Speaker 1: I used to be a big Marvel movie fan.
Speaker 1: That is before they just started like pumping out hot garbage that they called movies.
Speaker 1: But back when I was in college was in the middle of like the Infinity War Endgame, like those were coming out, and that was like an event at DBU, like we would all go after our fraternity meeting on Thursday nights we would go to the theater, we would get all the seats, we get the popcorn, we get the ICs and we were just so excited.
Speaker 1: And one of my favorite movies that came out during that time period this is actually a little bit before, but it was Captain America, civil War, and the plot line to this movie is that in the movie before the big Avengers team up before, like some stuff went down, they kind of got in some trouble, a lot of collateral damage, and so now they're kind of wrestling through like should there be oversight?
Speaker 1: Should they not be oversight?
Speaker 1: Like how do we do this thing?
Speaker 1: And the superheroes divide into two teams you had team Iron man and team Captain America and then this guy named the Winter Soldier comes and they want him turned over and it becomes this big deal and ultimately everybody's forced to pick a side.
Speaker 1: Which side are you on?
Speaker 1: That was the big tension for this whole movie.
Speaker 1: Whose side are you on?
Speaker 1: Why in the world am I talking about Captain America, civil War?
Speaker 1: Well, because, track with me, we've been walking through these past few weeks our Eden series and we've been going through Genesis 1 through 11, and we've been looking at what the Bible has to say about the big questions in life who we are, why we're here, what's wrong, what's the solution, who makes the rules.
Speaker 1: All of those are found, those answers begin in these first 11 chapters of your Bible, and we talked about everything in it that he made you as his special creation to bear his image, to be a statue in the world, that he made a visible representation of the invisible God.
Speaker 1: And this thing called sin came in and it broke that.
Speaker 1: And sin is when we, just like Adam and Eve, decide to disconnect ourself from the source of life and do it our own way.
Speaker 1: It's like a tree being sawed off, or it's like a branch being sawed off of a tree.
Speaker 1: It looks like freedom, but ultimately it leads to death.
Speaker 1: And then this week we reach the story of Cain and Abel, and what we're going to see is it's going to actually carry over from Genesis 3, and we're going to see two categories that all of humanity gets grouped into the children of God, or the seed of the woman, and the children of the devil, or the seed of the serpent, which I know sounds really, really confusing, like you're talking about, like children of the devil, like what's going on here.
Speaker 1: Track with me because when we start to dig in, we're going to see that this is so true and we see it in everyday life.
Speaker 1: And specifically, we're going to see that the story of Cain and Abel shows us that God doesn't just want our leftovers or performance.
Speaker 1: He wants our hearts.
Speaker 1: And while sin tries to master our hearts, jesus, the true and better Abel, shed his blood to free us so we can live in real relationship with God.
Speaker 1: That's the sermon in a sentence, and so we're gonna jump in.
Speaker 1: If you have your Bibles, flip open to Genesis chapter four, very beginning there.
Speaker 1: It will be on the screen as well as we read.
Speaker 1: We're gonna read verses one through five.
Speaker 1: Now Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying I have gotten a man, with the help of the Lord.
Speaker 1: And again she bore his brother, abel.
Speaker 1: Now Abel was a keeper of the sheep and Cain a worker of the ground.
Speaker 1: And in the course of time, cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and their fat portions.
Speaker 1: And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard.
Speaker 1: Will you pray with me For a second?
Speaker 1: Could you just pray for yourself?
Speaker 1: Take this time to pray for your heart, for your mind, that God would prepare you to receive whatever it is that he has for you tonight conviction, encouragement, healing, that he would remove any potential distractions.
Speaker 1: And then would you pray for me that I would preach his word faithfully, that everything I say would be helpful and true and that, if it's not, you would forget it quickly.
Speaker 1: Lord, we thank you for tonight and your word and this opportunity to gather here and learn under it.
Speaker 1: God, I pray that I would simply faithfully preach your word with a shepherd's heart, and God that you would be glorified.
Speaker 1: Father, we love you, we praise you and praise things in the name of Jesus.
Speaker 1: Everybody said amen.
Speaker 1: So, like we said, this story picks right up after where we left.
Speaker 1: Eve had been exiled from the garden.
Speaker 1: They've been sent east, they're outside of the garden, they're still in Eden, but not in the garden of Eden.
Speaker 1: And they have two kids, cain and Abel.
Speaker 1: And Abel was a shepherd, meaning he watched herds and flocks.
Speaker 1: He would wander around and follow them as they grazed.
Speaker 1: And Cain was a farmer, and the text says that they both brought an offering to the Lord.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of clues here that talk about this offering actually being at the door of the Garden of Eden.
Speaker 1: And Cain brings an offering of the fruit of the ground.
Speaker 1: We don't know exactly what it was, but he was a farmer, so it was probably like fruits, vegetables, grain, you know all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: And Abel brought an offering from his flock, so it was probably a lamb or sheep.
Speaker 1: And God favors Abel's sacrifice.
Speaker 1: He doesn't outright reject Cain, but he doesn't show any favor to Cain, and so this part of the story confuses a lot of people.
Speaker 1: Why in the world does God prefer Abel's offering Like is it content?
Speaker 1: Like Cain just brings God a salad and God's like get those greens out of here.
Speaker 1: Like I don't want salad fruit, like God just loves a good steak, like the fat portion.
Speaker 1: Well, the text actually gives us a clue.
Speaker 1: Cain just seems to have like gathered up some vegetables.
Speaker 1: It doesn't really say anything special, like he just gets an offering and brings it to the Lord and there wasn't much thought or care behind it.
Speaker 1: It's almost like God knows, he's just there to check a box.
Speaker 1: But Abel's offering actually gets a little bit of an extra description compared to Cain's.
Speaker 1: It says that Abel brought a buck and their fat portions.
Speaker 1: And the important thing to note there is giving a firstborn means you're not guaranteed anymore, like you're not guaranteed a second born, like a firstborn is a really important thing.
Speaker 1: That's the first of your fruits.
Speaker 1: You're not guaranteed more.
Speaker 1: And he also gave the fat portions of this animal, which were the best tasting, they were the most nutritious.
Speaker 1: And so what we're supposed to see here in this text is that Abel gave God his first and his best.
Speaker 1: You could even say that Abel gave God everything, even though it cost him.
Speaker 1: Abel trusted God to provide, and the Bible calls that faith, and we know that this is why God showed Abel favor, because in Hebrews, chapter 11, it says by faith, abel offered God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain.
Speaker 1: And what the author of Genesis is trying to show us here is that God cares deeply about our hearts.
Speaker 1: So think of it this way Homecoming season is rolling around, right?
Speaker 1: Bernie is in two weeks champion.
Speaker 1: How long before y'all's right.
Speaker 1: So homecoming proposals is a thing.
Speaker 1: So, girls, imagine with me that your boo thing is proposing to you for homecoming and this is the sign he gives you, right?
Speaker 1: So, yeah, it's cardboard, some sharpie like, some wrinkles, some folds.
Speaker 1: How many of you would want this poster?
Speaker 1: Okay, you're being nice.
Speaker 1: Right, there's clearly no time or effort put into this poster.
Speaker 1: Right, like Tommy, you're giving a thumbs up.
Speaker 1: Like there is clearly no attention to detail or anything put into this poster.
Speaker 1: Right, it's clear.
Speaker 1: Homeboy phoned it in.
Speaker 1: He forgot about this.
Speaker 1: And this is last minute, right?
Speaker 1: So that's this poster.
Speaker 1: But now imagine we actually have a picture for this one.
Speaker 1: So this is poster number one.
Speaker 1: Imagine poster number two.
Speaker 1: I'm just going to set that there is this, right?
Speaker 1: So this one is fancy, right?
Speaker 1: This is you've got like lights.
Speaker 1: You've got balloons, polka dots, glitter like that's outlined balloons on the bottom.
Speaker 1: Like, this is a much nicer poster.
Speaker 1: But here's the kicker Homie Venmo'd his friend 20 bucks to do it for him.
Speaker 1: Right, like he didn't put any time or effort into this thing.
Speaker 1: He looked it up on ChatGPT and it's just clearly not anything behind it.
Speaker 1: Right, it was done for him, it was outsourced, it's nice, but it just doesn't feel quite the same.
Speaker 1: Now a third poster pretend he decides to give you this.
Speaker 1: See, we get odds right, why?
Speaker 1: This is clearly not as nice as the fancy poster, but you can tell that there was time, there was attention, there was detail poured into this.
Speaker 1: Right, like homie drank three Red Bulls and tried like 15 times just to get his line straight, like you can see the pencil marks where he drew and erased.
Speaker 1: Drew and erased Like this one means something, because there's heart behind it, there's intention.
Speaker 1: Now let me ask you this girls, would you be happy if your boy gave you this one?
Speaker 1: And he was giving other girls this one?
Speaker 1: No, right, you kick him to the curb.
Speaker 1: Right, he's actually giving his heart to someone else.
Speaker 1: Where in the world am I going with this?
Speaker 1: Well, that's the point of the sacrifices of Cain and Abel.
Speaker 1: It's not that God liked steak, it's not that God liked the fat portion.
Speaker 1: It's that God desired the heart to be behind the sacrifice and it's clear that Abel brought something that cost him.
Speaker 1: That actually took effort, that took time.
Speaker 1: And while Cain brought something and it was an acceptable sacrifice in the Old Testament you hear about grain offerings as being totally fine and acceptable God knew in his heart and his mind he was just there to check a box.
Speaker 1: He just outsourced it.
Speaker 1: It was just going through the motions box.
Speaker 1: He just outsourced it.
Speaker 1: It was just going through the motions, just like that fancy sign or the bad one.
Speaker 1: And this is so important because it's so easy for us to just give God our leftovers.
Speaker 1: You'll spend hours and hours on TikTok Netflix but only read the Bible when there's literally nothing else to do.
Speaker 1: Or put 100% into athletics or theater or academics, but show up to church with zero focus, zero effort.
Speaker 1: Or you'll spend all your time and energy on a relationship with a girl or guy, do everything you can to make them happy, but spend absolutely no time with the God who created you.
Speaker 1: It's the spiritual equivalent of a janky poster and that's not what God desires.
Speaker 1: And for some of you you're like poster number two.
Speaker 1: If we're honest, there's no heart behind it.
Speaker 1: We post the Bible verses, we go to the church events, we sing real loud in worship, but in reality it's all just a facade, just a mask that we put on to feel less guilty about all the stuff that we're hiding.
Speaker 1: It's just a performance.
Speaker 1: And so if you're in either of those camps, what I don't want you to hear is me saying that God is demanding more and more and more.
Speaker 1: That's not the point here.
Speaker 1: God wants your heart, and so ask yourself does he have it?
Speaker 1: Ask yourself the question why do you do the things you do?
Speaker 1: Why are you here tonight?
Speaker 1: And I'm glad you're here, don't get me wrong, but why are you here?
Speaker 1: Because we can do all the things in the world, but if our heart's not behind it, we've missed the point.
Speaker 1: God wants your heart because he's the only one that you can trust to actually hold it.
Speaker 1: Anything else you give your heart to will ultimately hold you, and that's what we see next in the story of Cain.
Speaker 1: So we're going to pick up in verse five.
Speaker 1: This is after the sacrifice.
Speaker 1: It says so.
Speaker 1: Cain was very angry and his face fell.
Speaker 1: And the Lord said to Cain why are you angry and why has your face fallen?
Speaker 1: If you do well, will you not be accepted?
Speaker 1: And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door.
Speaker 1: Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it.
Speaker 1: And some translations will say it wants to master you, but you must rule over it.
Speaker 1: And so Cain feels like God's rejected him.
Speaker 1: He gets mad and God has not rejected him.
Speaker 1: In fact.
Speaker 1: God seeks out Cain and starts a conversation and he asks Cain, why are you angry?
Speaker 1: And God knows why Cain is angry.
Speaker 1: Girls, are we good up here, girls?
Speaker 1: God knows why Cain is angry.
Speaker 1: It's not like he's just like, oh, all of a sudden so surprised.
Speaker 1: He's asking that question for Cain to figure out why he's angry With this sacrifice, what is bothering you about submitting to me, about surrendering to my authority?
Speaker 1: Like, why does it bother you?
Speaker 1: He sees that there's something in Cain's heart that's off, that's twisted, that's warped, and that's why he warns him about sin.
Speaker 1: He says sin is crouching at your door and a lot of times we think that means like it's at the door of your heart, like it's kind of like a metaphorical thing.
Speaker 1: But the reality is that that phrase is not in the Hebrew Bible anywhere.
Speaker 1: In fact, a lot of scholars think that when he's talking about sin crouching at the door, he's talking about the door to the Garden of Eden, where they would offer sacrifices, and that word crouching is actually one that's used as animals.
Speaker 1: And so really, the picture that's trying to be painted here is that, just like in Genesis 3, when the serpent was crouching in the garden beside Eve and whispering rebellion, he's now outside the garden next to Cain whispering the same thing.
Speaker 1: It's a mirror.
Speaker 1: It's Genesis 3 all over again.
Speaker 1: He faces the same choice that his parents did.
Speaker 1: Will he choose to trust God and live under God's authority, or is he going to do it his own way?
Speaker 1: And what God is trying to get Cain to see is that going his own way is not freedom.
Speaker 1: Sin wants to master you.
Speaker 1: Doing it your own way is actually opening the door for sin to take control, because, at the end of the day, every single time, a choice to reject God's authority in your life is a choice to be a slave to sin.
Speaker 1: I remember a story I heard from a young adult pastor at a really large college ministry that was going on in Dallas called the Porch, when I was at college, and he had this crazy testimony and he'd always share about being able to remember the day that his parents dropped him off at college.
Speaker 1: Like they unload all the furniture, they set up the fridge, they drive away, they leave him and he remembers this thought as he's watching him drive away.
Speaker 1: He thought to himself hey, I can finally do whatever I want.
Speaker 1: And that's what he did.
Speaker 1: That very next night he goes to a frat party.
Speaker 1: He gets extremely drunk.
Speaker 1: Soon it was parties every weekend, drinking, drugs, hookups, pornography.
Speaker 1: He got a job and with that money you would think that he would be able to get his life together, but instead he just kept using it on those bad habits, bad decisions.
Speaker 1: He fed it, he fed it, he fed it.
Speaker 1: And then church and God, which had been a part of his life growing up, slowly got pushed out and at first it felt like freedom.
Speaker 1: Nobody could tell him what to do.
Speaker 1: There were no parents to give him rules or consequences.
Speaker 1: But as time went on, he started to realize that he wasn't in control at all.
Speaker 1: His sin was in control.
Speaker 1: He thought he was choosing independence, but he was being masked.
Speaker 1: It promised him freedom.
Speaker 1: We're actually making him a slave, because freedom from any authority always leads us to being slaves to our desires, and we've all experienced this in some way.
Speaker 1: Let's be real Vaping feels like freedom until if you're away from it for more than an hour, you start to get anxious and jittery and afraid.
Speaker 1: Social media feels like freedom until you can't go to bed without TikTok.
Speaker 1: Pornography feels like freedom until you try to stop and realize that you can't.
Speaker 1: Drinking feels like freedom until you can't have fun without it.
Speaker 1: Video games feel like freedom until your sleep and your grades and your schedule are just wrecked because you can't stop.
Speaker 1: Lying feels like freedom until you're trapped in them.
Speaker 1: Because, see, true freedom is not just the freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want.
Speaker 1: That kind of freedom doesn't make you free.
Speaker 1: It makes you a slave to whatever desire is the loudest in your life at that moment.
Speaker 1: True freedom is not just freedom from freedom, for Not just freedom from rules, but the power to live how you were designed to live.
Speaker 1: Freedom from rules but the power to live how you were designed to live.
Speaker 1: Freedom to do what's right, to do what's good, to do what you should do, to be connected to the source of life, to bear God's image.
Speaker 1: Freedom is not the absence of authority in your life.
Speaker 1: It's the joy of living under the right authority and it's the freedom that comes from submitting to God and doing things his way by following Jesus.
Speaker 1: And if you do that, you won't be enslaved to fear or sin or your desires, but you can be free, knowing that you belong to a loving God and you're his son or his daughter, and he cares for you and everything he tells you is either for your good or harm.
Speaker 1: That's the kind of freedom you want, but unfortunately, cain chooses his own way.
Speaker 1: That's not the type of freedom that he chooses and that's what Genesis is going to show us next, in verse eight.
Speaker 1: Cain spoke to Abel, his brother, and when they were in the field, cain rose up against his brother, abel and killed him.
Speaker 1: And then the Lord said to Cain where is Abel, your brother?
Speaker 1: He said I do not know.
Speaker 1: Am I my brother's keeper?
Speaker 1: And the Lord said what have you done?
Speaker 1: The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground.
Speaker 1: And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood.
Speaker 1: And when you work the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength.
Speaker 1: You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.
Speaker 1: Cain said to the Lord my punishment is greater than I can bear.
Speaker 1: Behold, you have driven me today, away from the ground and from your face.
Speaker 1: I shall be hidden.
Speaker 1: I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.
Speaker 1: And then the Lord said to him not so.
Speaker 1: If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be on him sevenfold.
Speaker 1: And the Lord put a mark on Cain lest anyone who found him should attack him.
Speaker 1: Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.
Speaker 1: So Cain kills Abel and, just like in Genesis 3, god comes in with a question Where's your brother?
Speaker 1: Obviously, calls him out on it, exposes the truth and he lays out the consequences.
Speaker 1: He says, cain, you're going to be a wanderer, right, you're not going to be able to farm anymore, which sounds like a really, really weird consequence.
Speaker 1: Like hey, you murdered someone, you don't get to grow corn anymore.
Speaker 1: Like ha ha ha.
Speaker 1: But the thing here is, farming was actually kind of thought about as like what we consider city life in that day and age, because if you're a farmer, you could stockpile resources and food, you could be a lot more independent.
Speaker 1: But if you're a wanderer, if you're a shepherd like Abel, was you actually had to rely on the Lord for protection for the grass to be there for your herds and for your flocks.
Speaker 1: And so the crazy thing is, cain wanted independence from God and his punishment, his consequence, is now he has to walk the rest of his life in his brother who he killed's shoes, so that he will learn to be dependent on God, because that's what we were made for.
Speaker 1: So even the punishment was supposed to draw Cain back.
Speaker 1: And you see this, because Cain still clearly doesn't get the point, he complains about his punishment.
Speaker 1: He's like God, you're being too mean, and God's like all right, fine, nobody's gonna kill you.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna give you a sign so that nobody can kill you, and if they do, they'll be avenged seven times, meaning nobody's gonna kill you, right?
Speaker 1: And so the sign wasn't just random.
Speaker 1: All throughout the Bible, god confronts sin with justice, but he always gives mercy on the back end.
Speaker 1: Think about after the flood right, you get the flood, which is God's judgment on sin, but then you get the rainbow afterwards.
Speaker 1: Or at the Passover, you get the punishment on Egypt for wickedness, but then you get the blood on the doorpost and mercy.
Speaker 1: Or at the cross, you get justice and mercy.
Speaker 1: And so you think that Cain would get the point and turn back right.
Speaker 1: Like he gets it at this point, he understands the consequence.
Speaker 1: Well, in verse 17, he does the complete opposite.
Speaker 1: It says that Cain had a child, enoch, and when he built a city, he called the name of the city after his son, enoch.
Speaker 1: He builds a city which is the exact opposite of wandering.
Speaker 1: It's another act of defiance.
Speaker 1: It's his way of saying, hey, I know you might've protected me, god, or said that you're going to protect me.
Speaker 1: I don't trust you, I'm going to do it on my own.
Speaker 1: I'm going to build a city, I'm going to take care of this situation on my own.
Speaker 1: It's the same old choice.
Speaker 1: It's the same downward spiral of sin.
Speaker 1: And the next thing we get is a genealogy, which normally genealogies are the part that we like sleep through.
Speaker 1: But there's actually a lot of importance, especially in this one, because this genealogy goes seven generations down, from Adam to a guy named Lamech or Lamech.
Speaker 1: Some people pronounce it differently, it's spelled differently, but Lamech is a not nice dude, he's a bad guy, right.
Speaker 1: And so this goes down through the line of Cain to Lamech, and the first thing we hear about Lamech is that he takes two wives.
Speaker 1: This is the first instance of polygamy, which means like marrying multiple people, which is frowned upon in the Bible, Very frowned upon, right.
Speaker 1: It never turns out good.
Speaker 1: And so this is this lustful, selfish act that says I don't care about you as a person, I'm just gonna use you for my own pleasure, for my own gain.
Speaker 1: And then he sings a song to his wife, which is a really weird song.
Speaker 1: He says Ada and Zillah, hear my voice.
Speaker 1: You, wives of Lamech, listen to what I say.
Speaker 1: I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me.
Speaker 1: If so, he's bragging to his wives that one time a young man struck him and wounded him and he retaliated by killing him.
Speaker 1: And later you're going to see in Exodus that God limits retribution.
Speaker 1: He says an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and we think about that as being cruel.
Speaker 1: Like an eye for an eye, you should forgive and like yes, as time goes on.
Speaker 1: But in that day and age, to say an eye for an eye was to say, hey, you can't just go willy-nilly Wild West.
Speaker 1: If somebody hurts your feelings, like if somebody stubs your toe, the most you can do to them back is to stub their toe.
Speaker 1: You're not allowed to go and kill them and their family and all their ancestors, because that's what happens.
Speaker 1: But Lamech does the complete opposite.
Speaker 1: He says this dude even looks at me the wrong way.
Speaker 1: I'm going to kill him and I'm going to brag about it.
Speaker 1: And then that thing he says at the end he says if Cain's vengeance is sevenfold, then the vengeance for somebody killing me is 77 fold, like seven times seven, which is like, can he just say that?
Speaker 1: Like can he just declare, like God's going to protect me?
Speaker 1: And the answer is no.
Speaker 1: But it's just so much pride and arrogance and violence that's caught up in this.
Speaker 1: It's like Lamech saying, hey, I'm gonna do what I wanna do and God's gonna forgive me, because it's his job to forgive me.
Speaker 1: And we think that sounds crazy.
Speaker 1: But how many times have we used that exact where we make a decision?
Speaker 1: And the point here is Not just to zoom in on some random character named Lamech, but the point here actually goes back to Genesis 3.
Speaker 1: And so bear with me here real quick.
Speaker 1: We're actually going to use the iPad real quick for this.
Speaker 1: So if we can switch over to the Apple, so let me get hooked up to this real quick.
Speaker 1: Oh, hold on, all right, hold on, okay, hold on, cool, all right.
Speaker 1: So that should be good.
Speaker 1: Now, maybe, maybe it's hooked up.
Speaker 1: Okay, I don't know if this is going to work, we'll try it one more time.
Speaker 1: If it doesn't, then we're just going to bail.
Speaker 1: Let's try it one more time.
Speaker 1: Oh, you know what?
Speaker 1: Hold on, talk amongst yourselves.
Speaker 1: I know the issue.
Speaker 1: I'm on the wrong Wi-Fi, okay, well, we're just going to nix that then.
Speaker 1: So what you see here is that in Genesis 3, you get this picture of two different lines.
Speaker 1: You get the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent right, and the seed of the woman says, hey, I'm going to put enmity between the serpent, which we're talking about, satan, so I'm going to put hostility, hatred, between the serpent and the seed of the woman.
Speaker 1: And then you get the first time that the gospel is ever preached.
Speaker 1: God says that you're going to bruise his heel, but he's going to crush your head.
Speaker 1: He's talking about Jesus.
Speaker 1: But then you get the line that goes down and the woman has two children she has Cain and she has Abel.
Speaker 1: And then the serpent also has children as well.
Speaker 1: So the children of the devil, children of God, but then over here under the children of God, cain decides to kill Abel, and so, by his decision, he decides to become a child of the devil, of the serpent.
Speaker 1: And then you see, ultimately Seth is born and a replacement for Abel.
Speaker 1: We didn't read that.
Speaker 1: But then now you still have these two lines throughout history the seed of the woman, the seed of the serpent.
Speaker 1: And it continues on.
Speaker 1: And so Cain then go down his line and you have Lamech, who's a murderer, and then you have Abel go down that line.
Speaker 1: It says Seth, and Seth's line begins to call on the Lord.
Speaker 1: And so the point here is that one side is the line that calls on the Lord, that trusts in his promise, and the other side is the line that rejects him and lives in rebellion.
Speaker 1: And Cain and Abel are indicative of, like we said in the beginning of the sermon, the two streams of humanity children of God, children of the devil.
Speaker 1: And Abel trusted God.
Speaker 1: He brought him his first and his best.
Speaker 1: He tried to do it on his own.
Speaker 1: Abel's blood cried out for justice from the ground, while Cain's descendants just got deeper into violence and arrogance.
Speaker 1: And so the whole point here, and really what Cain and Abel, what this Genesis chapter four story is trying to tell us is that there is no neutral ground, that all of humanity is split.
Speaker 1: You are either a child of God or a child of the serpent.
Speaker 1: Trusting yourself as a child of the serpent, building your own little city apart from God, or trusting in God and calling on his name, one leads to destruction and one leads to life.
Speaker 1: And so you need to ask yourself who am I a child of?
Speaker 1: What line do I fall under?
Speaker 1: And that's a really important question to ask.
Speaker 1: Because Cain, a child of the serpent, he was offering a sacrifice to the Lord.
Speaker 1: He's in church, right Like just being in church, growing up in church, being around Christian things, knowing some Bible verses.
Speaker 1: That does not make you a child of God.
Speaker 1: There are children of the serpent in here tonight.
Speaker 1: It's a matter of the heart, it's a matter of your relationship with God, and the truth is that we are all born into being children of the devil.
Speaker 1: We're born into sin.
Speaker 1: Romans 3.23 says all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, of the glory of God.
Speaker 1: But we don't have to stay that way.
Speaker 1: God made a way, he created a solution that the seed of the woman would crush the serpent's head and the seed of that woman was named Jesus.
Speaker 1: And while Abel's blood cried out from the ground for justice, hebrews 12, 24 tells us that Jesus's blood speaks a better word.
Speaker 1: Where Cain's violence brought death, jesus's sacrifice brings life.
Speaker 1: Abel gave his first and best to God, but Jesus is the first and the best God's own son offered up for our sin.
Speaker 1: Cain shed his own blood out of love.
Speaker 1: Abel's death left a cry of guilty on Cain, but Jesus's death leaves a cry of grace on us.
Speaker 1: That's the better word of the gospel.
Speaker 1: Justice is satisfied.
Speaker 1: Mercy is for you.
Speaker 1: You don't have to be mastered by sin.
Speaker 1: You don't have to build your own city.
Speaker 1: You don't have to be defined by that relationship mistake.
Speaker 1: You don't have to be controlled by what people think of you.
Speaker 1: You don't have to be enslaved to your phone.
Speaker 1: You don't have to be controlled by what people think of you.
Speaker 1: You don't have to be enslaved to your phone.
Speaker 1: You don't have to be crushed by the pressure of grades or performance.
Speaker 1: You don't have to be ruled by anger and bitterness or jealousy or comparison.
Speaker 1: You don't have to be stuck in shame from your past and you don't have to be mastered from the future.
Speaker 1: Why?
Speaker 1: Because Jesus is the better able, and he made a way for you to come back home, to be a child once again of God, to be adopted back into the family.
Speaker 1: Scripture says that he laid down his life.
Speaker 1: Romans 10, 9 through 10 says if you declare with your mouth Jesus is Lord and you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, saved, that the blood of Jesus will cover you and it will speak a better word not guilty but forgiven, not a slave but free in Christ, child of God.
Speaker 1: That's the invitation.
Speaker 1: You don't have to be Cain, you don't have to wander from thing to thing empty well to empty well, disappointment to disappointment.
Speaker 1: You can quit your wandering and you can come home.
Speaker 1: And it starts with surrender.
Speaker 1: The opposite decision of Abel or of Cain, of Adam and Eve, to say God, I'm done trying to do it my own way.
Speaker 1: I'm done trying to rule my own life, do my own thing.
Speaker 1: I'm surrendering to you, I'm going to live under your authority.
Speaker 1: Jesus, I'm going to make you king, which means I'm going to do what you say.
Speaker 1: And when I don't, when I screw up, when I mess up, I know that there's grace and I can repent, I can stop, I can turn around and I can come back home.
Speaker 1: And it's saying I'm gonna do that.
Speaker 1: Jesus, I believe that what you did for me on the cross was enough to forgive all of my sins, that you paid for them, and if you do that, you'll be saved, you'll be set free.
Speaker 1: That's the invitation to you tonight.
Speaker 1: Come back home Everybody, just bow your head, close your eyes for me real quick.
Speaker 1: We're about to pray and go to small groups, and so tonight, I know there's a lot of people and we're all here for different reasons, different things going on.
Speaker 1: Some people, you've been going here since you were born.
Speaker 1: Some people, this is your first week here, but each and every single one of us has come in in one of those two camps children of God, children of the devil.
Speaker 1: And if you realize, hey, I don't have a relationship with the lord, I haven't been walking with him.
Speaker 1: I might have been in church, I might know some answers, but at the end of the day, it's just my parents faith, it's just a performance.
Speaker 1: I've been given god just some half-hearted leftovers.
Speaker 1: You don't have to stay that way.
Speaker 1: And so tonight, for maybe the first time, you really feel that something's wrong.
Speaker 1: Something needs to change, and my invitation would be to you to make that decision.
Speaker 1: Don't put it off another day, don't ignore it.
Speaker 1: Confess with your mouth and believe in your heart that Jesus is Lord and that he was raised from the dead and you will be saved.
Speaker 1: And so what I want you to do is, when we go to small groups, if that's you, if you say that's me, I am in the wrong camp.
Speaker 1: I want you to have a conversation with a leader.
Speaker 1: Find me, find one of us.
Speaker 1: I'll be down here at the stage, and we want to walk you through that so that you can be set free from your sin, from your guilt, from your shame.
Speaker 1: Or maybe you realize that, hey, I've placed my faith in Jesus.
Speaker 1: That's a once and for all thing.
Speaker 1: You don't need to do that again.
Speaker 1: But you realize I'm walking in the wrong direction.
Speaker 1: I need to turn around.
Speaker 1: Tonight can be that night.
Speaker 1: Confess it, confess it to a leader, confess it to a friend, put it out into the light, leave it and move on.
Speaker 1: That's what's available to you in Jesus.
Speaker 1: You need to move.
Speaker 1: My ask is to just respond, whatever that might look like.