A reading from the Book of Genesis.
These are the records of the heavens and the earth concerning
their creation. At the time that the Lord made
the earth in the heavens, no shrub of the field had yet grown
on the land, and no plant of the field had yet been sprouted for
the Lord. God had not made it rain on the
land, and there was no man to work the ground, but the mist
would come up from the earth and water all the ground.
Then the Lord formed the man out of the dust from the ground and
breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became
a living being. Then Lord God planted a garden
in Eden in the east, and there He placed the man he had formed.
The Lord God caused to grow out of the ground every tree
pleasing in appearance and good for food, including the tree of
life in the middle of the garden, as well as the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil. A river went out from Eden to
water the garden. From there it divided and became
the source of four rivers. The name of the first is Pishan,
which flows through the entire land of Havilah, where there is
gold. Gold from that land is pure.
Delium and Onyx are also there. The name of the second river is
Kihan, which flows throughout the entire land of Cush.
The name of the third river is Tigris, which runs east of
Assyria, and the fourth river is the Euphrates.
The Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden
to work it and watch over it. And the Lord God commanded the
man. You are free to eat from any
tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, for on the day that you eat it, you
will certainly die. The word of the Lord.
Well, we are starting a new series called Sacred Spaces, the
Holy ground where God meets us. Sacred spaces are those places
in this physical earth where we encounter the living God and are
set apart in a special and unique way for the mission that
He has. We're going to be starting this
morning in Genesis and we're going to be working our way
through the Scriptures all the way to the new Jerusalem in
Revelation, looking at all the ways that God meets his people.
We're going to start in the garden and then we're going to
look at the altar and then the Tabernacle, the temple.
We're going to work our way through the mountain and then
finally to the to the the new temple in Jesus Christ and then
the new city that he brings. So I hope you join us for the
series. I wonder if there's anyone among
us who've brave enough to try those 1000 piece puzzles.
Have you tried putting one of those puzzles together?
Now here's a here's probably, you know, the biggest challenge
of them all. Have you ever tried to put one
of those puzzles together without the aid of the box, The
picture on the box where you have to deal with all these
scattered pieces? You don't know how they connect.
Sometimes you're forcing it and sometimes you're not.
And sometimes like maybe a piece that's a, you know, with another
one over here, but overall, it's just a lot of like pieces
scattered around. There's no vision bringing it
all together. Sometimes that is what it can be
like to live the human life without any kind of vision or
purpose of what God intends for your life.
You have all these pieces everywhere.
You've got your gigs and you've got your work and you've got
your friends and you've got friends over there and friends
over here and you've got church and you've got, you know, like
all kind of hobbies and interests and pain and setbacks.
You're like, how does all of this fit together?
What's the grander beautiful picture for my life?
A recent study found actually that well over half of Gen.
Z feel like their lives lack that picture lacks meaning and
purpose for their lives because there's nothing coherent and
beautiful and complete that they feel about their life and their
work. And the truth is like it doesn't
just, it's not just Gen. Z, it's every generation.
If you don't have that bigger picture, you don't know how your
life is supposed to coalesce and come together.
That can be very discouraging when you ask what's the bigger
picture? What's the bigger purpose for my
life? Now reading from Genesis 2 is
like a picture from the Lord God for every generation.
Here's what it looks like to be a full and complete human being.
Here's what I can do with your life.
Here's what I intend. We see the original sacred
space, which was a garden. Isn't that cool?
A garden was the original space where God wanted to encounter
human beings, where He brought them to life, where He placed
them and gave them a purpose. He gave them abundance and lush
rivers and delicious food. The garden is the place for
God's people return to again and again to hear God's call on
their life and know His presence and join His work.
So it's true that we don't live in this garden.
What's described here is no longer our full and complete
reality, but the picture of it was kept for our benefits so
that everyone from every generation who struggle to know
their bigger picture, the bigger picture of their life and their
purpose can return to it and say here's what God is doing with
your life and here's what God is doing with the world.
So I invite you to turn there now.
Genesis 2, I think it's on page nine of your programs.
You can obviously turn there into your Bibles.
That's the first book of the Bible, Genesis 2 four and
following. Now when we think about the
picture that Genesis 2 is painting, here's the first
feature that we need to know. The first feature of this
picture is God who is Lord over both lack and abundance.
God who is Lord over over lack and abundance.
We missed this. We missed the picture of the
meaning of our life. You, you might be here and
you're you're facing lack. You might be here and you're
facing abundance. If you cannot see a God who is
Lord over that, your life is going to lack meaning and
coherence because Genesis 2 presents a very interesting
world. It's it's a world that is both
desolate and desirable, and God is Lord over both circumstances.
Look at in verse 4 and following how He is present even in the
barren times. Verse 4 says these are the
records or the genealogies or essentially like the the the
original story of the heavens and the earth concerning their
creation. At that time the Lord God made
the earth and the heavens. No shrub of the field had yet
grown on the land. That's the first negative thing
#2 no plant of the field had yet sprouted.
Second negative thing for the Lord God had not made it rain on
the land. There's the third you could call
it a negative reality or something that doesn't yet
exist. And then finally, there is no
man, no human being to work the ground.
Go back and a lot of people agree on this.
People have different perspectives on the origins of
our world will agree that there was a time without people and
there was a time where things were desolate and there was a
time when a lot of what we know now that's lush and beautiful
and good and civilization and art and and and Thai food didn't
exist. And yet given this lack of rain,
lack of trees, you don't see God panicking.
You don't see him distressed. He's he's ruling and reigning.
He's the Lord God has all the time in the world to deal with
this situation, to deal with this lack, and to wait for the
right time to act. And sometimes it's just good for
us to remember that God can handle desolation.
He's lured over the lack. In fact, in Genesis 1, we see
the Spirit of the Lord hovering over the chaos of the earth.
It's chaotic and dark things don't exist yet.
And the Lord God is right there hovering, and He creates
beautiful order out of that situation.
Psalm One O 7 puts it this way. He meaning God turns a desert
into a pool, turns a desert into a pool, dry land into springs.
The Lord God can take lack and turn it into abundance.
But you can also do the reverse. Psalm one O 7 says he turns
rivers into desert, springs into thirsty ground, fruitful land
into salt, salty wasteland. So the Lord God has seen
ecological like change and he's not afraid of it.
He's Lord over it and he's Lord over lack in abundance and can
turn 1 into the other depending on his purposes.
He's not afraid of lack and he's not enamoured with abundance.
I would say this is really important for us because we are
tempted to believe that the purpose of our life, the picture
of our life, is success, however we define it.
That if our goals are unmet, if our lives feel desolate, we
might assume I've lost the plot and purpose of my life.
It's just a bunch of pieces. And we just assume like, OK, if
I failed at something, that means my life is futile.
And that's just not true at all. The purpose of our life starts
with God, who is Lord over lack and abundance, and he's Lord
over He's Lord over both. Whatever circumstance that we're
in now, what does God do in this dusty and desolate world?
Well, he brings life. Verse 7, the Lord God formed the
man. The verb here for formed is what
the ancient Near East would refer to like a Potter making
clay or making making up like taking clay and forming it.
God is forming the man out of the dust from the ground, and
verse 7 says he breathed the breath of life into his nostrils
and the man became a living being.
And here's one thing I want us to notice.
I just want us to notice the grace of verse 7.
Just pure grace. What's the human being doing to
exist? He's not winning any
competitions, not proving himself, not working really hard
to exist, not getting God's attention, doesn't exist at all.
His life begins with God's mind, God's heart, God's intentions,
God's creativity, God's breath of life.
God's does everything. The human being does nothing.
It's God's greatness and God's grace that fills his life with
purpose and and that just we can never forget that, friends, we
can never forget that our lives begin with grace.
We did nothing to exist. We are hereby God wants us here
and placed us here and he made us and everything about us
belongs to him and starts with him.
Verse 8, the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the East, and
there he placed the man, the human being that he had formed.
And notice just how much the Lord God is being intentional
here. He's he's planting a garden that
takes if anyone here has planted a garden, you know how much
intention that takes. Then he places the human being
in the garden. So there's more initiating grace
from our Lord here. He creates the abundance that
the man will now live in, like thrive in.
And in verses 9 through 14, we actually see a world dripping
with abundance. We we started in desolation, but
now we see that the Lord is abundant.
Abundance comes from His grace. Verse 9 talks about beautiful
trees with delicious food. It's sort of aesthetic and
delicious. And then verse 10, God provides
a water source. It's a great river that brings
life. And in fact, the the river, what
happens is that when the river hits Eden, it divides into four
parts. And many scholars believe that
this is sort of an ecological clue that that the garden, like
Eden, is like a great mountain. The garden is at the top of the
mountain. The water flows into the garden
and then divides in four different ways to irrigate the
four corners of the earth. And then Genesis 2 goes on to
describe the existence of precious metals and, and, and
then also, best of all, there's a human being placed in the
midst of all of this, the vegetation, the water, the gold
and the dellum and Onyx to cultivate all of it.
This past April, Laura and I went on a marriage retreat.
And one of the things we did was we, we hiked up a mountain in
Georgia and I did not bring water with me.
And man, I was like, what am I going to do?
We're not even at the top of the mountain yet.
And I'm really thirsty. And we got to the top of the
mountain and we were shocked to find order and beauty.
There was this Japanese koi pond that was really well maintained.
There was vegetation everywhere. There was this historic
renovated guest house. That was all like ready.
And then best of all, there was a fountain of drinkable water.
And it was like there was past intentions that had placed all
of that together, put all of that together right atop of the
mountain. So what did we do?
We refreshed ourselves in the water and poured it on our heads
and drank it and, and then we just took in all of the beauty.
We took in the beauty of the house and the koi pond and
looked out into the valley and saw all the, the, the fresh
Georgia landscape and trees. It was just absolutely gorgeous.
The original sacred space was kind of like that, except way
better. Purposeful, beautiful,
delicious, teeming with life. This is from God.
He's generous and He loves to provide abundance for his
children. But if we think that's the
meaning of our life and we don't see the God behind the
abundance, we will lose the plot.
We will lose the purpose for all of the abundance.
We will lose the personal intention designed behind it,
that fruitfulness. Ask anyone who has everything
they've ever wanted in this life.
They finally get it and their lives in some ways are more
desolate and empty than when they were just struggling to get
the next meal. The Lord God is over lack and
over abundance, and that is one of the most that is the primary
feature of this picture of what it means to be human.
It's just pure grace flowing from Him no matter what the
circumstances are. Yet we do have a role to play,
and that's the second feature of this picture of what it means to
be human in this sacred space, the garden.
The second feature of the picture is a human being trusted
with great freedom and responsibility.
A human being trusted with great freedom and great
responsibility. It starts with God, Lord over
lack in abundance, and then it moves to the human being trusted
with great freedom and responsibility.
Verse 15, the Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden
of Eden to work it and to watch over it.
Really important words. We see it repeated in other
sacred spaces in Scripture like the Levitical priesthood.
They were to do this exact same thing, work it and watch over
the Tabernacle, the Hebrew word for work.
The first of that pair avad and this carries a sense of applying
human effort, labor, intention to make a problem better.
It is applying creative effort to cultivate something within
creation. Adam is supposed to cultivate
the gold, harness the river, raise a family, build a
civilization, tend the garden. That is a high calling avad,
Avad this place, Adam. But how does Adam's work in Eden
relate with ours? What about our work of evading?
One pastor explains it this way. Gardeners like Adam take an
active stance toward their charge.
They don't leave the land as it is.
They dig up the ground and rearrange it with a goal in mind
so that it produces food, flowers and beauty.
And that is the pattern for all work.
It is creative and assertive. It helps people thrive and
flourish. What does it look like to apply
creative, active work in our world, rearranging it so that
our lives flourish? A psychologist takes the
insights on human nature and applies it with skill and
compassion and relationship to their clients.
As a result, fear and shame give way to strength and courage
among the people that they serve.
A young artist applies hours each week to train their hands
and their minds to master a craft and master the notes.
They learn to take the the raw material of their craft, the
notes in the strings, and they learn to make something
beautiful and inspiring. An entrepreneur notices a local
population getting exploited for their natural resources, but
instead of passively letting it happen and passively profiting
from it, they take an active creative stance.
They connect law enforcement with the business community, and
they come up with a sustainable plan so that this community is
able to profit from and flourish in their natural resources of
their own property. A grad student builds upon
arguments from leading scholars to craft a thesis which advances
the field of study. A young dad notices A chaotic
pile of laundry higher than Mount Zion itself, smelly and
undifferentiated, and applies effort and skill and hard work
and intention to turn that into beautiful, differentiated, good
smelling piles of laundry for each member of their family.
Work the garden. Take an active creative stance
of the things that are right in front of you as part of Our
Calling friends, as part of our work.
John Wesley put it this way. Do all the good you can by all
the means you can and all the ways you can and all the places
you can at all the times you can, to all the people you can,
as long as you ever can. Now, one of the best examples of
this that I've seen is from a man whose name is Gary.
Gary's story goes like this. All he wanted to do was be a
foreign missionary. He that's the call he got from
God as a young boy and a young man, and he pursued it into
adulthood. He got his training.
He, he, he married his wife, Carolyn.
She also wanted to go to the mission field.
They work towards it. They did.
They jump through every single hoop they could to fulfill their
call and dream. And once they had jumped through
every single hoop, the door slammed in their face and the
mission board basically told them you can't go, you can never
go. And they were, I mean, there was
absolutely disillusioned. Like I think they were like 30
or above at this point and had worked for years for this.
So they just did the next right thing.
He took a job as a a pastor of youth and young adults in North
Carolina and he just started pastoring them and they started
coming up with him with, you know, relationship problems,
which probably seemed trivial to him at the time, but he was
like, OK, So he started to counsel them.
He started to pastor them and he started encouraging people and
they're engaged couples and married couples.
And, and then he started noticing patterns.
God started to give him insights.
Here's some helpful things for you to shepherd these young
couples. And so he found that it was like
so helpful for them that he decided that he would write it
down. And he's like, I don't know.
We'll call it the five love languages.
Fast forward now, his work on the five love languages has been
translated into 50 different languages, actual languages.
And he continues to write, speak and minister not just
relationship wisdom, but also the gospel of Jesus
internationally all year round. He's 87 years old.
Sometimes he speaks every night of the week and encourages
people and preaches the gospel. I don't think he could have ever
seen that coming. But he just did the next right
thing and God made sense of the whole picture.
God calls Adam to work it a VOD, but he also calls them to watch
over it. Shamar, this is Guardian
language. This is the language that refers
to protection. Be on the lookout, be a
watchman, because there's going to be there's going to be people
who are going to come against this work.
Evil will come against it, and you must guard it.
This means that anything destructive or contamination
needs to be kept out because sacred space is meant to stay
sacred, not be defiled, not be trampled on, not be treated with
disdain. And so further instructions on
that are in verse 16 and 17. The Lord God commanded the man,
You are free to eat from any tree of the garden, but you must
not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for
on the day you eat of it, you will certainly die.
And soon after an evil minded snake like creature comes with a
lie. And this is Adam's first Test.
Like, will he shamar sacred space?
Will he keep evil out? Will he confront it?
Will he put his own life on the line to protect what God has
called sacred? That was part of his
responsibility. That's what part of what God
gave him to do. God trusted Adam and Adam
betrayed that trust because he did not shamar sacred space.
He, he did not take an active creative stance.
He did not guard it. An evil trampled evil even
worked through his own heart and Adam's own disobedience.
And there's this just sense of breakdown of trust.
And this is what it means for sacred space to be violated.
Ever since, you know, Adam's sons, you, you watch what
happens and, and sacred space gets more and more violated.
In fact, Adam's descendants tried to make, they tried to
recreate even, you know, but they did it through violence and
extortion. And instead of recreating even
they, they made things like the Tower of Babel or the city of
Babylon, just more injustice and more pain and more exploitation.
And we see this in our world, don't we?
We see this when when a person or group exploits the
environment for their own profit, but without thought for
coming generations, or when a powerful person violates
someone's innocence, or when God entrusts us with an assignment
and says work it and keep it. And we were like, it's too hard
and this is not what I imagined for my life.
So we quit. See, it's not just our puzzle
that's scrambled. It's the whole world.
It's just all these pieces everywhere, broken, like, torn
apart. Like, how is this going to be
put back together? Shattered, Shattered remains,
broken glass. Let's see.
There was one son of Adam that was different.
Yeah. Bringing the whole point home
there. One of Adam's son's friends went
back up the mountain and found a garden there.
In fact, we have a visual illustration.
There he is right there, the second from the last.
You see him up there, Jesus Christ in Gethsemane, praying in
the garden, confronting the snake.
Instead of falling down on the job, He sweats drops of blood
and prays all night. Father, thy will be done, not my
will, Thy will be done. And the snake, you know, tried
to deceive him but couldn't. So the snake pierced him.
And from his wounds, from the wounds of Jesus, flowed living
waters to irrigate the four corners of the earth, to bring
refreshment of spiritual life and renewal to anyone who would
turn to him. He would give healing to the
nation's and Adam's son, God's Son, Jesus Christ has become our
new garden, the new Eden and the new gardener within Eden.
For all of us who have tasted the the fallout of our own sin
or the sin of other people, when we feed on him, this, this new
garden, we will surely live. I heard about the story of a
jazz musician named John. You know, John tragically lost
his dad at age 12. And so as he came of age and
realized that he had a dream of becoming a jazz musician, he was
always looking for those father figures, you know, is that void
in his life, always looking for mentors who could take him to
the next level. He'd play with any band that
would take him, basically practice as much as he could.
But one of those father figures, as it happens, like passed on
heroin addiction to him, which was rampant in the jazz
community at the time. And so, but he's he's struggling
and he's he's working at it. And then finally, John gets his
big break. Miles Davis invited John to join
his quintet. He starts playing with Miles
Davis, but the only problem is his drinking and his heroin
addiction had gotten so bad that he, like his live performances
were were erratic. And Miles Davis was like I got
to let you go man. This is not working out.
And just imagine like what a low point you would be.
You've worked all your life for a goal.
You finally meet that goal to do what you think you're calling
is, but you screwed it up and you missed your greatest
opportunity. And something really interesting
happened in John's life is that that became a moment where he
was like, OK, I'm going to face the snake.
I'm going I'm going to face the darkness.
And he actually, he locked himself, not advising this, but
this is what he did. He locked himself in his
Philadelphia home to go cold Turkey off heroin and alcohol.
And it got so bad, his withdrawal symptoms, his
daughter thought he was going to die.
But instead of dying, he actually encountered the living
God. And Jesus Christ changed his
life, changed his heart. And he said God, like he, he
said, God, I want you to give me an opportunity.
Would you help me make beautiful music to bring joy to people's
lives? Would you help?
Would you restore my broken life and help me and help me, help me
with this craft? And he came out of that
Philadelphia home and he recorded his album and he called
it a Love Supreme. And when you listen to John
Coltrane's album Love Supreme, it's like you can hear all the
picture, the picture of his life, all those shattered pieces
and shards of his life come together and the most beautiful
mosaic ever. All like the pain and the
missing dad and the, and the notes and the years in the
wilderness and the failure and the grace and the hope.
You can hear it. And this is what Jesus can do
with every human life. Every time we have failed and
every time we've missed opportunities and every time we
feel like it's it's broken and UN unredeemed and we have no
idea how it's all going to fit together.
This is what the new gardener does.
See, there's all the pieces together and he says, let me
make something of let me recreate Eden one person at a
time. And if you're here and you've
never met him, you can turn to him now, just like John did back
in the year 1957. I I love what he says in his in
his liner notes. He said this album is a humble
offering to him and attempt to say thank you God through our
work, even as we do our they do in our hearts and with our
tongues. May he help and strengthen all
men in every good endeavour. That's true.
He can do that with you and me one day.
I know it. We're, when we turn to him,
we'll see the whole picture. We'll see the puzzle come
together and, and it and we'll say all praise be to God.
But in the meantime, it's still a puzzle, isn't it?
The pieces, how do they all fit together?
I'm not exactly sure. You're not exactly sure.
We're just doing the next right thing.
We're just Avadh and Shamar watching and and working the
little plot of the garden in which God has placed us.
And we're asking him to make it sacred again to the glory of
God. So, so let's just bring it back
here today. What are we going to do?
Got a practice for you that you can try it.
We'll call it the garden practice because why not?
And this is for every stage of life.
I've got some prompts for you here.
You can write it down or not. We'll we'll figure out a way to
send this out. But this can help us realign
with God's purpose for our life. And it starts with people.
People who are the people that God has asked you to love and
serve on a consistent basis? Are there people in your life
God has asked you to love and serve on a consistent basis?
People, projects. What are the projects?
You could call it a craft or, or the next right thing that the
Lord has asked us to invest our best efforts, our best efforts,
our creative, active stance. That's projects #3 problems,
problems. What's your mound of
undifferentiated Mount Sinai dirty laundry?
What's your version of that? What issues in this world has
the Lord asked you to confront, to guard, to watch over, to do
something about problems #4 provision, provision.
What blessings or graces has God provided?
Or would you like Him to provide for you, to flourish in your
work? And then finally, prayer.
Prayer. Where do we need God's help to
work and steward the garden unto His glory?
Maybe it's grace for the failure.
Maybe it's strength of the task. Maybe it's wisdom from above,
people, projects, problems, provision, prayer.
Let's end with prayer now my friends, as we seek to be
faithful in the garden. Lord, we just give you all of
the pieces of our life. We don't know how they fit
together. Thank you that you are the
picture, that you can see the picture, and that you are making
all things new in our life. Thank you that you formed us
from the dust and that you placed us here with purpose.
Lord, would you teach us to to work with joy and to keep watch
with joy unto your name. And Lord, help us trust you with
the with just the story. We don't know how it will come
together, but thank you that you're bringing all of the
broken pieces of our life and all the gifts of our world and
even our hopes and dreams, Lord. And you're making a beautiful
picture of grace and mercy in Christ and with Christ and
through Christ to the glory of God the Father, who pray this in
Jesus name, Amen.