Worship Warnings | Behold Your God Podcast

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Welcome to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, Director of MediaGarantia, and we have a very special guest joining us today.

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He's a member of the Board of Directors for Heart Crime Missionary Society and for MediaGarantia.

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He's one of our founding members. When we became an independent nonprofit back in 2015, this was one of the first people that I reached out to about being a part of the work.

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He's also a pastor of Christ Church Radford in Radford, Virginia, and he's been a dear friend to me for about the last decade plus.

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Anthony Methenia, thanks for joining us today. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's good to be here. Now, if you're familiar with MediaGarantia, you know

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Anthony. He's been a contributor to both Behold Your God studies. He was in the

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Logic on Fire film, but people may not know that you actually do serve MediaGarantia behind the scenes as a very active board member, but they may not know also your connection to Christ Church New Albany here.

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Yeah, I actually moved to New Albany, Mississippi in 2013. No, 2003, early 2003, and was here for a period of 18 months before the church sent me out as a missionary to Ethiopia.

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And I served in Ethiopia for a couple of years, and then I was back here at the church, served as an elder here at the church for a couple of years before moving from here to Radford, Virginia.

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Yeah, when I first came to the church and I was converted, Anthony was one of the guys that probably spent the most time with me initially, just sitting down, meeting up for coffee, talking through things, listening to me, just having my mind explode about all of these new and amazing realities.

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And so that was all really good and still means a lot to me that whole season of life.

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Tell us how you wound up in Virginia. How did you go from serving here as an elder to now serving as an elder and the main pastor for preaching at Christ Church Radford?

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Yeah, that wasn't my plan. I initially made the transition because HeartCry Missionary Society was settling in Virginia at that time in Radford, Virginia.

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So because I had been involved in missions overseas in Ethiopia, I was managing that work.

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I saw the need to allow someone else, another organization that was trusted, to take it over.

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I had an informal partnership with Paul Washer and HeartCry through Conrad and Bayway already.

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And so we worked it out to where I would move there, kind of hand them over the work that had begun, and they would take it on.

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And it would leave me then at a place to where I was free to attempt to discern what

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God had for me after that. So it was kind of a blank slate. You didn't know what was coming next. I had no idea.

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I thought I'd be on the ground in Virginia for about a year, and then I would be off to whatever was next for me.

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And I often joke that they hogtied me, and I'm still there.

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Yeah, so you're there. You've been serving now, as I said, one of the pastors and the main elder for preaching.

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Is that an accurate description? Yeah, I just call myself a pastor, but I'm the only staff pastor.

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There are two other elders, but I'm the only full -time staff member, and we serve together.

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We started with three elders. The other two that we started with left along the way.

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One, then the other. I was alone for 18 months or two years, and we added another elder, and now we've added a third.

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So there are three of us serving, but I am the primary preaching elder, preaching 75 % of the time. I got you.

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So what I always like to rib you about, part of your job is being

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Paul Washer's pastor. So how's that going for you? Yeah, it's great. It's wonderful to pastor people who believe and live based on the

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Bible. Yeah, that's right. Do you ever just kind of look down and say, like, I don't know why you're clapping,

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Paul. I'm talking to you. I think about it every day. Well, today we want to talk about worship and the reality that it could be somewhat shocking to our religious sensibilities that there is worship that God himself rejects.

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Anthony, you have been here in New Albany for the last few days and preached for us yesterday, and this is one of the subjects that you touched on in your sermon, and we'll get to that in a little bit more detail toward the end of the podcast.

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But that's what we want to talk about, and the assertion that God rejects certain worship and accepts certain worship is a strong claim.

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If someone had not really done business with that, if they'd never been presented with that,

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I can understand how they might kind of buck up against that. But we really only have to look to the

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Scriptures, and we see multiple examples of this. So in the Old Covenant, I think about Malachi 1, where people are offering to God what they would be ashamed to offer their earthly fathers or their earthly masters.

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Amos 5, 21 -23 comes to mind, where the Lord says, There's also obviously in Leviticus 10,

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Nadab and Abihu offer strange fire on the altar, and they're killed by God as a result.

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King Saul offers burnt offering when Samuel's running late there in 1

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Samuel 13, and God rejects the offering and ultimately rejects Saul as king as a result of that.

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And then obviously the earliest example of this is the worship offered by the second man to ever exist, as we mentioned already in Genesis 4,

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Cain. And toward the end of the podcast, we'll get into that in more detail. But suffice to say that the principle is proven that God sometimes rejects worship that is offered to him.

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Without getting into any specific detail in each one of those examples, Anthony, is there a common thread that runs through all of those?

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Well, simply put, the common thread is that these people we see throughout

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Scripture are attempting to worship God in a way that they have deemed appropriate rather than the way that he himself, that God himself has commanded clearly in Scripture.

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Well, so this idea that we're to worship God in the manner that he's commanded us in his word, it's certainly not unique to the old covenant.

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It carries right through to the manner of worship that's established for us today in the new covenant. And our forefathers in the faith called this idea the regulative principle of worship.

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And whether you realize it or not, if you're listening to this, you, your church holds either to the regulative principle of worship or what has been called historically the normative principle of worship.

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So help us distinguish between those two things. Yeah, unfortunately, in our culture, the most common form is the normative principle.

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So anything that isn't strictly forbidden in the Scriptures is oftentimes assumed to be okay.

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Just yesterday, even, I was having a conversation with someone who literally asked me where in the

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Bible pumping gold dust and angel feathers into a sanctuary auditorium was forbidden in the

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Scriptures. Well, obviously, there's no chapter and verse for that. But we're not normative principle people.

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We are regulative principle. That is, we want our worship, our corporate worship, to be regulated by the

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Bible. God has been very clear in His word to tell us what He expects from us and how

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He's to be approached. He's told us about His character and He's made clear

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His commands and His expectations. And so we want to be a people that are regulated by the principles that we find in the

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Scriptures, especially with regard to corporate worship, which is where the terminology comes from, the regulative principle for worship.

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Yeah, right. So our worship is regulated by the word of God, by what God has explicitly told us that in the

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New Covenant we should do in our worship. And so then, as you mentioned, the normative principle is essentially anything that's not expressly forbidden in the word of God, whether it's drama, special music, gold dust, chicken feathers or angel feathers or whatever kind of feathers those are, it's all fair game.

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So the choice is fairly clear there. If you don't understand what we're referring to there with the feathers and gold dust, it's good that you don't, but there's,

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I guess, a group of people, primarily underneath the New Apostolic Reformation, it's a highly charismatic group of people who claim that God has drawn near and that is visibly manifest by gold dust coming down from heaven.

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Yeah, they're manufacturing the presence of God. Yeah, yeah. With smoke machines, glitter coming from the air conditioning vents, feathers coming in, they're calling it angel feathers, those type things.

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Well, so again, going back to, you know, we don't have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to this thing.

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We have the witness of the Holy Spirit working through his people for the last 2 ,000 years.

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And in that, we have our forefathers in the faith who wrote our confession, the

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London Baptist Confession in 221 and then the Westminster Confession in 211, which begins, the light of nature demonstrates that there is a

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God who has lordship and sovereignty over all. He is just and good and does good to everyone.

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Therefore, he should be feared, loved, praised, called on, trusted in, and served with all the heart and all the soul and all the strength.

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But the acceptable way to worship the true God is instituted by him and it is delimited or the limits of its boundaries are set or we might say it is regulated by his own revealed will.

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Thus, he may not be worshipped according to human imagination or inventions or the suggestions of Satan nor through any visible representations nor in any other way that is not prescribed in the

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Holy Scriptures. So, if we take it as a given that we shouldn't be doing hokey tricks, we shouldn't be dropping feathers on people, we shouldn't be dropping dust on people and claiming that it's

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God drawing near, but what about when it's something that we just like to do and we've grown up doing it and maybe it's the way that we've worshipped

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God in our context our entire lives, maybe through drama or special music and that sort of thing.

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I mean, what kind of counsel can we give for why that would not be acceptable worship?

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Well, I think the confession is helpful here because those are the result of human imagination and invention.

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This is what I would like to give God. I would like to give him this skit or this drama.

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I would like to give him this kind of music and if he hasn't determined clearly in his word that he'll be worshipped in that way, then he will not accept it.

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Surely, we want to be a people that worship him in a way that he accepts and when we rely on our own imagination or ingenuity, then we're going to fall short every time of producing worship that is acceptable to him, that's pleasing to him.

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That's our goal. That's what worship is, to acknowledge him for who he is and what he's done, to recognize the glory and the splendor and majesty that belongs only to him.

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We want to be a people that are committed to looking at God on the pages of his word and worshipping him in a way that he has determined that we worship him.

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Yeah. I think probably one of the most common things that I've heard in having this conversation with people is this is what

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I do. I am a dancer or I am a drama person and I just want to offer

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God what I'm good at. It's kind of like, but that reminds me of someone who was a farmer of the ground, who was a vegetable farmer and just thought, you know what,

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I'm just going to give God some of what I do here. Yeah, and that's Genesis 4 with Cain.

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That's what he attempted to do. And for someone who is a musician who wants to give

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God their musical talents, if that's their vocation, that's their work, it is worship

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Monday through Saturday. That's a great point. But it's not what he has, it's not the way that he has determined that we worship him in the corporate setting.

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And that's where we often go wrong. Now, Monday through Saturday, when we get up and serve the

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Lord, the six days of the week that we're commanded to in the fourth commandment, whatever he's called us to, that isn't contrary to the scriptures, that isn't sin, we are worshipping him.

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I mean, whatever you do, whether you eat or drink, do all to the glory of God, all of life is worship. What we're talking about specifically is corporate worship.

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When we gather together on the Lord's day, on the Sabbath morning, and worship him together as a local church, he has prescribed how we do that.

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Give attention, 1 Timothy 4, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16.

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Give attention to these things, take pains with them to the reading of the word, to the exhortation or preaching of the word, and to the teaching, to doctrine.

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Give attention to these things. Now, we also know that we, from elsewhere in the scriptures, we should be devoted to prayer.

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So we come together and pray together corporately. Every Sunday morning, you all do it here at Christ Church New Albany.

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We do it in Christ Church Radford as well. And then also singing. We come together and we sing songs one to another, encouraging, teaching one another about the truths of the gospel concerning Christ.

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We want to do that. Week in and week out. And we want to serve him in these other capacities of our life.

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But it's not okay for us to say, this is what I do, this is what he's called me to. I'm a musician.

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This is what I want. This is the way that I want to worship God. Or I'm good at doing dramas or skits.

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This is the way I want to worship God in the midst of the corporate setting. Yeah, I'm so glad you mentioned that because it is,

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I think it's from perhaps a devaluing of vocation and obeying the

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Lord and working six days as unto the Lord that some of that comes in.

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I mean, you know, in the new covenant, the pots and pans are holy to the Lord. The bells on the horses.

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All the common things that a believer engages in legitimately during the week can be done and should be done as worship.

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And your giftings, your talents, those things as they're done, as they're rendered unto the

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Lord are made acceptable, obviously, by the perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ on your behalf.

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But it is the corporate gathering that we're talking about. And so, again, preaching, prayer, the word of God read and preached, singing, and the ordinances and sacraments.

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This is the prescription from God for his worship in the new covenant. Yeah, and you mentioned

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Cain bringing the fruit of the ground. In that passage there, it's clearly a time where they were coming in to worship

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God in a corporate fashion. So it came about in the course of time, Genesis four, three, which could have been the end of harvest when they would have been worshiping

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God. And it also could have been a weekly Sabbath. But the issue there, they, no doubt,

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Cain and Abel had learned from their father how they ought to worship God. They had grown up in the same home with the similar privileges.

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And yet still, Cain, rather than giving what God had made clear that is acceptable to him, he just took,

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Genesis four says, some fruit. You can imagine him just in our own context, getting ready quickly, being distracted on a

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Sunday morning, not preparing your heart, just running out the door and showing up, just getting there, sitting, mind distracted versus actually beginning to prepare your heart on the evening prior and setting your affections on Christ and getting up and spending time with him and arriving to church and being prepared to worship him in spirit and in truth.

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We see this happening with Cain and Abel. I mean, Cain just took some fruit.

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Abel took fat from the firstlings, the choicest part of the choicest animals, and he presented it to the

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Lord. There was thought given to it, primarily thought about what

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God said was acceptable to him. He had listened to the commands of his father,

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Adam, who had heard the commands from God when he was walking with him in the cool of the day, and he had passed it on to his sons, and one of the sons proved to be obedient and the other proved to be disobedient.

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Yeah. Well, the issue is not just that we, in the regular principle and in worship, that we get all the proper elements that the

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Scriptures prescribe, and as long as we don't include things that we bring to the table on our own, just I feel like doing this,

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I feel like we should do that. The issue is more than just getting the right elements in worship, and more specifically in Genesis 4, as you talked about in your sermon on Sunday, the issue is one of faith, that true worship must proceed from a place of faith.

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So I wonder if you could unpack that for us a little bit from Genesis 4. Yeah, there in Genesis chapter 4, the primary issue isn't so much the offerings that are brought, the fruit of the ground, or the fatlings from the herd, as much as the heart of the men who are bringing the sacrifices.

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So it's the sacrificers that we see being the primary issue, which is clear from Hebrews chapter 11.

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Abel offered his sacrifice in faith. He was hoping only in God, and the same is true for us.

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If we have faith, then we will actually give attention and care and concern to what

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God has said in His Word, and we'll be careful to do it. And that's where we see it playing out in Abel's life.

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Yes, he had faith, and it wasn't just simply that he had faith so he automatically brought the right thing, but because his faith was in God, he was concerned about what

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God had said in His Word, which was direct revelation to his father from God for him, for us.

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It's what's recorded in the Scriptures. And when we give attention to that, when we have faith, we're going to pay attention to God and to His Word so that our worship will be pleasing to Him.

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And that's the connection that we see there, the difference between Cain and Abel. But the connection that we see in Abel's life, he had faith, he believed

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God, he trusted Him, therefore he obeyed Him. So that issue of faith, that Cain lacked faith, is implicit in the text, but it's made explicit later on in several places in the

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New Testament. Where do we see that? Yeah, 1 John 3 makes clear that he killed his brother because his brother's deeds were righteous.

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He himself was unrighteous. He was attempting to extinguish the light of the gospel that was present in his brother that continued to expose his own deeds.

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In Jude, he's mentioned again, verse 11, in the small book of Jude, they've gone the way of Cain.

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It is the way of the enemy, the way of Satan. That is the separate seed, the other seed that's not in the promised line of the

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Messiah that's promised in Genesis 3, verse 15. One of the things that occurred to me while you were preaching

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Sunday, and it wasn't the main point of your text, it wasn't really included in it, but it was hinted at.

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I've never thought about the pain that Eve must have felt when she's gotten a man -child with the help of the

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Lord. Here's Cain's name, as you mentioned, the Word is gotten. She is aware that God has given her.

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Well, God had given her and Adam the promise that one day the

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Redeemer would come through her seed, through their line. Surely, when

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Cain is born, she thinks, here he is. God's faithful. For then, the ongoing...

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She has Abel, and clearly she has other children that we're not told about in the

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Scriptures. But at some point, this one who she thought was the one turns out to be a murderer.

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And she loses him, not physically in death. I'm sure it was terrible as a mother for her to lose her son,

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Abel, to death, to be murdered, but that she lost the one that she thought.

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And I'm sure that her faith was shaken by that. What about this promise that God gave?

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How is He going to bring all of this together? She doesn't have the genealogies that we do in the

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New Testament to work our way all the way back. She just has the bare Word of God. So, yeah,

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I just never really thought about... In a sense, my heart goes out to our first mother,

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Eve, and the pain that that must have been like. Yeah, in a very real sense, she lost two sons that day.

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Abel to death, and Cain, because he was sent out to be a vagrant and a wanderer.

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Some of the benefits from looking at Cain and Abel is the reality that these men here in Genesis chapter 4 represent two great classes of people, even in our day.

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The lost, on one hand, Cain represents them, and the saved on the other,

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Abel. Those who have faith and those who don't. Those who are trusting, like Cain, in their own efforts and merits and works for their righteousness, and those who are trusting only in the

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Gospel and in Jesus Christ. The self -righteous, on the one hand, and the broken -spirited, on the other.

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The mere formal professor of religion. Cain definitely was a professor of religion.

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He was going through the motions. His motives weren't right, but his motions appeared right from the outside, and that's set against the genuine believer of Abel.

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Those who rely upon their own works, as I mentioned, and those who rest on the finished work of Christ.

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Ultimately, the great picture is those who are rejected by God and those who are accepted and blessed by Him.

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That's an overarching application for us. We can ask ourselves the question, are we following in the line of Abel, or are we following in the line of Cain?

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Are we receiving the Lord Jesus Christ? Are we seeking to know Him and to obey

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Him, or are we neglecting Him, which neglecting sounds a bit passive.

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To neglect Him is to reject Him, and if we neglect Him, we'll be rejected by Him, and we see that happening in Cain's life.

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One of the things I remember you saying from the sermon yesterday is that nothing angers the self -righteous like being told that their worship is not acceptable to God.

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I've seen this in real life in conversations that I've had with people about normative and regulative principle of worship, but we certainly see an example of that in Genesis 4.

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Yeah, when Cain brings his offering to the Lord from the fruit of the ground, and God takes no regard for Cain or for his offering,

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Cain became very angry. Genesis 4, verse 5, the second half of verse 5 says,

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Cain became very angry, and his countenance fell. Inwardly, he was furious.

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He was angry that the Lord had not accepted his offering.

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The Lord had rejected him, and he was angry not just at God, but he was angry at his brother because God had accepted his brother, and the anger on the inside showed without.

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He wasn't just angry within, but his countenance fell. The body language, it was evident to the way that he felt, and nothing angers the self -righteous like being told that your worship is not acceptable to God.

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We see that happening there with Cain. He was furious because in his mind, his offering should be accepted.

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If he were God, he would be happy to receive the worship that he had brought that day, but he's not

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God, and he had not paid attention to what God had said. He was worshiping God just the way that he wanted to, and as a result, he was furious that all his labors should stand for nothing.

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At the end of the day, his labors weren't that impressive. He was doing what was easy and convenient, what he wanted.

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He was angry at the thought that he could not approach God and worship him according to the desires and dictates of his own mind, and we see this in our day.

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When we approach people and attempt to talk with them about their sin, about the goodness of the

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Lord, about the way that God has determined that he himself be worshiped, when we bring up some of these things like drama in church and skits and special music, these type things, we see that natural man and sin or because of sin and pride and self -righteousness, we hate the truths of the gospel worse than we hate the devil himself.

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We hate the idea that we must humble ourselves and obey God, that we're needy and utterly dependent on him.

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Apart from God doing the work in us and us recognizing who Christ is for us, recognizing the sinners that we are and the salvation that we need, we're not going to come to God in the way that he's commanded.

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We're not going to be okay with the divine sovereign making these kinds of claims on our lives.

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But one of the great realities of the gospel is that when God does accomplish this great work within, we delight to do his will.

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We joyfully walk in his ways. We seek to make room in our lives to apply all the truths that we see as they are in Jesus.

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The commands of Christ become our food. They're a delight to our soul.

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We get up in the morning desiring to live for him, to worship him with all that we are, not just in our individual lives, but then as a result in the local church, we begin to take painstaking effort to give attention.

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How has God said for us to gather together and worship? What should we give the lion's share of our time to?

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Should we sing for 45 minutes and preach for 15 minutes? Is that the way that we see the

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New Testament written to the local church? Or should we sing and stir our hearts towards the

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Lord, singing the promises of God, reminding ourselves of the need, expressing ourselves in prayer, having a scripture reading, attempting to believe by faith that these are the words of God to us, and then have someone stand in the pulpit and proclaim the glad tidings of Jesus Christ, preaching the gospel from the rooftops, as it were, in order that sinners might be saved, in order that the church might be sanctified.

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That's what we do. That's what Christians do as a result of their hearts being changed. That's what faith accomplishes.

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We then, like Abel, want to know, Abel asking Adam, how is it again that God said for us to worship?

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That's how Abel knew that day to take the choicest part of the choicest animals, because God said, this is what

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I'll accept. This is how you'll be acceptable to me. If you have faith and you believe me, then worship me in this way.

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Yeah, amen. I so appreciate you bringing that up. I want to make it clear to our listeners that maybe you're listening to this and you're the director of the little clock that counts down on Sunday mornings, or maybe you're the director of children's drama ministry or something like that.

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We don't mean to tell you that you are Abel, or I'm sorry, that you are Cain, and that you are an unregenerate person who wants to murder your brothers.

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But I would challenge you to listen to what Anthony just said and tell me what else besides a high view of man and a high view of yourself and a high view of your own giftings and talents and a low view of God and his ordained means of grace and his worship that he's established would lead to anger, would lead to a rejection of God's ways and an insistence upon our own ways.

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So I would just challenge you. I want to make sure that you understand we're not saying that you're a member of the race of Cain, but we are challenging that that would come from a low view of God and a high view of man that should be repented of and reconsidered, and we hope that you'll lovingly hear us say that to you.

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Yeah, and we're all products of our own culture. I mean, we grew up in different traditions where different things were practiced that may or may not have been biblical in the churches that we were involved in.

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And if we're still in those same traditions, same denominations, let's say, then it's easy for us to assume that it's the way that we've always done it.

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Surely it's okay. I myself was saved in the midst of this kind of context.

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How could it not be pleasing to the Lord? Well, some of us are saved in spite of the efforts that are being made, in spite of the ministry philosophies that are going on.

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And we have to give credence to that on one hand, but we have to look and see like what does

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God say in his word? You know, I have an anecdote that I have to tell because it fits so well there.

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We have a mutual friend who ministers in a Middle Eastern country, and they've taken the first Behold Your God study.

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I believe they've done the second one now, but it's a wonderful story. I'd tell the whole thing if I could just because it's such an amazing work there.

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But they took a group of people through it in their church. Now their church is primarily made up of internationals, so people who work in this

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Middle Eastern country from all around the world. And there's a real unity in the faith.

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There's not a division between Easterners and Westerners, but culturally, Easterners and Westerners have grown up very differently.

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We're talking about Easterner and Western Christians here. So they meet together. They go through the

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Behold Your God study. The first week, God's a great attraction to the Christian life. Yes, this is great.

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Week two, okay, if we look around and that's not what we see, how do we get back to that?

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Great, you know, everybody's loving it. Week three, how do we know? Well, God's given us His Word.

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Week four, Christ, and on and on until they get to the week on worship.

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Everybody's totally together. This is the best study they've ever been through. The week on worship divides the group in half.

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And what they found was that it was a lot of the Westerners who were mostly angry about it.

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And there was one Western person in particular who said, you know, look, I grew up in a church where we did drama, where we did this and we did that other thing.

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And everybody that I've ever known has worshiped God like this. This is the culture of the church that I grew up in.

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This is how I worship God. It's how I'm comfortable worshiping God. It's how my family worships God. It's just the way that we do it.

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And it took someone from, who was an Easterner, who had been converted out of, I forget what, you know, an

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Eastern religion like Buddhism, to say to them, you know, enough of this talk about this is how

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I grew up worshiping God. The way I grew up worshiping God was I used to sit a little bowl of rice in front of a statue of a little fat man every day.

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Everybody in my family worships God that way. I grew up worshiping God that way. It feels natural to me.

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But when I came to the true and living God, I realized that I was not at liberty to worship

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Him however I felt like worshiping Him, but that He would be the one to tell me how He wants to be worshiped.

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So it was amazing because it took a literal former idolater to rebuke the idolatry of the

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Western Christian. And, you know, they talked through those things and came to, you know, a blessed understanding.

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But it's just such an amazing... I mean, we do grow up different ways. But that's not a legitimate excuse or a legitimate reason for us to set worship however we want to set it.

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Right, yeah. When Cain's offering is rejected by God and he responds being angry and his countenance being fallen, there's an unbelievable display of the mercy of God in that situation.

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God knows what's welling up inside of Cain. He knows what's on the horizon.

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And He doesn't just stand back and let history take its course, we might say.

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But rather, out of compassion and mercy, He steps into the situation and He asks

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Cain, why are you angry? Why has your countenance fallen?

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Like, I can see you. I know what's going on. It's as if He's saying,

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Cain, do not follow through with the ill will that your heart is feeling. The anger that's welling up on the inside, it's towards me, but it's also towards your brother.

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Cain, don't do this. There's a warning against disobedience. A merciful, compassionate plea from God to Cain.

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And we know that, I mean, we know from reading the passage, Cain disregards it altogether. He had already disregarded the way that God had determined to be worshipped.

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And now he disregards the words of God coming to him in this compassionate plea.

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Eve, the chapter prior, was talked into her sin by Satan, the serpent.

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Here's Cain, unwilling to be talked out of his sin by God Himself.

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Cain, he says, if you do well, will not your countenance be lifted up?

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Cain, you'll be happy within if you'll obey, which is a wonderful word for us.

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Whatever situation we find ourselves in, when we're downcast, when we're bitter within, angry, anxious, worried, obedience is the solution.

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Obey the Lord. Worship Him in that situation. If you do not do well, though, however,

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Cain, sin is crouching at the door and its desire is for you.

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But you must master it. Cain, if you obey, it will go well with you.

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If you don't, it will continue spiraling down. Sin desires to destroy you.

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And that's what happened with Cain. But it's wonderful to see the merciful compassion of God here intervening, attempting to hold

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Cain back, as it were. And the same is true for us. In fact, this warning is good for us to hear.

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Sin is crouching at every one of our doors. And it isn't, as I mentioned in the sermon, just a simple house pet.

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Its desire is to destroy us. It's ferocious. It's savage. It wants nothing but to choke the life out of us, to destroy us and our families and our churches, to squelch any type of positive movement in the kingdom.

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I mean, sin is the most heinous and wicked thing in all of existence.

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Every negative thing that we can think of is due to sin. Death came by sin. Sickness is due to sin.

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Sin is the great enemy. And it is crouching at each of our doors.

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And its desire is to destroy us. We must master it. And the only way that we can master it is by bowing the knee to Christ.

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Sin is our master, Romans chapter 6, until we're translated into the kingdom of light, and then

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Christ becomes our master. That's our only hope for mastering sin. Sin will destroy us if Christ does not rule us.

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And what an amazing, as you said, picture of the eternal God there in Genesis 4.

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I mean, here is the holy, righteous judge before whose face sin, none can stand.

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And sin, he cannot, he's too purified to even look on sin. He's furiously, blindingly holy.

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And yet, when the first murderer stands before him, guilty of murder, the blood is calling out to God from the ground, stands and lies to God, to his face, as it were.

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We see the humility and the kindness of God manifested so clearly in a hand, the offer of repentance that we know that will one day come through the

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Lord Jesus Christ. And with that warning to us, it's wonderful to know that that hand is outstretched even now with the warning.

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We always know when the difference between the enemy when he comes to accuse us and the

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Spirit of God when he comes to convict us of sin, the enemy tells us, look, there's no hope.

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You should give up. You should quit. You should go kill yourself. You should, you know, there's just no hope for you.

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But the Spirit of God comes to us and shows us our sin and shows us

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Christ and shows us the way out which is through repentance and faith.

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So if that's you today in whatever situation you're facing, while he's speaking, while you hear his voice, don't turn away from him.

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Well, thanks for listening to us today. I do want to tell you that we're going to link to the sermon that Anthony preached on December 2nd here at Christ Church New Albany called

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Worship Warnings. And we would encourage you to go and spend some time with that sermon.

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Listen to it. If you have any questions, we'd love to hear from you. You can write to us at info at mediagratia .org,

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support at mediagratia .org. All of those come to the same place. In English, that's themeansofgrace .org.

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You can go to our website and there's a contact form there. We'd love to hear from you.