I'm excited to be up here.

I get to, this morning, to wrap up this series that we have been in.

The goodwill, God's will, goodwill, God's works, God's will, good works.

It's something along the lines of what I just said.

I get to wrap that up and I'm super excited.

I've really enjoyed, I've been away the past three Sundays, so I haven't heard any of them here, but I've listened and it's been sick.

Yes?

I feel...

 You know what I mean?

I just need to do awesome stuff.

And so I'm going to try and wrap up the three amazing words that Pastor Jake gave here.

And I'm going to go super meta.

Not like Zuckerberg, you know, like...

 like, super deep and profound.

No, I'm just, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, here's what I'm gonna do.

I'm gonna nerd out for a few minutes at the start of this message, and I just need you to, like, let me do that, okay?

I need you to pretend that you're, like, super involved and invested, and you're like, this little nerd guy, I love when he does that.

I love when he gets all excited about that weird stuff, and he talks super fast, and it's, you know, I love when he, I just need you to work with me here so that I can build us an epic setup.

 for us to see why the message of this series is such wildly good news for the believer.

But I need to set up some context for us, okay?

And so I just, I need you to work with me, okay?

Cool?

All right, great.

So let me show you what I think is the most groundbreaking claim in the entire Bible.

Arguably the most important verse for Christian theology.

Any guesses?

Okay, John 3, 16, that's a good guess.

 You'll read it and you'll go, right, I should have thought that.

Throw it up there.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Genesis chapter 1, verse 1.

Oh, yeah, the groan of all the kids who grew up in church.

Like, oh, I knew that one.

And just everybody else.

So I think this is arguably the most important verse in the entire Bible.

The way I look at this, the way we can look at Genesis chapter 1, verse 1.

If this verse is true, then anything is possible.

 If this verse is true, then everything that comes after it can also be true.

If that verse is false, then the Bible is a scam.

If this verse is true, then the resurrection is believable.

 You know, if God made the heavens and the earth and he made our universe, then he can break the rules.

So when the rules get broken, I have a reason to, oh, because the person who's breaking the rules, when miracles are performed by the power of the Holy Spirit, I can be like, yeah, the person who is breaking the rules is the one who made the rules.

He's allowed to do that.

He exists outside of them.

That's important.

If this isn't true, then it undermines everything that we're doing here.

 And so grounded in this verse, and those that follow it in the next few chapters, is a really significant Christian idea called teleology.

Everyone say teleology.

 Great, you pronounced that so good.

If you remember, who remembers the Flourishing series?

The, like, Sermon on the Mount series?

You remember?

Give me a thumbs up if you remember that.

Okay, I watched the, I think it was, something that was so funny in Pastor Jake's first message was when he whipped out, like, the, if you, anyone remember the Greek word from Ephesians?

And it was, what, like, peripateo, peripateo.

And he said it, and everyone was like, oh, yeah, we remember that.

Okay, so one of the really important words in that series is the word teleos.

 Do you remember that one?

That's pretty far back.

I mean, you guys are some Bible scholars if you're holding on to that.

That's a really important word.

And does anybody remember what it means?

Okay.

Well, Dylan, you preached it.

So it's not fair for you.

That was awesome.

So yes, it means whole or perfect or complete.

And the root word for teleos is the word telos.

 Okay, so we're learning Greek now.

And the word telos means the end of something, not like when the something finishes, like the reason something was made, the final end, the purpose or the meaning of something.

 Does that make sense?

So to be teleos, to be perfect, is to reach your final end, is to be fulfilling your purpose.

It's to be what you're supposed to be completely.

That's Matthew 5.

When Jesus says to be teleos, your heavenly father is teleos, that's what he's getting, like be what you are supposed to be all the way through.

You understand?

Reach your ultimate final end.

Exist as you are meant to.

And so teleology in Christian thinking is the idea that that is possible.

 That there is such a thing as us attaining to our final end.

There is such a thing as meaning and purpose in our lives and in the things that God created.

That things are like this on purpose.

If you go through D Group, which you should, you'll read Love Thy Body by Nancy Pearson.

And it's easy when you hit a book like that to kind of just like check out.

 Don't do that.

It's really, really foundational for understanding this, and you'll learn a lot more about this.

So if you enjoy this message, then, like, when that book comes, I mean, pay attention to all of them.

But, like, she's a smart person, so it's easy to, like, you know, fall asleep to her.

Take as much out of it as you can.

Cool?

You should do D group.

Okay.

So here's the claim of teleology is that the things in our world, human beings, human nature, just everything that we see is designed, is made, and therefore have a way that they are meant to be.

 A teleological worldview is one that looks at the universe and looks at human nature as something intentionally made by an intelligent designer.

And so we're able to see God-given purpose in the way that things are.

Does that make sense?

 So teleology is one things are this way on purpose.

So like, just for example, like, I think this is really obvious, like biological one.

When we look at like the obvious physiological differences between men and women, uh, we don't think that that is just like, uh, you know, just something that happened to be, or that something that is, that's just the way, no, no, no.

I believe that God made human beings that way on purpose.

So the way that we sort of naturally compliment one another, I don't think that's an accident.

I don't think that's just like a cultural evolution added on top of like the biology that was formed over time for the necessity

 the necessity of human survival.

Like, sure, dude, that's super utilitarian.

I think that actually God made us to complement one another.

And that's why we fit together really well, right?

I read this study.

I think it's really awesome.

It turns out that children, they assume that teleology is true.

 And you might say, you know, you can go one of two ways with this.

Okay, well, then if you see it in the world, then you're childish.

Or you can say, or this is an instinct.

This is intuitive to us.

So they ask children questions like, you know, why do rocks exist?

Because of like the process of like erosion and weathering or because bears needed a way to scratch their backs.

 And the children always say, because bears needed a way to scratch their backs.

And that is looking for teleology, believing that things are here on purpose.

Believing that the way that things exist, the things that make them unique, it's not an accident, that things are meant to be that way.

And I think that's human intuition.

I think that we try and force ourselves to grow out of that.

 But I think that we can't help but see it.

Even something as simple as like what psychologists observe is that the human brain finds symmetry, is pleased by symmetry.

We like to feel that something that we're seeing was designed, right?

Like we look for symmetry in places that it doesn't exist because we're addicted to order, because we believe the universe is ordered, because we know that it was made, that it was formed.

 So things are this way on purpose, number one.

And number two, more personally, we have a purpose.

We exist for a reason.

And because this universe was made, here's what the Bible teaches, is that the universe has certain governing principles in its code.

 given by God that determine what will lead to flourishing and what won't.

So God situated and created our world in such a way that being righteous, being moral, will lead to good.

And being unrighteous and being immoral will lead to destruction and to pain.

You can't get lucky and escape that.

 That's just the case.

That's the way that God designed the world.

And if you read the book of Proverbs, for example, Solomon is trying to unlock that idea in Proverbs.

Solomon is trying to unveil that and reveal that that's what he's getting at, is that this is the way that God has made the world.

And if we can obey that, if we can form our lives around that belief, then we'll be able to flourish.

And then, of course, Job and Ecclesiastes are like, but it doesn't always work that way.

And that's why those books...

 That's why those books exist.

So here is basically, to summarize everything I just said, we're almost done nerding out.

Here is the conclusion that trickles down from Genesis 1, verse 1.

Number one, there is a right way to live.

There is a correct, best way for human beings to live their lives.

Number two, if we live that way, it will make us happy, and we will flourish.

And number three, if we don't, it will be damaging to us.

 Peter says something in 1 Peter 2, verse 11.

He says, I warn you, I'm pleading with you not to engage in these sins that are waging war against your soul.

I love that language.

I think that's such a brilliant way to describe sin, and I'm glad that's in the Bible.

Sin's disobedience to God wages war against our souls.

 That's a huge deal.

So if we don't live the way that God intends for human beings to live, then it will be damaging.

It will wage war against what is truest about us, like against our human nature at its core.

 Okay?

Now here's the problem.

A lot of people don't view the world this way.

This is not the modern mindset.

This is not the way that the West has grown to see the world.

So really briefly, I want to introduce you to the Mount Rushmore of our modern worldview.

Three dudes who says some really stupid stuff.

But they are deeply, deeply influential.

And they have shaped together their thinking and influence the way that the West feels today.

 You know, I'm always wondering the answer to the question, why does everybody seem to feel like everything is so meaningless all the time?

 You know, how did we grow into this mindset?

If you remember when we went in our series on work, I talked about Solomon and Ecclesiastes and how that was predictive of where we are today.

How did we get there?

How did we land at this place?

And I think it's the same thing.

The writer of Ecclesiastes is questioning teleology.

He's questioning the way that things were designed.

And our world has done the same thing.

By removing God from the equation, we've been left without any reason to believe that things are this way on purpose.

 And it's shaped the way that we feel about our lives.

You can be a Christian person in this room who believes every word of the Bible.

The issue is you are still living in a Western culture.

In a world, in a society that has adopted a different worldview than the one that you hold.

And worldviews get into everything.

It gets into our art and into our politics and into our friendships and into our self-perceptions and into our educations.

It's everywhere.

And you are a sponge.

 You're a sponge.

You cannot help the fact that you have soaked all of this up.

So whether you would renounce these philosophers and teachers or not is irrelevant.

It's gotten into you.

Right?

Okay.

So I want to tell you about Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.

We know those names?

Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche.

I don't know how to say his first name, actually.

And Sigmund Freud.

Okay.

So each of them, their beginning conclusion, where they begin from, is that God is not real.

 That there is no God.

And therefore, they follow that conclusion to its end by abandoning teleology and seeing where it leads them.

So Marx is, and this is my really quick summary, so this is not going to be perfect.

But Karl Marx is like, listen, everything is really about money and about power.

And what's truest about our lives is that we're all struggling under financial oppressive systems and that the dominant class is using morality and religion as a weapon to keep their power.

He said famously that religion is the opium of the people.

 Amazing.

Okay.

Nietzsche says, yeah, morality, actually, I agree with Karl Marx.

Morality is like slavery and that there is no good or bad and that none of our actions really have any moral significance.

We've just been told that they do.

And so there is no right way to live.

Instead, we need to fight through the moral limitations that have been put on us, become worse people overall so that we can create our own paths of meaning.

And because of this, he famously said, God is dead and we have killed him and we need to move on from him.

 And create a new way of living.

And then Freud is like, dude, I totally agree with all of you.

Here's one of his famous quotes.

This is just delightful.

Listen to this.

He says, man should make eroticism the central point of his life.

 That's a real quote from Sigmund Freud.

If you want to be happy, you need to make sexual eroticism the central point of your life.

Because we're all just these creatures with these instincts that we should never deny because we're not created.

Nobody can tell you not to act on those things.

And so here's what he says.

We will finally all attain happiness when we can press into our evolved sexual instincts and break free of sexual restrictions that have been imposed on us for thousands of years by society and religion.

 So all three of them are like, there's all this weight on us that's been put on us by culture and by Christianity and by religion and we need to break free of it by fighting against the powerful, by breaking out this economic system and by believing that there is no one right way to live and carving our own path and just being, Nietzsche's just like, virtue is a scam, is a mistake.

Don't be good.

Being good is dumb.

And Freud is just like, and we just need to be animals in our sexual lives and that will make us happy.

That's how we can carve a path to meaning.

That's the, that is, those are the three thinkers that have more deeply shaped the world that you live in today.

 than anyone else so you may not be familiar with their work you may not endorse any of the things that i just said but it's gotten into our worldview like a virus and we have to intentionally pull from the scripture the truth that's going to stomp those things out right yeah and so these three men they all work together to say that in essence there is no such thing as flourishing

 that morality was never a necessity and that you do not exist for any real reason.

Everything in life is essentially oriented against you.

The universe is utterly indifferent to your existence.

 You know, I'm not a fan.

Right?

I'm saying that.

You're like, well, this is dreary and depressing and dark.

I agree.

That's why we've got to get out of this.

With the 21st century Western worldview, we're left with nothing but to conclude that we have no reason to work hard.

We have no reason to be good.

Good and work.

Do you see what I did there?

We have no reason to follow any sexual ethic.

We have no reason to deny ourselves any pleasure.

We have no reason to live at all.

 There's no reason that's given to us.

We need to search and hope that we can find one.

And I find that to be horribly dark.

And I'm thankful that the Bible stands in aggressive disagreement to this stance.

Okay, nerd moment over.

Good?

We feel good?

I wrote in my notes, in parentheses, probably took way too long because I am excited.

I wrote that down.

Okay, so let's go back to the book of Genesis and see what it has to say about the world and our existence and the purpose...

 of why we're here.

So Genesis 1 and 2 has four mandates given to mankind that I think are really essential for us understanding why we're alive today and what to do about the whole God's will, good works thing.

Okay, so we're going to turn first to Genesis chapter 1.

 My Bible has pictures in it.

Just wanted to tell you.

I'm very excited about it.

Okay, Genesis chapter 1, verse 26 and 27.

Okay, so then God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness.

And they will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, the whole earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.

So God, I'm hearing so many pages flip.

Guys, it's like the first or second page.

I mean, just...

 It's like all right here up front.

I'm just like, guys, it's page two.

 Oh, man, that's great.

Okay, the whole earth and the creatures that crawl on the earth.

So God created man in his own image.

He created him in the image of God.

He created them male and female.

And then chapter 2, verse 25.

So just, hey, guys, just one over.

Oh, this is two pictures.

So that's just, there's no words there.

Again, pictures in my Bible.

Pretty sick.

It's kind of a nice break.

You know, when you're reading, you're like, oh.

 Page is a picture.

Okay, 225.

Here's what it says.

Both the man and his wife were naked, and yet they felt no shame.

I want to connect those really quick.

So God gives this command, this mandate to Adam and Eve to exist in the world that he has made and to bear his image.

In other words, to be his representatives, to look like God on the earth.

Okay, so of everything that God created, the person who's meant to be the figurehead of God's authority as the ultimate creator is mankind.

That's super dope.

 And there is this innate value that is given to human life because we're made in the image of God.

And because there's no insecurity that should be allowed to exist in the world, which is why they're naked and they don't feel ashamed.

Do you know what I'm saying?

 Shame cannot be a thing so long as Adam and Eve are perfectly bearing the image of God, right?

There is nothing to be ashamed of.

They look like God, right?

And that's how they're made to be.

And so they're given this mandate to bear God's image.

Okay, then let's see the second one.

Chapter 1, verse 28.

God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it.

Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls.

 On the earth.

Okay, so here's what I want you to do.

I want you to fill the earth with offspring.

I'm God.

I'm the creator.

I've created life, and I want you to pick up in that process and spread life everywhere.

Do you see what's happening there?

God creates human life, and then he's like, I want you to create more human life.

I want you to be like me, right?

 Yeah?

I want you to fill the earth.

I want you to build a people such that what we've begun here spreads to every square inch of the surface, the face of the earth.

Cool?

Okay, Genesis chapter 2, verse 18.

Then God said, it is not good for the man to be alone.

I will make a helper corresponding to him.

Verse 21, chapter 2.

 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to come over the man, and he slept.

And God took one of his ribs and closed the flesh at that place.

Then the Lord God made the rib he had taken from the man into a woman and brought her to the men.

Okay, so now there's this dynamic that's put in place.

So Adam, I want you to rule.

I want you to rule over the land, but I want you to rule under my authority.

And then he creates Eve.

 He says, Eve, I want you to help Adam, and I want you to rule with him under his authority.

There's this modeling of God's, I want you to represent me, and I want you to be in charge.

I want to rule together, and I want your relationship to represent the dynamic that we already share.

Cool?

Yes?

God wants that dynamic to be in the world.

Rule over the world together.

Adam, you rule.

Eve, you help.

And there's no brokenness in the dynamic.

There's no marital trouble that enters the world through them.

Does that make sense?

Yes.

 They're perfectly united in the way that they're intended to be.

And then chapter 2, verse 5 through 7.

This is my favorite part.

 No shrub of the field had yet grown on the land, and no plant of the field had sprouted.

For the Lord God had not made it rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground.

That's really important.

But mist would come up from the earth and water all the ground.

And then the Lord God formed the man out of dust from the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and that man became a living being.

Verse 15.

The Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to work it and to watch over it.

This is the fourth example.

 Mandate that God gives.

Work the land.

Bring about the vision that I have for this land.

Cultivate the undeveloped parts of the world such that the garden of Eden, such that Eden spreads all across everything that I have made.

So the imagery is that God is like, here, I have this garden, this farm situation, and there's the surrounding lands all undeveloped.

And I want you to spread this farm everywhere.

I want you to develop all the land.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

 Okay, so here's our four mandates.

Let's go over them again.

So we have six.

Okay, so number one, bear his image.

Number two, be fruitful and multiply.

Number three, rule with him and help with him.

And number four, work the land.

Okay, those are our four mandates given to Adam and Eve.

And we can see how like the modern world has adopted self-perceptions that reject this idea, right?

So like, for example, number one, bear his image.

It's like, no, dude, be you.

Be you.

Bear your image.

 Create your self-identity.

Be your unique self.

Don't bear somebody else's image.

Don't be someone else.

Be you.

Number two, be fruitful or multiply.

No, dude.

No.

Live in sexual mayhem.

You know, don't do that.

Who cares about that?

Number three, rule with Him.

Help with Him.

Submit to God.

No, dude.

Choose autonomy.

 Right?

Rule yourself and reject authority.

And then my favorite, build Eden, works the land.

No, build Babel.

Build your brand.

Build you.

Right?

That's the way that our world thinks.

And so the question is, why?

How did we get there?

How did we get from Genesis to Freud?

What happened?

Right?

What happened in the middle, God?

What happened from the garden to get us to where we are today?

How is that possible?

Well, there's a really obvious answer.

If you flip your Bible one page over, there's something called the fall of man.

And we're all familiar with this story, right?

 Abba and Eve, they reject the commands of God and it causes a whole lot of trouble.

And I want to show you the way the writer of Genesis very, very geniusly has these four mandates in mind when pointing out the details of what the fall has done.

Okay, so I want you to keep, remember, bear his image, be fruitful and multiply, rule and help, work the land.

Okay, ready?

Are you ready?

Okay, chapter 3, verse 7.

Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew that they were naked.

So they sewed fig leaves together.

 And made coverings for themselves.

And the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze.

And they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

That corresponds to the command to the mandate to bear his image.

Right?

That's what's been broken.

Hey, I want you to be my representative on the earth.

So do the things that I do.

And act and live like me.

Well, you break away from that.

And you don't bear my image anymore.

And now shame enters the world.

Right?

Do you see?

 The reason they were naked and unashamed is because they perfectly bore the image of God.

When they break away from God, when they reject Him, they are no longer bearing the image.

Not the way that they're meant to, and so they feel shame.

They've become something else.

They've reinvented themselves in a new image.

And it's an ugly one.

 And they can feel that it's an ugly one.

And it puts this immediate rift between them and God.

For the first time, man has this idea that he should run from God's presence, that he should flee from him.

That this God that he was meant to be in total perfect union with, working about creation together, he now needs to hide from.

Right?

Because their sense of familiarity has been shattered.

Right?

Right?

 Okay, number two, Genesis chapter 3, verse 16.

So God begins to speak, and he tells Adam and Eve the consequences of their actions.

He said to the woman, verse 16, I will intensify your labor pains.

You will bear children with painful effort.

Your desire will be for your husband, yet he will rule you.

 Over you.

Okay.

Can we put up the four again?

I want you to see.

Look, in this one verse, we see a corresponding problem that's introduced to our be fruitful and multiply.

Right?

This isn't God just being like, you ate that fruit, and so now giving birth is going to hurt.

Okay?

That would be a really reductionist way of looking at this text.

The writer of Genesis wants us to remember that they have this mandate from God to be fruitful and to multiply.

Well, being fruitful and multiplying just became a heck of a lot harder.

Right?

That's the point.

It just became a brutal process that it was not supposed to be.

 Yeah?

And then he says, remember, we have rule and help.

Hey, I want you to have this beautiful dynamic that reflects the relationship between Adam and God.

Well, the relationship between Adam and God has been shattered.

And so now the relationship between Adam and Eve has been shattered.

And now dysfunction has entered our world.

Right?

Do you understand?

So this mandate for them to rule and help, well, it doesn't work anymore.

Because now they're going to be in constant competition.

Now they're going to be fighting over who gets to be in charge.

Right?

Adam will overuse his strength or he'll fall into passivity.

 And Eve will live in insecurity.

Whoa, where did this just come from?

It came from there.

They had a mandate that the fall undid.

The way that they were meant to rule and live together has been broken by the fall.

And then number four, and again, this is my, I think this is the most important one for the series that we're in.

Verse 17, And he said to the man,

 Notice, he says, it's one verse to the woman, three verses to the man.

I love it.

He's like, Adam, you're in trouble.

Okay, and he said to the man, because you listened to your wife and you ate from the tree about which I commanded you, do not eat from it.

The ground is cursed because of you.

The ground is cursed.

You will eat from it by means of painful labor all the days of your life.

It will produce thorns and thistles for you and you will eat the plants of the field.

You will eat bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground since you were taken from it for you are dust and the dust you will return.

 What does it say in chapter two?

God had not, he hadn't created yet because there was no man.

There was no man to cultivate the ground.

And so he placed Adam in the garden to do that.

 That was the mandate.

Work the land.

What did God just say?

Well, now the ground is cursed.

The land is cursed.

Hey, I made you to work the land.

The land is now cursed.

Do you see how that's real?

Whoa, what just happened?

That's kind of insane.

This isn't just about plants, you know?

God isn't just saying, like, so long as most human beings are living in agrarian societies, things are going to be pretty tough.

No, it's about human nature.

It's about our existence with God on the earth now.

The ground is cursed.

 The ground that we were made to work is cursed.

In other words, the reason that we were made to exist has now become borderline impossible for us to attain.

Teleos is out of the question.

It's not a thing for us anymore.

Right?

Yeah?

God is saying to them, you have decided.

You decided not to live the way that I told you.

And so brokenness has entered the very fabric of your world.

These processes that I created for good

 The idea of marriage, of being fruitful and multiplying, of working the land.

Well, things have changed, and they're going to fight back against you now.

You're going to be going against the grain of these processes.

In other words, the things that you were made for, you can't really do, at least not the way that I intended you to.

And so it almost feels like if you stop there, that Marx and Nietzsche and Freud must, in this case, they're kind of onto something.

They're a little bit correct about our world.

It seems like they're making a correct observation, but I intentionally, I snuck around something, I tricked you, and I left something out.

 God's first statement of judgment in verse 15 is against the serpent, the tempter.

And he says, there will come one from the line of the woman who will crush your head and you will bruise his heel.

God's first statement is a statement of judgment against the serpent.

In other words, a statement of judgment against the fall.

A promise to squeeze all of this mess back to the place that it came from.

And so we zoom forward to the gospel.

I love this.

Matthew chapter 4.

 As he, Jesus, was walking along the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who was called Peter, and his brother Andrew.

And they were casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen.

Follow me, he told them, and I will make you fish for people.

Immediately they left their nets and followed him.

Can you go back to 19 here?

Do you know what this is?

This is the recapitulation.

This is the restarting of be fruitful and multiply.

Work the land.

Rule with me.

That's what just happened, right?

 That came back into our world.

That mandate that was stolen from us, the reason that we were created, the meaning that we were meant to live in, that was robbed, has been returned to us.

Right?

It's all reinstated.

This is God getting back into our world, walking in our midst again, and inviting human beings back into His mission.

Right?

God had a mission in Eden.

Well, Jesus had a mission in Galilee.

That's really important.

Because for the first time,

 Since the garden, since creation, God's mission and man's mission can be one again.

And so the apostles are meant to be little representatives for humanity, you know?

That's why they're these run-of-the-mill losers who have nothing going for them.

I'm just being honest.

They represent, there's a famous story I had to read in high school by Nathaniel Hawthorne who wrote the Scarlet Letter called Young Goodman Brown.

And Young Goodman Brown is just meant to be a guy.

He's given the name Young Goodman Brown because it's like the most average name ever because he's just supposed to be all of us.

 And that's what we see in the apostles.

We don't see impressive people.

We don't see learned people.

No, we see losers.

And 99.9% of people deeply resonate with them because they're our representatives.

He didn't grab people who were worthy of being new little Adams.

He grabbed all the fallen, messed up people that looked like Adam when he got kicked out and said, Adam, come back in.

The angel with the fire sword has been removed from the eastern gate of the garden.

Come back in.

 Humanity is snatched back into God's story, to God's will being done on earth as it is in heaven.

That's really cool.

In other words, meaning and purpose is restored.

We get to live lives of meaning again because of the gospel.

Peter says in 1 Peter 1 that you were redeemed from your empty or vain way of life, that was passed down to you from your fathers by the precious blood of Jesus Christ.

 What needed to happen so that we could be brought back to Eden to live lives of meaning again was for Jesus Christ to die.

And so God is saying to them, hey, come and build with me again.

Come and rule.

Come and cultivate the land.

And what it means is the curse that was on the ground has been lifted.

Matthew 9, verse 37.

Pastor James read it already.

Look at this.

Think about this.

Then he said to the disciples, the harvest is abundant.

Wait a minute.

I thought the ground was cursed.

Not anymore.

Not anymore.

Not anymore.

 The ground is not fighting back against you anymore.

The harvest is plentiful.

It's abundant.

It's begging to be reaped.

That's awesome.

I love that.

 We have our mission once again.

And that's why the call to good works is such freaking good news.

Because my life doesn't have to be meaningless anymore.

Listen to what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15.

He says, therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the Lord's work.

Why?

Because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.

It's not in vain.

The vanity is gone.

I've often heard something like, you know, you could just sit at his feet for the rest of your life.

 And that would be enough.

And I thought that was really cool when I first heard it.

And I don't know if I think that's true anymore.

I think that I am, as a human being, I am hardwired, like all of you, to crave mission.

And I cannot live without it.

My fiancee, Blythe, she told me about this show.

 It's called Special Forces.

Anyone heard of Special Forces?

It's the dumbest concept for a game show I've ever heard.

They get these tough military dudes and they bring on like F-list celebrities, maybe lower than that.

And they're like, here's what we're going to do.

I'm going to make you do some hard military stuff.

And it's a group.

And guess what?

Here's the prize.

There isn't a prize.

 So just imagine being physically tortured by some marine, and the prize is like, if I get through this, I get nothing.

Oh, right, yeah.

Huh.

And I heard that, and I was like, that is so stupid.

Everybody is going to leave right away, because welcome to being a human.

Without a mission to work towards, without an end goal, without a telos, right?

Without a way to become complete, right?

 I can't work and I can't live.

And so ministering to God, you know, ministering to God is one of those things.

What the Bible says is that we're all priests now.

And so, no, it's not at all just about what you do.

Right?

It is about being in the presence of God.

But the job of the priest is also to mediate God's presence to the rest of the world.

Yeah.

 And that's why life in Christ is so epic.

Because I am now a walking, breathing, living temple of God.

Right?

In the Old Testament, the nations, Jesus, he flips tables and he says, my house will be a house of prayer for all nations.

Not anymore.

The nations were once called to the temple.

Today, the temples are sent to the nations.

That is so sick.

And so here's my challenge to you this morning.

Do not join.

 Do not join our culture in rejecting the premises of Genesis 1, 2, and 3.

It doesn't go where you think it will.

The temptation of autonomy and self-ownership and self-rulership, it ruins everything.

That's what got us in this mess in the first place.

And so do not try to make meaning out of your independence and your originality and your self-creation.

We cannot create ultimate pathways of meaning.

We can only submit to the one that's already been carved out before us by God.

 And that path was blocked off for quite some time, but Jesus has opened the way.

Invited us back to the narrow path.

There is a right way to live, and it's the best way.

I'll close with this.

Here's how Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians chapter 5.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

Pay attention to that.

That new creation language.

The old has passed, and see, the new has come.

 Everything is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ, and given us the ministry of reconciliation.

That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and he has committed the message of reconciliation to us.

Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us.

We plead on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God.

Then chapter 6, verse 1.

Working together with him, or in the NIV, it's cooler, as God's co-workers...

 we also appeal to you, don't receive the grace of God in vain.

When you read chapter 5, it's to pay attention to that new creation language, right?

In Eden, God creates the world.

He creates Eden, and He cultivates that bit of land, and He gives it to Adam, and then He leaves the rest of the world to Adam to do.

Right?

You understand?

God uses His creative power

 to make a place for Adam to live, and then entrusts Adam to colonize the rest of the world with Eden's beauty.

Okay, it's the same thing.

Jesus has, that's Eden, and Jesus has the recreative power.

He recreates the world, and then leaves the mandate of colonizing this kingdom, of spreading its word.

He leaves that to us.

We have essentially the same mandate, the same command as Adam.

We've been put back in our proper place.

We get to be coworkers with God.

 Right?

It's like He starts the work and then He asks us to finish it.

That's huge.

That's really significant.

This is the one path to true meaning.

This is the one life that's worth living.

Everything else falls entirely too short of what is offered to us in Christ.

I get to be involved in divine things.

Jesus says in John chapter 15, He says, I no longer, I no longer call you servants, I call you friends.

Because I've shown you what my Father is doing.

In other words, you and I get to be about the Father's business.

 We get invited into the family business, and it's a really good one.

And it's a really important one.

And it's the one that's re-beautifying our world.

And it's calling men, be reconciled to God.

There is nothing better to live for.

You and your pleasures and your desires are not a better reason to keep on existing than the glory of God is.