that in the ironic sense of the word. How insane is it to try to hide yourself from the

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God who made the heavens, the earth, who sees all? That's what they did.

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They heard the sound of God walking in the cool of the day and the man and the wife, they tried to hide them. Objectively, we know this is folly.

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Psalm 139 .7 tells us this. It says, where shall I go from your spirit? Where shall

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I flee from your presence? Commenting on Genesis three. You understand? If I ascend to heaven, you are there.

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If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. The psalmist here knows that this is meant to be a paradigm for human experience.

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He's commenting on this very passage. He's saying that where shall I go from your spirit?

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Where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there. If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the outermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, your right hand shall hold me.

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If I say surely the darkness shall cover me and the light about me be night, even the darkness is not dark to you.

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The night is bright as the day, for the darkness is light with you. For you formed my inward parts, you knitted me together in my mother's womb.

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I praise you for I'm fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works. My soul knows it very well.

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My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

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Your eyes saw my unformed substance. In your book were written every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there were none of them.

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How precious to me are your thoughts, O God, how vast the sum of them. If I would count them, they are more than the sand.

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I awake and I am still with you, the psalmist says. And yet when we sin, we do what

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Adam and Eve does. How often is your basic impulse after you sin?

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To try to grit your teeth, you don't wanna pray immediately, you don't wanna acknowledge it, particularly if you sin the same sin that you've committed over and over and over again.

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Your instincts, your impulse is to try to delay reconciliation with your maker, try to pretend like it didn't happen, try to pretend as if he is not there and that he does not see.

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You're tempted in that moment to think that it would be more embarrassing to confess the same thing over and over and over again than to bring it to the

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God who tells you that if you confess your sins, he's faithful and just to forgive your sins and cleanse you from all unrighteousness.

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And yet that's our basic pattern. Our basic pattern is when we sin, we try to hide ourself from God, we try to pretend like he's not there, we try to sear our consciousness, we try to do everything that we can do mentally to push those thoughts of what we just did outside of our mind and pretend that God is not there and he's not watching and he does not see.

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Shame causes us to do the irrational, to try to hide ourself not only from each other but from the

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God who made us. And we have plenty of complicated mechanisms of works righteousness that we go through to try to make up for our sin, to try to pretend as if we don't have to deal with our sin on its own terms in the way that God wants us to deal with it.

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But the point is that shame is destabilizing. It causes us to hide from each other, it causes us to hide from God.

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It makes us fear judgment, okay, which is itself a judgment. So shame causes us to fear judgment, which itself is a judgment.

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The fear of judgment is a judgment of God against your sin. What does God say in the passage? Verse nine, the

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Lord God called to man and said to him, where are you? And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself.

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Instead of having a good relationship with God that's based on trust, fundamentally man rejects

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God's laws, man rejects God's standards, and man himself is caused to fear judgment, which is itself a judgment.

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Proverbs 28 one tells us the wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion.

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You know that confidence is not just a personality issue. Christians of all people should be bold as a lion, they should be confident.

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The fact that we aren't is often evidence of the secret sins that we're holding on to, causing us to flee when no one pursues.

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The point here is to say that shame is destabilizing. There is a fear of judgment that comes from a defiled conscience.

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When you give yourself over to iniquity, you have to understand that the experience of that is going to be shame, which itself is a fear of judgment that comes from a defiled conscience.

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God warns the children of Israel that in the exile, that they will be put to flight at the sound of a leaf.

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Leviticus 26, 27 says this, if in spite of this, you will not listen to me, but walk contrary to me, then

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I will walk contrary to you in fury, and I myself will discipline you sevenfold for your sins.

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Notice what God says, he says, you shall eat of the flesh of your sons, you shall eat of the flesh of your daughters.

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I will destroy your high places and cut down your incense altars and cast down your dead bodies upon dead bodies of your idols.

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My soul will abhor you. I will lay your cities waste, I will make your sanctuaries desolate, and I will not smell your pleasing aromas.

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And I myself will devastate the land so that your enemies who settle in it shall be appalled at it.

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I will scatter you among the nations. I will unsheathe the sword after you.

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Your land shall be a desolation, your city shall be a waste. Then the land shall enjoy its sabbaths as long as it is desolate.

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While you are in your enemy's land, then the land shall rest and enjoy its sabbaths.

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As long as it lies desolate, it shall have rest, and that rest that it did not have on your sabbaths when you were dwelling in it.

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And as for those who are left, I will send faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies.

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The sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, and they shall flee as one flees from the sword, and they shall fall when none pursues.

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They shall stumble over one another as if to escape a sword that none pursues. And you shall have no power to stand before your enemies, and you shall perish from among the nations, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up.

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The point here is to say that shame is destabilizing. It makes us fear judgment.

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It is itself a judgment against God. Brothers and sisters, we live in a wicked land. We live in a land that has murdered over 60 million children.

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We have blood guilt on our hands. What do you think the result of that is?

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How do you think that that psychologically affects people? Do you think that we can sin with such impudence as we do as a nation, and be completely and totally unaffected?

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And Conley mentioned the pandemic a few minutes ago. Think about that. Think about an entire nation who's unable to face the possibility of a .001

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% chance of death. If you don't look at the world and see the world through spiritual categories, you won't understand what's going on.

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Do you understand that you have a greater possibility of dying every time you get in a car wreck than you have through that major world event?

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Yet we think it's wisdom to deny the spiritual realities that are present.

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We think it's wisdom to view the world simply through the lens of materialistic categories.

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What do you call a person who's unable to mitigate risk, who's unable to make basic calculations about the nature of the risk that they're gonna face in life?

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You don't think that we live in a country right now that is held captive by the fear of death?

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You don't think that we as Christians are living in a country right now that is not experiencing the destabilizing effects of our sin?

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You think that God is a liar, that we can just violate his words and violate his standards and be completely and totally unaffected?

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That's what happens when you try to view the world not through the lens of the biblical categories that God has given you, which are meant to help you explain the things that you see.

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That's what happens when you're trying to understand the world through the lens of those who hate

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God. Let me give you a psychological label here to help us to think through some of the things that you're seeing here.

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So I'm talking about Adam and Eve, sinning against God, eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

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Fundamentally, what's introduced into their experience is a paralyzing fear, okay?

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What is general anxiety disorder? It's fear of judgment, which results from a defiled conscience. That's not the way you understand it, but that's what it actually is.

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What is general anxiety disorder? It's excessive anxiety and worry occurring more days than not for at least six months about a number of events or activities such as work, school, or performance.

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So a person who has general anxiety disorder, they find it difficult to control their worry. And you know what?

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If you read the diagnostic criteria in the DSM, you'll realize that you're talking about a person for six months who experienced persistent anxiety and worry.

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And this worry is not attributed to the physiological effects of a substance. Meaning, you know what?

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If you take a bunch of medication and abuse a bunch of medication, you might have a bunch of anxious feelings that are a result of that medication that you're abusing because there are side effects to the medications that you test.

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You know that if you have hypothyroidism, you might experience anxious feelings.

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That are coming from nowhere that you don't know what to do with. You know that if you drink a bunch of caffeine, you might feel on edge.

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What this diagnosis is telling you is that that six months of persistent anxiety and worry is not related to hypothyroidism.

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It's not related to the effects of a substance. It's not related to any kind of medical condition like hypothyroidism.

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This is just six months of anxiety and worry. That's what it is. That's what it's telling you.

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How do you view a person like that? What do you think is happening to a person who has experienced six months of excessive anxiety and worry that can do nothing about?

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What do you do? You ask them a few questions, brothers and sisters. Let me give you a few tips. If someone says they have anxiety, they have six months of persistent anxiety, ask them, what are you worried about?

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If they tell you, if they give you an answer, you know what, I have this test and job situation and everything else, then biblically speaking, that's worry.

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The Bible has an answer to worry. Do not worry about your life, right? The Bible has an answer to worry. If they don't know the answer to that question, say,

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I don't know, I just feel like I'm always on edge. For six months, I just feel like I'm constantly anxious, on edge,

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I don't have an answer. You know what, that's this fear of judgment that results from a defiled conscience.

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That's what it is. They're experiencing the same thing that Adam and Eve experienced. And they may not have an answer to that.

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They may not be able to identify the fact that yeah, you know what, there are sins of omission in my life that I'm constantly giving myself over to, so why wouldn't

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I feel destabilized as a result of that? The more tricky ones are the sins of omission, right?

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Most people don't understand that just because you're not actively engaging in a behavior that you know

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God hates, that doesn't mean that you're unaffected by it. Sins of omission, you could be a person who has in every conceivable way in your life failed to perform the responsibilities that God has given you to perform.

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And I counsel person after person after person who is experiencing all the results of a defiled conscience that comes from sin of omission after sin of omission after sin of omission, and you're not gonna help them by coming along and just saying, hey, you know what, that destabilizing fear that you live with, yeah, that's just normal.

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We don't have a medical answer for it, but it's probably a medical problem. We have no hope to give you. I guess that's just your lot in life, why don't you just take some drugs that are gonna try to mask the symptoms.

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We're not helping people with this, brothers and sisters. My point here is just to say that God's given you an infallible word which is meant to help you to understand life.

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What happens when people give themselves over to sin? You live in a society of people giving themselves over to iniquity over and over and over again.

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You have to understand the result of that is that we are going to be destabilized. That's the way it works.

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We are going to be living out this fear of judgment. You're living in a society of people living out this fear of judgment that results from a defiled conscience and we are so persuaded that it can't possibly have a spiritual solution because of many of the lies that we have given.

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Here's the point. The point today is not simply to be able to help you to identify shame but to provide the answer to shame and you're not gonna be able to provide the answer to shame if you don't know what you're looking at.

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Now what is the gospel? The gospel is the good news of an answer to guilt and shame.

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You notice in the text, Adam and Eve, they tried to find their own answers to this problem. So Adam and Eve, what do they do?

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Immediately, they sin against God. What do they do? They try to sew fake leaves together and make for themselves loincloths to try to hide themselves from each other.

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They hear God walking. They immediately try to hide themselves in the trees as if God hasn't seen.

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They came up with their own man -made solution to these problems but the problem is that God himself has the true answer to their problem.

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Genesis 3 .21, the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin and clothed them.

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Some animal had to die to be a substitute for Adam and Eve in that moment to provide them an answer and that animal who died in order to provide them clothing, that animal wasn't an ultimate solution.

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That animal pointed to the ultimate solution. That animal itself was not an ultimate solution. The ultimate solution to our guilt and our shame and condemnation is that Jesus Christ came to earth to live the life that we couldn't live, to die on the cross, dying the death that we deserve.

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Revelations 3 .18, God points us to this animal sacrifice in Genesis 2 .21

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and tells us its true purpose. God says, I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen and salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see.

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Brothers and sisters, we as Christians, we have answers to guilt and shame and condemnation and the answers to guilt and shame and condemnation are not going to be found in blaming our guilt and shame and condemnation on hopeless materialistic labels.

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The answer to our guilt and shame and condemnation are gonna be found in what Jesus has done.

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The Bible says, the wicked flee when no one pursues but the righteous are bold as lions. If you have the righteousness of Christ attributed to you as a free gift, you can have confidence not just before the throne of God, not only can you boldly approach the throne of grace to find grace and mercy in time of need, you can have confidence before your fellow man, you can have confidence in an uncertain world that's filled with trials and difficulties because you know to live is

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Christ and to die is gain. We as Christians do not have to be weighed down by guilt and shame and condemnation because we have an actual solution to this problem, okay?

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The gospel is the answer to our guilt. Romans 3 23, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that's in Christ Jesus.

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The gospel is the answer to our shame. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus for the law of the spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.

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For what God has done, what the law weakened by flesh could not do by sending his son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin.

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He condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the spirit.

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First John 4 18, there is no fear in love but perfect love cast out fear for fear has to do with punishment and whoever fears has not been made perfect in love.

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The point is just to say that we have an answer to this fundamental problem in what

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Jesus has done. When we sin against God, when we sin against each other, we have a real solution and it's not a solution of taking a mind -altering drug for the rest of your life, trying to mask symptoms.

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You have a real solution in what Jesus has done to come to set you free, to do for you what you can't do, to give you courage, to give you boldness.

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You don't have to be locked in your room afraid of people, worried that they may find out all your secret sins.

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Why? Because all of your sins, if you're a Christian, nailed to the cross and you bear those no more.

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God has given us an answer and it's that answer that we should give other people and you're not going to give that answer to other people unless you believe it with your heart and you learn to see with your eyes things that are obvious.

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You live in a world that is weighed down by guilt and shame and condemnation. You have the answers.

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You have the answers to these things. You have the answers to not just, it's not a temporary answer.

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It's a permanent and a final answer. Amen? Let's pray. Lord, we come before you today acknowledging that we are a people who desperately need the solution that you provided in a word.

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Pray that you help us to be eager and quick to apply that solution to our own life by your own power, through the working of your spirit and to help others apply it too.