Good morning, everybody. How we doing?
It's good to see you. It's good to see we got some
students here coming back for the school year.
Got folks returning. What's up, Matt and Kylie?
Man, it's like this is the this is the celebration of newly
married folks in the house today at the Garden Hollow.
Good to see you guys. It's you know what it's rainy
outside, but this is it's an exciting time of year.
Ian's reminding us that football season is back.
You know, school is underway. Thank you teachers.
Great job parents. If you made it here this morning
after is starting off a new school year.
Proud of you. Good to good to be here
teachers. Thank you so much.
And, and there's of course a lot going on here at the Garden
Church. If we haven't, if we haven't
met, my name is Josh. I have the joy of serving as
pastor here at the Garden and, and we're we're glad you're here
today. We are a community of people
with lots of we're different in all kinds of different ways, but
we're on this shared journey to to be shaped by the love of
Jesus, to share that in the places that we live, work and
play. That's what keeps us connected.
And if you're looking for a spiritual family, checking out
church, just exploring faith, Hey, we're we're so glad you're
here. Welcome.
We'd love to help you find that gum.
Grab me or anybody with a lanyard back in the back this
morning. We're we're excited to be diving
in this morning to to this to September.
I don't want to say fall not quite yet.
We're not quite there. It feels there, but not quite
diving into September and of course, diving into this new
series that Amy talked about a titled the story.
Maybe you have wondered, maybe not.
Maybe you have wondered how to make sense of the Bible.
Has anybody ever like, been confused by the Bible?
Like this is the Bible is is crazy.
It is unlike any other book that we read.
It's really a whole library of books composed over more than a
millennia. Different languages, different
cultures, different continents. There's a lot going on.
And yet this incredible diverse library of scripture tells a
single story that is so important for you and me.
And that's what we're exploring in the series.
We're going to go Genesis. It's a revelation garden all the
way to new creation and attempt to make sense of what's going on
in this story and how it matters for you and me.
One of my favorite movies is The Bourne Identity.
I'm dating myself a little bit here.
I love I love some me some good action movies.
And in the Bourne Identity, some of you have seen it.
Some of you are are old like me. The the movie opens with this
great scene. There is like a man, apparently
a corpse just floating in the open sea.
He's he's reeled in in the dark of night from the Mediterranean
on to this fishing boat. And and when he comes to and
they they realize that he's alive.
There's so much mystery like what is going on here.
First of all, this dude doesn't doesn't even know his name.
He doesn't know who he is, doesn't know how he got here,
doesn't know how he has bullet holes in his back.
Something is going on, but not only is there mystery around who
he is, but like clearly this is a this is a non typical human.
This guy over here like speaks multiple languages, has like
elite combat skills, processes things like a a seasoned
operative. Something is happening, but
we're not, we're not sure what. And over the course of the
movie, this individual who we end up coming to know is Jason
Bourne, goes on this journey to make sense of, to try and figure
out who, who am I? Because he's so confused in this
setting, trying to make sense of what his, what he's about, who
he is, what his purpose is in the world without the memory of
his story. I love this as an analogy for us
friends, because, you know, I think many of us, maybe you can
identify with this, find our ourselves at at at moments in
life where we're we're moving through the world, we're going
about our day-to-day and and we find ourselves saying like, who
even am I? What, why am I here?
What am I supposed to be doing? What is all this about?
We find ourselves with compulsions, intuitions,
defaults and we're like, where? Where does this even come from?
How do I make sense of my behavior and how I'm supposed to
be in the world? Have you ever felt yourself in
this kind of like a little bit of an existential, like what is
happening? How do I, how do I be in the
world? Well, I want to suggest to you
this morning that it's very difficult to know who you are to
answer the question of your identity or, or to answer the
question of purpose. Why am I here if we don't know
the answer to the question, where do I come from?
Where do I come from? What's my origin story?
And this is what we see in Genesis chapter one.
In fact, the word Genesis is from a Greek word that literally
means origins. It's the beginning.
It's the origin story of where we come from.
And now this is interesting because this story has often
been used to answer all kinds of different questions.
Maybe you grew up in a church context or situation where where
people use the book of Genesis to try and explain everything
about the world. Many people these days are
trying to to answer questions about modern scientific origins,
like how old is the earth? How exactly did everything come
to be? That was like, how did creation
happen? Unfortunately, I'm not going to
talk about those things this morning.
OK. If that's what you were hoping
for when you heard that Genesis was on the menu, I'm sorry to
disappoint you. And, and I won't be talking
about those this morning because I think that those are actually
modern scientific questions that are foreign to what's going on
in the book of Genesis. I don't think that's what
Genesis is talking about at all. Because what we find here, when
we look at these early chapters of Genesis, we find it not a
scientific account of material origins, but we find a
theological account about who God is, who we are, and what our
place is in this world that he has created.
And this is important. Friends, I, I say this not
because I don't believe that the scripture is reliable of enough
of a guide to to to take literally about something.
It's rather because I respect Scripture enough to pay
attention to what it's actually doing.
And I'm going to show you from the text of Scripture why I
think what we have here in Genesis one in particular is a
theological account, the answers some crucially important
questions. So we're going to we're going to
be all over Genesis 1 today. If you if you have a Bible with
you, pull it out. If you have a phone with you,
open it up, dial in in your preferred Bible app to Genesis 1
because I want to show you some things that are happening in the
text of Scripture this morning. In the beginning of Genesis one,
we find this description. It literally says in the
beginning and then we find a painting of disorder.
Genesis 1 paints the world as it exists in Genesis 1.
Interesting point that the world already exists in Genesis 1 as a
formalist and disordered C, like there's nothing but this C.
And into this we see the Spirit of God begin to move.
We read that the Spirit of God is moving above the waters.
And then over the course of the chapter, over the course of
chapter 1 in particular, extending into chapter 2 all the
way to verse 4, we find this record of the seven days of
creation. Now, if you've read Genesis or
been around church about you probably familiar with the seven
days of creation. What's going on here?
Well, each day has a lot of structure to it.
We're going to notice this and I'm going to suggest to you that
the first three days are all about God forming and the, the
the second three days are all about God filling.
And then the 7th day is about culmination.
We see that in the text this morning.
But the the big picture, if I were to summarize it down into
almost like a a single arc, we see the move from at the
beginning of Genesis 1A, space of chaos and disorder to a place
of order generated by the word of God.
So look with me here, there's a bunch of structure over the
course of these seven days. You'll notice first of all,
obviously there's, there's each day it's talked about, each day
begins with God's creative declaration.
And God said, right? We see that show up over and
over again 7 times over here in chapter 1.
And God said, and then as God speaks things into existence at
the conclusion of each day, he kind of steps back.
He, he does an assessment, a building inspection, if you
will. And each time there's a refrain
repeated and it was good six times.
Again, we see this refrain repeated and it was good.
And then at the conclusion of the 6th day, we're going to talk
more about that in just a minute.
We have and it was very good. OK, so and God said and very
good. And then what's going on with
sevens here? There is a bunch of sevens all
over this text. There's seven declarations that
creation is good. There's 7 words in the opening
verse, right? There's seven times that we see
a God say something, declare, speak things into existence.
Of course we have the seven days.
And all of this suggests to us, many scholars have said the
Genesis 1 is like almost a liturgical text again, in the
sense that you have a, you have a piece of paper that talks
about kind of like what we're doing today.
People suggest, scholars suggest that, that the, the 1st chapter
of Genesis was used liturgically in a similar way for the people
of God. And when we look closer, we
began to see like this liturgical structure, this
organizational structure, this poetic structure of, of
parallels that we see throughout the text.
It's, it's not simply a, a literalistic like chronological
history of things. And this is apparent for a bunch
of reasons. One of the most obvious is that
we see, of course, light shows up on day one.
When does the sun show up? Day four.
OK, so like there's some things here that chronologically, if
we're thinking about it scientifically, do not make
sense. But there's something else that
is going on here. If we pay attention to this text
that's super important. Look at this.
I've mentioned already that there's this pattern of forming
and then filling that's present here.
So on days 1-2 and three, we see God used separation to form.
On day one, we see that He separates the light from the
darkness. OK, God creates light and dark
on day 2. We see in verse 6 that He
separates the water from the water.
Now some of you are looking at your Bibles and you're reading
these verses or maybe you've read this in the past.
And if you ever read Genesis chapter 2 and verse seven, you
probably had the reaction that I did when I first read it.
I was like, what in the world is going on here, right?
God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from
the water above it. I didn't know there were vaults
in creation, right? We're not talking about bank
vaults here. What's going, what's going on in
this text? Well, in the Ancient Near East,
they didn't have the same cosmology or understanding of
the universe that we do today. People did not imagine the Earth
as a globe floating in a void of space, right, surrounded by
planets and stars. Instead, the imagination was
across cultures that essentially we live on, on a Flat Earth.
It's this big, it's this big flat sphere.
In some illustrations, you could see in the Ancient Near East,
it's supported by turtles and all these other things that go
down and create a pillar. But but under the earth, under
the ground, there is the imagination that under the
ground and around the ground, everywhere there's water,
there's sea and it's chaos and, and the sky they didn't
understand. As we think about it today, we
think like, OK, there's other celestial bodies.
They're these stars. Well, the ancients actually
imagined that we were living inside a Dome.
OK, like if there was just like when you're if you go to a
football game and it's in a Dome thing, you look up and you see
the ceiling. That's what they thought the sky
was, was like there was this Dome and and the stars they
thought were embedded into this Dome.
OK, Dome would rotate had some cool rotating features, but but
that was that was how they made sense of things.
So here in verse, in day 2IN verse 6, when God is separating
the waters below and the waters above, in the imagination of the
writer here, what's going on, if we were to try and make sense of
it scientifically, is is is the waters from below are getting
pushed down and the waters above are getting pushed up above the
Dome. It's not a perfect seal.
Occasionally you have rain, right?
That's why there's rain, obviously.
But the waters above are being pushed up above the Dome.
So God creates in this way by separating the sky and the sea.
OK, so that's day 2. So we got light from darkness.
We've got separation of waters to create sky and sea.
And then a day three, we see God separate the land from the
waters. We see this, of course, here in
verse 9. So God is using this tool of
separation to create order, separating light from dark,
separating sea from sea, separating land from water.
And then we get a one more thing in verse 11.
At the end of this first movement of forming on the land,
plants sprout up, right? God creates the plants.
All right, So that's days 123. Now, when you look at it, days
4-5 and six, this is, there's a parallelism here.
There's like a poetic structure. Days 4-5 and six run in parallel
to the first three days. In the first three days, these
expanses, these voids, almost like a, a canvas has been
stretched out. God has created these three
domains, right? Light, dark sky and sea, and
then land and water. And then we see in verse 4, God
returns to this light, dark domain that he's created.
And what we see created all the celestial bodies, the sun, the
moon, the stars. On day five, God returns to the
skies and the seas. And what do we see created?
Well, the fish in the sea, the birds in the air.
Day 2 is brought into completion.
Day 6, God returns to the land. And what do we see created?
All of the animal life comes into abundance.
And then we have God's ultimate one more thing, one that would
put Steve Jobs to shame, right? God says.
Oh, and one more thing. And then we get to the end here
where he says in verse 27, God creates his final masterpiece,
us humans created in God's image.
All right, so this is the structure of the first six days
of creation that we see through the course of Genesis 1.
And then at the end we get kind of like almost the marching
orders, right? The assignment.
So what what happens then? There's something for God to do.
There's something for us to do. And we see that in these final
verses. So humans are given the
assignment. You're created in God's image,
in God's likeness. So fill the earth and subdue it.
Rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, every
living creature that moves on the ground.
And then at the beginning of chapter 2, we see God completes
his work and what happens? He moves into a 7th day.
The 7th day, we find out in Hebrews is not a 24 hour period
for sure. I don't think any of them are,
but certainly in Hebrews day 7 is ongoing.
God enters into a state of rest now that he has completed his
work. All right, there's a lot of
stuff there. Welcome to Genesis one O 1, I
guess. So what does all this mean guys?
Like what, what's going on here? Why do I point out all of the,
the structures and the symbols and what's happening here, this
poetic parallelism that happens in Genesis 1?
Why, why does it matter for me and you?
Well, first of all, to, to, to really appreciate what's going
on here, we have to understand the stories that Israel is
surrounded by. So Genesis the the, the origin
story obviously speaks of the beginning creation and these as
oral traditions go back to Moses for sure, at least even before.
But but most biblical scholars for a bunch of reasons also
found in the text, they think that these came to be compiled
and composed in the way that we read them today, sometime in the
period of the Babylonian exile, OK, way later in Israel's
history. This is important for a couple
of reasons. The first reason is that in this
moment of history, the people of God found themselves deeply
disoriented right there. There were all of these places
that they had attached their identity to, these these rituals
that they had attached their identity to.
There were all of these things that made them special and by
which they interacted with God and knew who they were.
And it had all been blown up. Jerusalem had been destroyed.
They've been taken away captive, and now they were homeless and
somebody else's land. And so in this moment in the
history of the people of God, where where there's deep
confusion, there's deep questions about who we are.
How do we make sense of our life and our story.
God leads his people back to these stories, these origin
stories, this theological account of how we as a people
came to be in order to ground them.
That's the first thing I want you to notice.
The second thing, which is also really interesting, is that just
like today, this was not the only account of origins, right?
This wasn't the only story that was around that the people used
to make sense of who we are and how we got here and what our
place in this world was. In fact, at New Year's every
year, all of the the Jewish people in Babylon would have had
to listen to their neighbors recount the Babylonian origin
story. If you're super nerdy, you can
still read it. It's one of the oldest extent or
existing documents, the oldest human stories that we have
available. It's called the Enuma Elish, and
the Enuma Elish paints a very, very different picture of human
origins, a different imagination of God and the world and who we
are in this. See Babylon was this Kingdom
located in ancient Mesopotamia, OK Mesopotamia comes from 2
words in the Greek Mesa, which means middle.
And there's a word potamia. Basically is is the Greek word
for rivers, OK? It means the land between the
rivers and Mesopotamia is this area that that was known as the
cradle of civilization for, for the place where some of the
oldest human settlements and cities emerge between the Tigris
River and the Euphrates River. OK, we see the same rivers
talked about in Genesis 214, like this creation story comes
together in conversation with a Babylonian story.
These rivers were very important.
They were in many ways the source of life for these first
civilizations because every year they would flood and that the
silt from the floods would cover the land and it created a rich
space for agriculture. But the the the rivers didn't
just create life, they also were a source of great violence and
chaos. Archaeological digs at cities
throughout the region have found in places like Shrewpak, ER and
Kish that there are these sedimentary layers.
Where there was this big town, there was the civilization.
All these things were happening. There was just obliterated by a
flood. This was common practice in in
this early ancient Near Eastern world, water very often again
symbolized as chaos rose up and just wiped everybody out.
This was a common thing that many of these ancient
civilizations talk about. And in the Babylonian story, in
the Annuma at least, water is personified as a God, The God
Tiamat. OK, some of you know better from
Dungeons and Dragons, but Tiamat.
OK, so Tiamat is this, this ancient God, right?
Who is the sea God? And like the mother of all
chaos, she's constantly sending chaos monsters at everybody and
destroying people, wiping people out.
The storms come, the floodwaters come in and obliterate everyone.
And according to the Babylonian origin story, Tiamat is
ultimately defeated by the patron St. of Babylon, Marduk.
And Marduk is a baddie. Like he comes in and he just, he
rips up Tiamat. It's very gory, like slashes
Tiamat in half and according to the Anuma, A leash.
Like that's how the world comes to be.
Like the earth is Tiamat's ribs, right?
Her, her great tears form the the sources of the Tigris in
Euphrates River. Her tail is still visible in the
Milky Way. This is how the Babylonians
understand the world, right? The world has come to be through
this conflict between the gods. There's great violence, the gods
are competing with each other and ultimately Tiamat, our God
is stronger and so he wins and and creates the earth, the world
from the corpse of his defeated foe.
This is the origin story and you might be saying like what, what
where are people in this? Like where, where do we fit?
Well, if you read the story, basically the gods were
capricious, like immoral and lazy, right?
All the gods in the, in the, in the, in this Babylonian origin
story, they didn't want to do any work.
And it turned out that there was a lot of work to do.
There was like fields that needed to be tended and temples
that need to be built. So essentially the gods got
together and they said, OK, we need some slaves and so we'll
create people. And this is in the Babylonian
story, the origin of people, the slaves, so that the gods can
take it easy. People exist, so gods can rest
all right? In contrast to this violent,
messy, disordered, chaotic story, we have Genesis 1,
Genesis 1 and written at a similar time.
Like it is mind boggling how different this is than the
Babylonian origin story. What?
What do we see in Genesis 1 about the world, about the God
who creates, and about we as humans?
What we see that first of all, that creation is not random,
it's not a conflict to just emerge or happen.
That the Spirit of God enters a space of chaos, not by violence,
not by coercion, but by the power of His Word, begins to
design, to create poetically bringing order to the disordered
chaos of the world. Unlike the Babylonian account,
we don't have a bunch of gods. Like in the Babylonian account,
the sea is a God and the land is the God and the sun is a God.
And honestly, your doorpost is probably a God.
You're like, everything was a God in in the Genesis account,
all of these other gods are depersonalized.
The sea just becomes a force, right?
Natural things. There is but one God who rules,
who moves, a single creative God.
The world is created not randomly, not as a source of
conflict, not the spoils of war. But it is this beautiful,
ordered place which God declares to be very good.
And where are people in this story?
Not the slaves who are just there.
So the gods can be lazy. People in this story are God's
crowning achievement, the the very good, the the pinnacle of
creation created in Imago day in the very image of God.
And this is theologically wild for for a text that's a couple
1000 years old. Like we look back at texts that
are a couple 100 years old and we're like, oh, some messy stuff
in there. This is a couple 1000 years old.
And God says in the image of God, he created them, male and
female, he created them. Not just the king bears the
image of God, not just the dudes bear the image of God, all of us
created in the image of God. This idea of images is
incredibly rich. I could talk just about this for
like the whole, the whole time, but I have to tell you a little
bit about it. So in the ancient Near East,
right, people didn't have telephones.
You couldn't FaceTime somebody. They didn't have Internet
broadcasts. So there were kings still who
ruled and had authority, right. But most people in a Kingdom of
any size would have never physically encountered the king.
Just like you probably haven't met the president or the Pope,
right Then they probably didn't physically encounter they they
didn't have broadcast journalism where you could TuneIn and hear
the voice. You can get an e-mail.
And so how would kings in the ancient world demonstrate who
they were and, and present their identity to their subjects to
the world? Well, at the edges of ancient
kingdoms, and you'll still see this if you travel the
Mesopotamian area, these ancient kings would go and they would at
the edges of all of their kingdoms, they would set up
these images, these statues of themselves.
And these statues would represent that when you arrived
in that place, when you showed up and you saw this, this
towering statue, a beautiful piece of art, it, it would tell
you, oh, in this place that king is in charge, his rule and his
reign extends to right here. And and this is what that king
is about. There would be inscriptions in
cuneiform describing what this king was about, why he was
great, who he was, the image of the king.
And so God says in Genesis One that he makes not statues, but
people to be his image, His representation, his life force
in the world, those who carry his authority.
I need to take just a minute and look at the person seated next
to you. Make it awkward.
Like turn and look at somebody I don't like.
Make eye contact. Hold it for an awkward second.
God created humankind in his image.
In the image of God. He created the male and female.
He created them. Friends, this is you.
You are the image. You are the statue.
You are the representation of the very life and identity of
God that says to the world, this is who I am.
This is what I'm about. He decides to put that in US.
Isn't this crazy? Like is anybody?
I mean, I this stuff blows my mind, but but I friends, I think
this is so significant. This is so significant.
Like I think some people have been so worried about Genesis 1
being a literal historical text that talks about how how
scientifically the world came to be, that they completely miss
the theology of what God is actually saying in this text of
scripture, which is incredible. God, God is saying here to his
people in a space of chaos and disorder, in a space where you
feel lost and confused, in a space where things feel
bewildering. I'm in control by my voice, by
my presence. I'm moving in the chaos and
bringing order, bringing beauty, bringing goodness into the
world. I have created good.
And not just the world out there, but you.
I I've placed my very life in you.
Friends, what does this mean for us, for me and for you?
So I've, I've done a lot of history in this message.
I've done a lot of like big picture theology.
When we think about the scope of Scripture, the story of
scripture that we're going to be talking about over the course of
the next 9 weeks, it all starts here with this origin story.
God creates us. He places His very image in me
and you. And then there are two things
that we already looked at that happened in this text that are
so significant. First off, God gives us
stewardship, dominion, responsibility.
I know this is going to be a shock to some of you.
Work is not part of the curse. We're going to talk about that
next week, OK? Now God actually says she's
getting wild. God could have done things a lot
of different ways. God goes in and says, look like
I have created, I have taken things this far, It is
beautiful. But I've left creation
unfinished. And now my steward, my image, my
representative, you are my deputies to go on and continue
the work of creation that I've begun, right?
To be creative, to bring order out of chaos, to bring beauty
and goodness. I, I freaking love this.
I sometimes we get in a mindset where we imagine that there are
like good jobs and bad jobs. There's like spiritual holy
jobs. And then there's just like, I
just, you know, I got to do something to make, make some
money, friends, whatever you are doing.
I mean, you could be doing something that's creating
disorder and disaster in the world.
If you are, please stop, OK? But for most of us, like there
is a creative ordering, like if you, if you are, if you are
writing software code, right, if you are coming into a classroom
and helping these little learners, right, If you are a
scientist on the, on the frontier of researching chemical
compounds. Friends, whatever you are doing,
do you think about it this way, Like you are continuing the work
of God in creation. Isn't that cool?
Friends? I, I think sometimes, like
sometimes we take ourselves out, right?
We say, well, oh, you know, I don't know, those people have
important things to do in the world.
But little old me, like, I don't, I, you know, I just don't
have very many gifts. I, you know, I don't have the
background, I don't have the education, I don't have the
competence. I don't really have much to
contribute. Blasphemy, like God has made you
in His image, take carry forward the creative potential that He
has put in you for the good of the world.
It's important. I don't know what that looks
like for you, but it's important.
Don't downplay it, don't miss it.
Don't minimize it as a way of keeping yourself safe or secure
or not not feeling very intimidated.
God has placed in you the creative DNA that brought the
world into existence. You are part of this Co creating
endeavor. But I love this.
God not only gives us work, he also gives us rest.
Not only stewardship but also Sabbath.
See, some of us downplay our contribution.
We think like I just don't have that much to offer.
I'm not really a big deal. Those other people over there,
they're the people who really matter.
But others of us, man, we out here hustling, trying to prove
something to somebody, especially in Boston, right?
I'm going to be a big deal. I'm going to get it.
I'm going to get this next certification.
I'm going to get this next degree.
I'm, I'm going to get this next position.
I'm going to do this thing. I'm going to, I'm, I'm going to
get this person to endorse me on LinkedIn.
Like I'm going to get to this next level and and then I'll
have really made it. And I love this even here in in
the first chapters of Genesis, God gives us this, this massive
responsibility of stewardship. And he also introduces Sabbath.
He says, Hey, I worked now I'm off.
And what does he do in his rest time?
We read in Genesis in the following chapters that he comes
and he walks in the cool of the day with the humans.
God wants to like hang out with us to walk and talk with you
friends. You have a crucially important
responsibility in the ecosystem in the Kingdom of God and also
you are not your work. You are not what you do.
You are not what you would produce.
You're not a doing. You are a human being.
And so God invites us into stewardship and he also invites
us into Sabbath to take responsibility for extending his
Co creating energy into the world and then also to rest and
to be with him to enjoy him. What a beautiful picture of our
design. Over the next weeks we're going
to be looking at what that what happens from there.
It doesn't end with creation, but this is the beginning of the
story. This is where it all starts.
This is our origin story and who we have made to be been made to
be the band is going to come and this morning we're going to
enter into a time of communion. We're going to start our
response time this morning with communion.
And so as they come, I want to invite you to sit with what
we've talked about this morning, to sit with this responsibility
to steward and also to Sabbath to Co create and also to enjoy
the presence of God in communion.
I love it because in this beautiful way it's a practice
that invites us back into our identity.
See Colossians explains that that Jesus is the ultimate image
of the invisible God. You mean all of us have been
created to image God. Jesus is the, the perfect
undistorted image of God. And in Jesus God has once again,
just as we see here in Genesis, has come to walk with his
people, to be present to us, to give his life to us.
In fact, in in John chapter 6, when Jesus is talking about this
gift, this practice of communion, he, he says that when
we ingest his body, his blood, when we participate in this
right, when we take these elements, we are, we are
participating in his life. Genesis says that it uses the
plural, I love this. God says, let us make man in our
image from the beginning. There is this communion in God
and and we use this word communion to talk about what we
do as we enter into that relationship.
We are getting to participate in the calm together union, the
together union that exists in the very Godhead.
And we get to do this because of Jesus, because Jesus has made
the way back to God open something we'll be talking a lot
about in the coming weeks. So this morning, as you reflect
on what we've talked about this morning, this this fascinating
text in Genesis, There's like 1000 other things I wish we had
time to talk about, but I want you to invite about, I want you
to invite you to consider this simple question, how do I see
myself? What's the story I tell me about
me? Do I believe that God's own
image abides in me? Do I live as if that's true?
Do I walk with that kind of courage and confidence and
responsibility? And also, do I move from the
grounded place that knows that I don't have to produce or perform
in order to be somebody? Because I have what God wants
for me from creation. He's already given it to me.