The Design of Joy | Genesis 1-2

Genesis 1-2  |  Cody Hale

Transcript

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Genesis chapter 1, beginning in verse 26, says, Then God said, Let us make man in our image after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him, male and female, he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed and its fruit, you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the heavens, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food. And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. Let's pray the Lord together. Heavenly Father, Lord, we recognize that the only hope that we have to live a life of any effect, the only hope that we have to live a life that can flourish and thrive and not just survive, is to live life according to your design. To live life the way that you have instructed for us to live. And so, Father, now we come and we offer ourselves to you, Lord, knowing that you have something to show us, knowing that you have something to teach us, and asking, Lord, that you would open up our minds to see it and open up our hearts to receive it, and that you would use it to transform our lives more and more into the image of the Lord Jesus. Lord, we ask these things now in Jesus' name. Amen. You may be seated. Bring it, Pastor. I like that, Bobby. So when I was a student pastor, one day I received a phone call. I received a phone call from a family in crisis, and they asked if I might be willing to come sit down with them and see if I could help. This family didn't attend church at the time, but they were at wits' end and were ready to try anything that they possibly could to get some kind of help, especially some kind of breakthrough with their teenage daughter. And so when I pulled into their driveway, I remember sitting there and being completely stunned. In the driveway, when I looked up, what I realized quickly was that this was quite literally one of the nicest homes in the entire county in which we lived. And I sat there and I considered for just a moment the irony of that moment. That from the outside, on the exterior, they were the picture of success. They were the picture of perfection. You would have had a hard time convincing any neighbor that drove by their house that the family inside those walls wasn't thriving and flourishing. Yet I knew the truth. I knew that as impressive as it was on the exterior, that inside that home was a family that was unraveling at the seams. And it became for me a parable of the American life. You know, we have more opportunities, more pictures, more images of flourishing than any other generation prior to us. Think about it. No generation is more educated, no generation has more degrees than our generation. No generation has more vacations, had more vacations than our generation. No generation has had more leisure time. No generation has had more hobbies. And yet, you know what we find? Is that we have the appearances of flourishing all around us. But all of us, many of us, actually lack less life, have live with less life. You know what we find? Depression, spiking, anxiety, going up. That's what we discover is basically every metric that you can use to actually discover whether or not a person is happy is actually in the decline. And the issue is not optimization. We have optimized everything from our schedules to our meals plans. And the issue is not a lack of opportunities. We have more opportunities than any generation that's ever had. The issue is that we are on a pathway that cannot lead to human flourishing. See, the old wise men of Israel, the ones that wrote the book of Proverbs, they had a worldview. And their worldview was that embedded in the Genesis account, embedded when God created the world, was an orderliness to the universe. And that we could, by studying what God has done, learn that order, and by learning that order and applying it to our lives, that we could now flourish in the way that God intended for us to flourish. And that's what I where I want us to start because that's what I want the Orchard Church to be about. I want us to be about living into God's design that we as God's people could flourish and thrive in all of the ways that God intends for us to flourish and to thrive. So our new mission statement will be that we exist to make flourishing disciples through the enjoyment of God together. We exist to make flourishing disciples through the enjoyment of God together. That we want to have a church and we want to establish a community and we want to take the good news that all people in this place are flourishing in the way that God intends for them to flourish. And then we want to create a process that you can take your children down and your coworkers down and your classmates down so that they too can begin to flourish. And to be able to see this, I want us to go to Genesis where the wise men of Israel believe that this was first embedded. And I think this is significant because what we see is we see man before there is sin, before there is a curse, before there is brokenness, in our original design, the way that God would have us to be. And what we see there is there, I believe, the design for true joy in our lives right now. That first, if we're gonna flourish, we have to recognize that we have all been designed to enjoy God. We have all been designed to enjoy God. That happiness is the universal pursuit of all people. In the late 1650s, there was a Christian philosopher by the name of Blaise Pascal, who actually died at just 29 years old, and he says this he says, All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. In other words, this is what he's saying. That everything that everyone does is for the purpose of being happy. For some people, they eat everything in sight. Other people, they count every calorie that they consume. And both do it so that they can be happy. For some people, they indulge themselves on every single pleasure. They don't spare themselves or tell themselves no on one single thing. For other people, they live an ascetic lifestyle, seemingly denying themselves of the most basic pleasures. And why do they do it? Both do it so that they can be happy. Some people abandon their families. Some people hover obsessively over their families, and they do it so that they can be happy. Some people save every dollar that they ever make. And some people go and take out every credit card that they'll give you in your name and max it all the way out. And why do they do it? They do it so that they can be happy. That the pursuit of happiness is the universal pursuit of all people, and it's not a bad pursuit. I think that's where sometimes in the church we get misguided. The pursuit of happiness is not the problem. The problem isn't the pursuit of happiness, the problem is where we pursue it, it's where we go looking for it. We search for it in all the temporary places and all of the worldly means and in all of the earthly ways. But God has put this pursuit in us. God has put the pursuit of happiness in us so that we will rightly recognize that we can only be happy when we are in Him and with Him. And so Genesis 1 and 2 makes sense to go to, doesn't it? That's where we see mankind in our happiest. There's no cancer, there's no trauma, there's no abuse, there's no death, there's no tears, there's no sadness, there's no threat. Here's man, and man is happy, and what we can begin to see is how God intended us to live from the beginning, so that through Christ Jesus we can begin to recover that for ourselves. So what we see here in the garden is that we were made to know God personally. That the author of Genesis, Moses, is going to great lengths to show us that we're not just animals, that we relate to God differently than rats and gazelles. We live differently than that, right? He says in a few different ways. He says that we have a dignity that's unique because God has made us in our image, in God's image. It's unique because we have been given dominion. No other creature on earth has been given dominion over the earth. And if you go all the way down to verse 31, what you'll see is after the sixth day, after the man and the woman have been made, God has been declaring over and over with a refrain, He made and it is good. He made and it is good. And then you get to the end of the sixth day after the man has been made, and what does he say? It escalates. And it was very good. What we're seeing here is that there is a climax to all of creation, and the climax of all of creation is mankind. And it's the climax of creation, because to be made in image in the image of God means at least that you are made by God, for God, that you can recognize him, experience him, know him, and love him, that we are given an awareness, that we are given an introspection, we are given a recognition of life that no other creature has, so that we can know and recognize God. In fact, in Genesis chapter 2, the picture becomes even more intimate and more graphic. What we realize quickly is that most of creation seemingly is mass-produced in an animal factory of sorts, right? Like God speaks and immediately it says that the oceans begin to swarm with fish, right? The livestock is all mass-produced. But we turn the page to Genesis chapter 2 and we see something very different. He drills down on the fun, on the uh creation of the man and the woman. And what do we see? That human beings are not mass-produced. No, instead, the Lord formed the man from the dust. That all the rest of creation is mass-produced, but the man is handcrafted by God Himself. And then what does God do? God bends down in the dirt, the God of heaven bends down in the dirt to the man formed from the dirt, and he pulls him up to his face and he breathes his own life into him. It's a picture of intimacy, it's a picture of closeness, it's a unique picture that is distinct from every other aspect of creation. And what it shows us is that you and I were designed by God from the beginning for a face-to-face relationship with him. We are meant and intended to live in a relationship that is intimate, that is close, that is personal, so that we know him in all of his manifold glories, that we could fully enjoy who he is. But we don't just see that we were made to know God personally. We need to recognize that we were made to need God dependently. We were made to need God dependently. We love autonomy, don't we? I promise y'all, my youngest, he came out of his mother's womb saying, he came out of his mother's womb saying, I do this myself, I do this myself, right? But you know what's unique about that? What's unique about that is one of the primary ways that Josiah is gonna know my care and know my love is through his dependence on me and my provision for him. Isn't that interesting? We look to the Lord and we say the same thing, don't we? I do this myself, I do this myself. And the Lord is saying, no, no, no, no, no, no. You have been designed, you are intended from the beginning to have limitations. You are dependent upon me for everything that you ultimately knew. Think about the word given there in verse 29. What does the word given imply? The word given implies that I need food, right? It also implies that I can't self-actualize that food. But then, beautifully, it shows us that God delights to give us what we need. So God made it so that we weren't self-sustaining, and he made it so that we weren't self-sufficient. He made us so that we were dependent upon him. But being dependent upon him is actually part of the means through which we begin to enjoy who he is and delight in who he is and recognize who he is. That our dependence upon God begins to teach us something about our relationship with him. It even has something to teach us about the gospel. That we see that fundamentally we are not most intended to achieve. We are fundamentally most intended to receive, to receive from our God those things that we need, that we can be and thrive and flourish in all the ways that God has designed us to be and to thrive and to flourish. That he has created us with a series of deficits, but it's these deficits that actually enable us to experience the delight of his provision. And so when we look to God and we say, I do it myself, we're actually stepping further away from human flourishing, not closer to it. That when we begin to try to re-engineer what God has handcrafted, it inevitably leads to malfunction every single time. We see this all over our society, and we can certainly see this in ourselves when it comes to our autonomy. No, we were designed to know God personally and to need God dependently so that we could enjoy God deeply. Think about where God puts the man, all right? God doesn't put the man off in a wilderness somewhere, does he? God doesn't put the man in a desert. God doesn't put the man in an unkept forest. God puts the man in the midst of a garden. And in Hebrew thought, in Hebrew thought, a garden was a place that was cultivated. It was a place that was tamed. It was a place that was brought under control. It was a place that was known to be aesthetically beautiful. It was a place that was known to produce bountifully. So it's a place of beauty, it's a place of bounty, and this is where God puts the man. He puts the man, and he then he makes a qualitative statement, right? It was good. It was very good. And so here in the garden, this place that is beautiful, this place is bountiful, he places the man, and he places all the other creatures of the earth, and only the man is able to make a qualitative assessment in the same way that God is. That's what it means to be made in his image. That we are made in his image in such a way that we are aware to know and look around that what we see is beauty. What we see is not just utilitarian, what we see is not just functional, what we see is not just practical, what we see is awesome. That we are given by God the ability to make these kinds of assessments so that we can enjoy what he has made in a way that no other creature on earth can enjoy what God has made. Think about it. Enjoyment is distinctively human, isn't it? Enjoyment is distinctively human. You can get on Chat GPT or AI, and AI knows all kinds of facts, has all kinds of knowledge. You can go on Grok, and Grok can use better rationality and logic than you and I can, right? But you know what AI can't do? You know what Grok can't do? You know what Chat GPT can't do? It can't delight in what it knows. Only we can do that. Think about animals. Animals know that they're provided, animals are provided for by the Lord, but they don't know it. Animals have experiences and can even know some kind of a feeling pleasure, but they don't recognize that it's good. We don't just experience good and we don't just see good, we know why it is good. That's what it means to be human, that we can make a qualitative assessment about our experience in the creation, and making a qualitative assessment about our experience in creation, we are able to see and to know that the creator himself is good and gracious and beautiful and powerful. That the way that we best express what is good, the way that we best express what is wonderful, the way that we best express what is worthy is we express it through enjoyment and delight. You know what, guys? Your wife doesn't just want to know that you know about her, does she? She wants, when she walks through the room, for you to be starry-eyed and amazed that that woman is willing to be seen in public with you. She wants to know that she is the delight of your heart, doesn't she? She wants her husband not just to know her, she wants her husband to enjoy her because it's in the enjoyment of his wife that he is expressing her true value and worth, right? Think about your kids. Your kids don't just want to hear you say, I love you. Like you ought to tell them that. You ought to tell them as often as you see them, you ought to tell them every night when you go to bed, every morning when they wake up, you ought to say, I love you, but they don't just want to hear you say I love you. They want when you open the door at the end of that day, they want to see your face light up with joy because they are the apples of your eye, and they are unlike any other child on the earth because they are your sons and they are your daughters, and they can see it on the expression of your face, right? It's the enjoyment of your children that ascribes to them their worth. Think about your friends. Your friends don't just want you to say, hey, I'm your friend, do they? No. What communicates actual friendship is I want to spend time with you, I want to linger with you. I don't want to be in a hurry, like I want to tell stories all night long, I want to laugh, I want to, I want to carry on, I want to, I want to keep up with memories, I want to commemorate our time together, I want to celebrate our time together. Can I ask you something, y'all? How does that compare with your relationship with God right now? He is of far greater value, of far greater beauty, of far greater kindness. Does he not deserve to be enjoyed? Does he not deserve to be delighted in? Does he not deserve to be fully experienced that you could express it with passion? Does he not worthy of this? Brothers and sisters, our God is too good to just be a checklist. Our God is too good just to be a perfunctory set of things, of routines that we go through week in and week out. Our God is so good that he is meant to be enjoyed. And if we don't enjoy him, who will? You and I were designed from the beginning to know God personally, to need God dependently, and to enjoy God deeply. What we'll also see is that we weren't just meant to enjoy God, but we're meant to share life. We're meant to share life. I mentioned earlier that there's a refrain throughout the book of Genesis, or throughout the first chapter of Genesis. That on the first day, God created and it was good. The second day, God created and it was good. So on and so forth. God created and it was good. We read it over and over again. And so when you turn the page, the chapter two, it's jarring. There's a break in the refrain. And there's meant to be a break in the refrain. It's meant to arrest you. That before there is sin in the world, before there is cancer in the world, before there is trauma, before there are wars, before there is depression, God turns the page after saying over and over that it is good, and he says, It is not good. And what is it that God says for the very first time while he's living in paradise, while the man is living in paradise, what is the first thing that he says is not good? He said, It is not good that man should be alone. Now think about that. Here's Adam, and Adam is living an intimate relationship with God Himself. Here's Adam, and Adam is living in utter paradise, a garden that was planted by God and cultivated for him. And God looks at the man and he says, You know what? This isn't good. That there's a sense in which Adam is surviving, but Adam is not thriving. And why is he not thriving? Because he's by himself. Because he doesn't have the community of another person that's there with him. I wonder if any of you could relate to that. I wonder if any of you would say this morning, you know what, I'm surviving, but I'm really not thriving. And maybe on the outside looking in, everybody else would think you live a life that looks a lot like Eden. That on the outside looking in, you have the house that everybody wants, and you have the job that everybody wants, and you have the prestige that everybody wants. But the reality is that there is an ache in your soul, and the ache in your soul says, it is not good that I am alone. Well, this is what we're seeing here. That this is part of the design from the beginning, that you were meant to share your life because it's together that we display God's image. We've already talked about this a little bit, but let's keep talking about more and more. What does it mean to be made in the image of God? What does it mean that male and female, he created us in God's image? Well, John chapter 4 tells us that God is spirit. So he's certainly not talking about physical attributes, right? He's not talking about literally, literally the physicality of your body, although we know that Jesus takes on a human body, so there maybe there's something to that. No, what he's talking about is something deeper than that. And at least part of what it means to be in the image of God is to live in community. Notice what it says here. This is very interesting, isn't it? God is in the singular. Even in the original language, God is in the singular, singular. But then what does it say? Let us, this is in the plural, make man in our image after our likeness. Isn't that interesting? That's plural, isn't it? Why would that be plural? Why would there be a plural pronoun used to describe a singular God? Well, God doesn't have an identity crisis. This gets to the essence of who God is. That God is a triune God who has existed in perfect, peaceful, harmonious community in all eternal eternity past, in eternity present, and will for all eternity future. That even within the Godhead Father, Son, and Spirit, there are functions and roles and responsibilities, but they coexist together, collaboratively, in perfect harmony over all eternity. So when he looks down and he sees Adam, and Adam is hanging out in the garden as his image bearer, and Adam's all by himself, it's kind of like looking at a puzzle that's missing half the pieces. That the picture's there, sure, but the picture's not complete. The picture is cloudy, it's in shadow. You can't see it fully. That he recognizes that if Adam is going to be able to fully portray the image and display the image of his God, the triune God, that he's gonna have to live in community so that there's more than one Adam, so that they can come together and begin to display who God is. And so he makes the woman, and when he makes the woman, it brings a completion to Adam so that now in this community, he is able to display what he couldn't before display. And as we read on in the scriptures, what we begin to discover is that this is really bigger than just marriage alone. There's certainly implications for marriage here, but this is bigger than marriage alone. That what we see are that God's people are always meant to congregate together and to share life together and to experience this life together. And that when God's people come together to share life together and to experience life together, that we actually have a peculiar way of being able to put on display the triune manifold glories of who our God really is. And so that's why our mission is that we would make flourishing disciples through the enjoyment of God together. Together. Because alone a person might be able to survive. But according to the design of God, what we clearly see is they are not even able to fully portray and experience the dignity of what it means to be an image bearer in its totality. That together is what it takes not for us not to just survive, but to be able to thrive. You know what part of our mission is gonna be here at the Orchard Church? Part of our mission is gonna be to overthrow loneliness in Shelby County, to overthrow loneliness in Fayette County, to overthrow loneliness in the Mid South. That part of the responsibility that we have is so that singleness doesn't have to equal loneliness. Part of the responsibility that we have is so that divorce doesn't have to equal loneliness. Part of the responsibility, part of the reason that I am convinced that God has put this church at 3690 South Houston Levy Road is that so that we can go in and men don't have to face shame by themselves anymore. Women don't have to process guilt by themselves anymore. So that teenagers can have a place where they feel like they may not fit anywhere else in the world, but they can know that they have a place where they fit together here at the Orchard Church. That this community is probably filled with children who are overlooked, who are undercared for, that they can come here and they can see through the way we care for them, and the way that we love them, and the way that we come together for them, that they can come here and they can see the value that they have in the eyes of the Almighty God. That we exist to come together, not just so that I can flourish, and not just so that you can flourish, but so that we can flourish collectively and so that we can push back the loneliness of our area that more people might be able to flourish with us. See, we live in a time of counterfeit community, don't we? We live in a time of counterfeit community. You think about social media, right? I think it's a great illustration of this. You go, you get that great New York strip from Kroger, and you marinate it just right, and you throw it on the grill and you get it on your plate, and you can go there, and even if you're by yourself, you can take a picture of it, and you can throw it up on the Insta, or you can throw it up on Facebook, and immediately you get a like, right? And then you get a comment, and then you get the wow emojis, right? And you think, wow, that feels good. You don't even know why it feels good. That feels good. I want more of that, right? What it tells, what we've learned is that social media is actually connected to the chemicals in our brain, and it releases a chemical called dopamine. Dopamine is a quick hit, and it's like, man, that's awesome. I want more of that, but it metabolizes and it goes away quickly. So intuitively, intuitively, we recognize that yes, I need community, I want community, but then it goes away quickly. And we're like, but I don't actually have community, and so what do we do? We go back and we look for those red bubbles over and over and over again. Don't we? Please, somebody, tell me that you love me, tell me that you love me, tell me that you notice me, tell me that I'm I'm known in the world, tell me that I matter to somebody, and we go back over and over and over again, but the reality is it's all counterfeit, isn't it? It's not real, it's not genuine. You compare that to going and buying four New York strips and marinating them just right and having over some friends to the house, and there you gather around the table, and you don't even think about social media anymore, do you? You get lost in telling stories, you get lost talking about the good old days, you get you get lost laughing and getting caught up on inside jokes and all the memories that you have with one another. And before you know it, hours have gone by and you haven't realized it. And you take that picture and you don't take that picture and put it on social media, you might. There's no sin in that. But you probably take that picture from that night, the selfie, that all of you get together and you hang it up in your office. And every time you walk by it, you smile, don't you? And you remember that night, and you experience a warmth and a connectedness that's different. You know that releases a different chemical in your brain. It's called serotonin. Serotonin. And serotonin is where we get our connectedness, it's where we get our warmth in life. It's it's where it's what begins to reshape our attitude and reshape our mood. It's something that that lasts for the long time. And as often as you think on that moment, it comes and it and it rejuvenates the joy that you experienced, even if it's just for a minute, on what you experienced that one time. What we're seeing, what we're seeing is the way that God has wired us to enjoy each other and to share life with each other. Brothers and sisters, counterfeit community is creating counterfeit flourishing. It's not real. Imitation communities and virtual communities are creating imitation flourishing. It doesn't last, it's fleeting, and intuitively we know that we are meant for more than that. We are meant in the image of God to join together that we could enjoy one another. We don't just share in God's image. We share in the responsibilities that we have. We share in the responsibilities that we have. I love that he doesn't just put man in the garden. He puts the man in the garden and he gives the man a job, right? And this is part of, remember, this is before there's sin. This is before there's problems. So I feel like there's a good chance that in the new heavens and in the new earth, all of us are gonna have jobs, but I think we're gonna get a lot of job satisfaction in that experience. Maybe that's not why you came to church to find out today. But it's interesting though, isn't it, that here he's given a job, and it's while he's doing the job, it's while he's naming the animals, it's while he's exercising dominion that ultimately he is noticed by God to not be good, to be out of alignment with the way that God has made for him to be. And so he says, I gotta make for him a helper that is fit for him. I've got to make a helper that completes him. I in other words, I love this. That God designed Adam to do work. God designed Adam for responsibility, but he designed Adam with limitations so that he alone could not upkeep the responsibilities that he has. Isn't that amazing? And so he recognizes, he recognizes that Adam is a man with deficiencies. Adam is a man with weaknesses. Adam is a man fundamentally in his most perfect state. He is a man with needs, and he is a man with needs that only when God makes a helper fit for him is he complete and able to do the task that he has for him. That together Adam and Eve have work to do. And together Adam and Eve have a mission to complete. And together Adam and Eve can be blessed, to be fruitful, and multiply in all the ways that God intends. Together they can exercise dominion. You know, I think that has a lot to say to us. Because if we're gonna take this new mission seriously, y'all, we have a lot of work to do. We have a lot of work to do. You know, right now, right now in our community, it's hard to believe. It's hard to believe because everything here is so sterling and so beautiful, and there are so many perfectly white smiles, it's hard for us to believe. But right now, we heard the testimony of a young teenager just a few weeks ago, didn't we? That feeling like he is being crushed under all of the affluent ideals of Collierville and Germantown, that there are teenagers in our community that are contemplating suicide right now. They feel alone, they they feel completely detached. Right now, in Collierville, there are men and women who are with perfect smiles and nice clothes, camouflaging all kinds of brokenness and all kinds of hopelessness. And they don't know how they're gonna make it, and they don't know how their marriage is gonna hold together, they don't know how they personally are gonna hold together. Right now, there are so many pressures that we feel as families, aren't there? And our families are buckling underneath the pressure of everything, of all the expectations that we feel like we have to meet, and all the lessons that we have to secure, and all the opportunities that we have to give to our kids, we feel like we're buckling underneath that pressure. Well, can I tell you something? I don't have all the answers for that. I can't fix that. And if I, Cody Hell, try to do that alone, you know what's gonna happen to me? I'm gonna drown. I I thought about our leadership as the church. Did you know right now in between just Collierville and Germantown alone, there are 80,000 people that live here? 80,000. Do you know how many people if you take our elders, our deacons, and our staff and you add them all together, do you know how many we have? Less than 40 people. Less than 40 people. If we have a mission to help 80,000 people be able to flourish in the design that God has for them, and we have fewer than 40 people, that's not enough. That won't do it. But what if, brothers and sisters? What if, brothers and sisters, that in the wisdom of God and in the sovereignty of God, God has arranged this local body, hundreds of us to come together at this time for this mission, and your gifts and your experiences, and my gifts and my experiences, and the Lord could mobilize hundreds of us and deploy us among the 80,000. Then that hundreds turns into thousands, and those thousands can turn into tens of thousands. Like, what if there is a design for us all to share the workload and to buy into the mission together that we could push back lostness and loneliness and brokenness and despair in our community? Well, y'all, I think that's exactly what it is. I think that's what we've been called to do. We've been called to push back on the counterfeit communities that we find here where we are, that people can experience something real. But we all have to come in and we have to share that responsibility together so that none of us drown, so that none of us are overwhelmed, and so that more and more teenagers, more and more children, more and more mamas and daddies, more and more grandmamas and granddaddies can have the hope of flourishing in Christ. Yes, y'all, we are meant to enjoy God, but we are meant to enjoy God together while we are living on mission, working, co-laboring. That brings us to the last part of the design of God. That we enjoy God, we share life, and then we make disciples. We make disciples. So, for the last 12 years or so, I've had the honor of being able to go to this little landlocked country down in southern Africa called Swaziland or Eswatini. We've actually had one of our students, uh, Riley Mosley, has has been done done some ministry recently in Eswatini. But what's unique about Eswatini is Eswatini is the last absolute monarchy on the continent of Africa, which basically means that the king has largely unchecked power and he's a deplorable human being, and he basically owns every single thing that's in the entire entire country. And so what happens is when you cross over a border crossing, if you're coming in from South Africa or you're coming in from Mozambique and you cross the border, what you're gonna find is this picture. This is the king and king Miswadi, and he's in his traditional dress, and it'll have this picture and it'll be hanging above all of the registrars as they sign your passport and you enter into the kingdom. And you know why his picture is there? His picture is there to show you the extent of his kingdom. His picture is there to show you the extent of his glory, the extent of his reign, the extent of his influence, the extent of his might. And so that everywhere you go, that you would recognize who he is and who you ultimately answer to. Well, this is actually a very ancient practice. It's a very ancient practice, dates all the way back to the biblical days. That what kings would do is the kings would go in and they would conquer a new land. And when the king conquered a new land, he would assign a governor. But then the governor would do what? He would hang the picture of the king or hang the picture of the emperor up in the embassy so that everybody that passed through would know who the king was, would know the extent of his reign, would know the extent of his glory, would know who they ultimately answer to. But you know what God did? God did something different than that. God didn't just go and aim to spread his glory by hanging up his picture. You know what he did? He put his picture in us. And then he deployed us to go to the ends of the earth. Why is it that God says that you should be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it? Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, have dominion over it? Why does God say that? Because when you go, his reign goes with you. Because when you go, you are filling the earth quite literally with his glory as his image bearer. Now, what do we know? What we know is that gets defiled, doesn't it? That gets that process begins to be broken down. But this is what he begins to renew through Abraham. What does he tell to Abraham? He gives what we call the Abrahamic blessing, where he says, Through you, you will be a blessing to all the nations. And what he's doing, what we call Genesis 128, is the cultural mandate. The cultural mandate is to bring all of culture, all of society under beneath the reign of God. And so what he's telling Abraham is that he is gonna work through Abraham to be a blessing to all nations, all families, and all places that they would be able to live underneath the reign and the rule of this great king. And how is he going to do that? Well, he's gonna do that through Jesus, isn't he? He's gonna do that through Jesus. When you think about the Great Commission, do you know what the great commission is? The great commission is the fulfillment of the cultural mandate. That in Genesis chapter 1, God says, Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and spread my dominion, spread the knowledge of my kingdom, spread the knowledge of my rule, spread the knowledge of my glory. And you know what Jesus comes and he says? He says, All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. I'm gonna send you out as my people with my spirit. I'm gonna send you out as people that I'm conforming into my image. And I'm gonna send you out that you would go and you would make disciples of all nations in all places, that you would baptize them, that you would teach them, and that you would recognize what? That my presence is with you everywhere that you go, that there is no limit to my reign, that all of these peoples and all of these places are being brought beneath the rule and the reign of King Jesus. And so we even see in Acts chapter 6, verse 7, listen to this language and see if it brings Genesis chapter 1 into your mind. It says, and the word of God, this is the church after Jesus has ascended to heaven, and the word of God continued to increase, and the number of disciples multiplied greatly, and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith. In other words, what it's saying is the author, Luke, is very purposely picking up the thread of Genesis chapter 1, and he is saying that now the disciples of Jesus are being fruitful and they are multiplying over the face of the earth. You see, brothers and sisters, we have a mandate. We have a mandate to make disciples, to make flourishing disciples, to the enjoyment of God together. And it's a mandate that is intended to give us a mission on which we can live our lives and invest our lives and spend our lives. It's a mission that's worth it because it helps people and it glorifies God. It's a mission that allows us to take the good news of Jesus that flourishing is now possible, that you don't have to live alone, that you don't have to drown by yourself. It's to enable us to take that to the far reaches of the mid-south and to the very ends of the earth. That is, what we find here is a pathway that we can begin to take people on. A pathway that if we will ourselves step into the design of God and we will begin to enjoy God and share life and make disciples, what we will soon discover for ourselves is that that is a pathway for human flourishing. And now the responsibility that we have is to take our classmates and our children and our grandchildren and our friends and our coworkers to begin taking them down the same pathway that they would recognize that they cannot be who they are intended to be, and they cannot flourish in the way they're intended to flourish until they begin to enjoy God and share life and make disciples. It's really interesting. Dr. Arthur Brooks, he's a professor at Harvard University. And his subject matter is actually happiness. The man studies happiness for a living. And he says that if you study the neuroscience, the neuroscience shows that there are essentially four components to true happiness when you interview happy people. He says inevitably you can boil it down to four things that happy people are firm in their faith, they have rich family, they have good friends, and they do meaningful work. They do those four things. Now, isn't that interesting? Because what I would say is that the neuroscience simply confirms what God has already told us in Genesis chapter 1. What do we see right here? Number one, faith. Enjoy God. What do we see now here? Family and friendship, share life. And then work, man, it's hard to find meaningful work, isn't it? How about the mission of making disciples? And what Arthur Brooks notes is that if you look at the declines in our society, yes, we have more degrees, yes, we have we have more optimizations, yes, we have more vacations, yes, we have more hobbies, but you know what we have less of? We have less faith. We have fewer marriages and fewer children and smaller families. Our friendships are now virtual and online instead of in-person and personal. And it's becoming more and more difficult to find meaningful work, isn't it? If only there was a way, y'all. If only there was a way, but there is a way. That's why the Lord has put together the Orchard Church so that we can come together on this mission and we can flourish in the way that God has, so that we can increase in faith and the enjoyment of God, so that we can share our lives and grow our families, and so that we can live on mission, that we have to start making investments. Stop living the way we've always lived, stop doing what we've always done, and start making investments in the design of God if we want to flourish the way that He we hope He hopes for us to flourish. And brothers and sisters, I don't know about y'all, but I'm ready to get to work. I'm ready to get to work. Let's pray together.