Thanks for listening to the His Hands Church podcast. If you're using the His Hands Church mobile app, please turn off the auto lock on your phone's general settings so that you can listen to the message uninterrupted. And thank you for being part of what God is doing at His Hands. Good morning. That was awesome. Had kind of a Holy Spirit moment during that last song. That was good. I'll have to talk about that in a second. If it's your first time here, welcome to His Hands. We are really excited that you're here. If it is your first time here, just know a couple things. We're just a bunch of normal people that really love Jesus and love each other. We're a big family. You can be yourself, you can be who you are, and just know that you're loved. We've got a couple quick announcements for you guys this morning. We've got a big, a big thing coming up in the next couple weeks. It's one of our biggest Sundays of the year, and it's Baptism Sunday. It's so exciting. It's Baptism Sunday. It's Sunday, November 10th, and there should be something on the screen. It's coming up here in just a second. It's kind of a cool picture of what Baptism Sunday is all about. But it's Sunday, November 10th. We have a sign-up table outside in the lobby. And you can sign up this morning to get baptized, or if you have children that are getting baptized, you don't have to sign up, but it helps us kind of know what to expect. This is a picture of a bunch of different walls that we have here in our baptism area. And we have this sort of tradition where when people get baptized, they sign their name on the wall. And so it's kind of hard to make out all of them. You know, we'd have to zoom in really closely to do it, but it's it's upwards of 800 something signatures, which is really exciting. And that's that's just that's just people going all in with Jesus. And so every time I walk back there, it is it is like a Holy Spirit time because it just shows you that God is working and He's moving and He is He's prompting us and leading us to go all in with Jesus. And so it's gonna be an incredible morning. Sunday, November 10th. You can sign up this morning. All you really need to know is to bring yourself a change of clothes, a couple towels, and even if you forget that stuff, we'll have extra. Uh, but it's gonna be amazing. And if you want to stay, this is something I encourage everyone to do if you never have, or even if you just have every time, because when you see 50-something, 60-something people go all in with Jesus, it is it is exciting. And the Holy Spirit is present. And so if you even if you just want to stay for an extra 30, 40 minutes and cheer on the people that are taking that next step, um, it's it's gonna be a great day. The next Sunday after that is gonna be Tailgate Sunday. It was on November 3rd, but we're moving it to November 17th, and that day is gonna be a blast as well. A little less spiritually significant, slightly, but uh, but still a lot of fun. We're gonna have we're gonna have a chili cook-off, we'll have sign-ups for that really soon. We're gonna have big inflatables for the kids and uh me and some other people. Um it's gonna be it's gonna be a lot of fun. We show the game up here on the big screen, uh, you know, 40 feet by 11 feet of HD awesomeness for for all of us that love football. And even if you don't love football, the Salisbury's are cooking food, so that's a reason to stay in and of itself. It's just gonna be a good day, a good day with our family. So that's uh the 17th, right after Baptism Sunday. It's gonna be awesome, and something that'll really help you keep track of all the things going on here. We have a mobile app that you can download. It's a free mobile app. Just search on your app store, uh, look for his hands and download that app, and all of our events are in there. So if you're ever curious about, man, what day was that or what's coming up, you can just go to the events page and it's all there, all the details that you would need to know. So, yeah, yay for technology. Um, only other thing I just want to mention is a big thank you to everyone who's who's helping us with giving. Uh, God is using it, he's doing some really cool things through it. One of the things that we've been doing this year, and we mention it a lot because it's it's it's exciting, it's exciting for me, is that we're giving 15% of everything that we're given back to the community through three local charities. There's the Hope Center, Papa's Pantry, and the Cherokee Family Violence Center. And so every time you give, know that it's not just going to what God's doing here, which is a worthy cause in and of itself, but it is going to support this community. And we need it to appreciate it. There's four columns on the back that you can uh you can use for giving. There's electronic giving, uh, paper, tangible, I don't know what to call it, old school giving. It's all good. It's all good. And God blesses all of it, and He promises to bless all of it. So uh let's pray and jump into what we're gonna talk about this morning. Jesus, thank you so much for uh for being with us this morning. Thank you for blessing us like you have. Uh, we love you. You're amazing. We just pray that you would speak to us through your word. You would teach us about who you are and about the life that you have for us. And we ask all this in your name. Amen. I forgot to unlock my computer screen. Uh the good news is I have my password hidden, so you guys should not be able to use this against me. Things that you forget. And boom, there we go. All right. Well, um, if you were here last Sunday, Ben Sykes started an exciting new series. It's a really exciting series. It's gonna take us all the way into the Christmas season. And and man, it was one of those things when Ben first showed me what he shared last week, it was about a year ago. I'll tell that story here in a little bit, but it affected me in an incredible way. God gave Ben this really, really creative and unique visual perspective on the entire story of the Bible. The Old Testament, the New Testament, stuff that hasn't even even happened yet. And so last week, Ben was on stage and we had a camera that he was he was drawing on a piece of paper, and that was up on the side screens, and he drew the entire history of the Bible, including Revelation and all of it, on a single piece of paper. But it wasn't just a line with some events written on it, it was it was a picture. It was really, really cool. We were just cool. There's some things in life that you can just look at, and it's okay to just be like, that is cool. And it was one of those things. It was just really cool. So if you weren't here last week, we have a video of that online on our YouTube channel that you can check out. There's a link on the bottom right corner of our website's homepage, and there's also a link on Facebook. Really want to encourage you to watch it. Because if you do, you're gonna see what God showed Ben, and it's really exciting. We're gonna spend the next eight weeks going through kind of each chapter of what Ben shared with us last week. So definitely check out that video, but we'll give you a little recap this morning in case you weren't here. In the drawing, Ben used trees as landmarks. And that works really well. If you have a significant tree in your yard, if you have a big willow tree, for example, and you're giving someone directions to your house, you might tell them when you see the big willow tree, you've arrived. And it's interesting because Ben sort of noticed that every time God shows up and gives his people this incredible new promise, there's a tree. And it could be that God just kind of has a thing for trees. The Bible sort of begins with a tree and ends with a tree, or it could just be, as Ben pointed out last week, that there are a lot of trees. So when God shows up, the likelihood of a tree being nearby is high. It's high. But every single time he shows up and gives this promise to his people, a new promise, there's either a literal tree or a figurative one that's there. There's a really cool thing that he noticed, and so he drew out six trees. We're gonna talk about seven. He drew out six trees, and they were they were represented by these little dots, and then he kind of talked about the history of what God has done and connected all those dots together in this really interesting way where it kind of swirled and didn't look like it was gonna line up, but it all came together, and then that seventh tree came at the very end. The entire drawing becomes a tree. And it's very fitting for us because as a church, trees have kind of become like our unofficial logo. Specifically one tree, and that's the tree of life. If you ever walk down the hallways here, if you're new, you're like, what are all these trees? Well, those are the tree of life. Marlon Yoder has gotten inspired to paint those. He's a decent painter. And so there's all these different trees that represent what we're really about as a church, and that's the tree of life. We're gonna talk about that this morning. But it's very fitting that the vision God gave Ben for this was a tree. And it was cool because as he was as he was talking last week at the very end, and after he drew the tree that his drawing becomes, he was telling the story that he was walking through our hallways a few months ago, and he noticed this one specific tree that Marlon had drawn. It was a new tree. And he got to looking at it, and it it really captivated him. And as he looked at it, he realized that it was the same tree that God had prompted him to draw. Same proportions, same dimensions. It was the same tree. And it's just a cool example of how the Holy Spirit works, where the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. Sometimes he's prompting us to do different things, but he brings it all together. And so last week we started with a single piece of paper. That's what, that's where it all began. And after a series of dots and lines and erasing and all that kind of stuff that went into telling the story, we ended up with this, which is this kind of abstract tree that that Ben drew. And then this is the tree that it kind of all connected to in the end. And it really doesn't do it justice just to look at it in the stages that it's in. So we have a really short, a really short video. And if we could actually bring the lights down, even that would probably help it be seen. We have a really short video that kind of shows you in and fast forward the process of how this was drawn. Then we'll we'll focus on the first part of it this morning. So this is sort of the story of the tree. So I have to tell you this story before we jump on the first tree. The very first time I saw this was uh about a year ago. And I had asked Ben to do something pretty intense, and that was to lead our Wednesday night junior high small group. Uh and junior high students are funny. We have a big group of junior high students that meets while we're in here every Sunday. And in the in the morning time on a Sunday, junior high students are kind of like zombies. They just sort of stumble in, they're lifeless. We have to kind of wake them up. On a Wednesday night at 7 p.m., it's like the polar opposite. I don't know if it's the number of monsters they've had throughout the day or if they've just been cooped up in school, but they are off the wall. And so asking someone, hey, how would you like to take on these 40 junior high kids that have all this crazy energy? It's a big thing to ask. And I'd already asked Ben to do it once, and he said yes. And sometimes I've learned that once is enough for some people and that kind of thing. So I was just asking him if he'd do it. And he says, Yes, I'll do it. And I was like, oh, thank you so much. Because it's good. They're worth it. And he says, I have this idea for what to share. And it's the story of the Bible, the entire story of the Bible in eight weeks. And I was kind of like, well, that's that's ambitious. That is more than I would try to take on with that group. But yeah. And he goes, actually, I have this drawing that I think God kind of showed me, and I want to draw it for you and show you what I would kind of do. And so he draws it for me, much like he did last week. I sat there and I watched him draw it as he explained it. And I'm kind of confused at first, but then it starts to kind of come together. I'm like, oh, this is really cool. And after a while, I'm just, you know, locked on, just mesmerized by it. And he finishes and he says, Do you think, do you think this would work? Do you think this is good enough to teach? And I was like, Well, you know, I think it's okay. With a few tweaks, we might be able to make. I was like, no, this is so cool. This is awesome. I mean, I was I was blown away by it. I had actually never seen, I've grown up in church my whole life, but I had never seen the story of the Bible laid out in a way that made me realize so many things that Jesus said were true. That he told the Pharisees, you search the scriptures to find God, but the scriptures point to me. And all the way through, as he draws it, you can see that it's about to lead to Jesus. It's about to lead to him. You see that God had this incredible plan. Ephesians 1, God says that from the beginning, before time even existed, he had this plan through Jesus to bring us into a relationship with him, into his family. And sometimes you can read the Old Testament, it just seems like things are failing. But the way that Ben drew it out, you can just see that it is coming together, that God does have control. It was just really, really cool. And so today we're going to start with the first tree. It's the tree of life, the very first dot on our piece of paper. And the tree of life, like I said, has become this sort of symbol of who we are as a church. And we're going to go into some details about that. So if you've been coming for a long time, you've probably heard Steve talk about the tree of life a lot, but it's important for us to focus on because it is so foundational to who we are, and it just so happens to be the first tree in our story. And we get to the tree of life in Genesis chapter 2, and it says the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east. And there he placed the man he had made. The Lord God made all sorts of trees grow up from the ground, trees that were beautiful and that produced delicious fruit. In the middle of the garden, he placed the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. So we have two trees. And the tree of life is the one that God says, eat from it, eat freely. And it could not have been named something better, because life is the best word to describe what the world was like at that time. There was perfect harmony between all of creation. There was a completely perfect, intimate relationship with God. You know, God walked with us. There was no propriety, there was no formality in our relationship with Him. It was just life. And as long as Adam and Eve lived at the tree of life, they had life and they had it in abundance. There's another tree. And that tree, the tree of knowledge of good and evil, gave us a choice. Sometimes we hear the phrase forbidden fruit. And this literally is the original forbidden fruit. That's where that phrase comes from. And we hear that phrase, we think of the normal things, okay? Lust, power, temptation, greed, you know, all those kind of things. That's what we think of when we think of forbidden fruit. But it's interesting because the original forbidden fruit was the knowledge of good and evil. Knowing right from wrong. That was the forbidden fruit. That is what God did not want us to experience, knowing right from wrong. And that's kind of curious, especially in a church setting, because religion is obsessed with what is right and what is wrong. Religion is obsessed with doing what is right and avoiding what is wrong. It's obsessed with advocating what is right and boycotting what is wrong. Whether that be a style of dress, a movie, a political party, you name it. That's what religion is in a nutshell, obsessive about what is right and what is wrong. And that is the tree that God said, do not eat from. He actually said, Do not eat from this tree. If you do, you'll die. And he wasn't threatening people when he said that. He wasn't saying, if you do this, I'm going to kill you because he doesn't do it. He's just stating a fact. He's saying, hey, look, you have life. And you can eat freely from life. But if you choose something other than life, the result is death. So don't choose that. Choose life. But that forbidden fruit, it was the knowledge of good and evil. We call ourselves a non-religious church, and sometimes that can cause confusion. But I think it's a really important phrase for us. Because what we see in this story is that religion, knowing right from wrong, is not life. It is not what God ultimately desires for us. In his original design, he didn't want us to have it at all. You could actually call the tree of knowledge of good and evil the tree of religion, and it wouldn't be a huge misnomer. He wants us to have life. And so what that means for us is really simple. We want to live at the tree of life. We want to live in this relationship with God, this freedom and joy and love with God, not living obsessed with the proper dress code for Sundays or how loud or quiet worship music should be. We don't want to be focused on those things. We want to be focused on relationship and life. And that's not to say that we have an anything goes mentality towards sin because we don't. But it's a recognition that knowing right from wrong and trying your hardest to do what is right and not do what is wrong is not the solution for sin. In fact, it was the cause of sin. Religion is at odds with Jesus. Jesus fought harder against religion than he fought against any of the obvious moral sins you could think of. And it was religion and those that were devoted to it that fought the hardest against Jesus. So Jesus stands in opposition of religion. And it's kind of a curious thing to sort out. When I think about this, when I think about this tree of life versus tree of knowledge of good and evil, uh the first thing that I think of is my relationship with my son. And I talk about him a lot because I love him. You know, my son's three years old now. And in the last couple of years, he has started to learn what is right and what is wrong. And that has changed the dynamic I have with him. We have a great relationship, we laugh a lot, we have a lot of fun. But the more he knows what is right and what is wrong, the more I am obligated to discipline him. Not because he's doing something that's wrong, because he did plenty of that before he knew right from wrong. But I'm obligated to discipline him because he's doing what is wrong, knowing that it's wrong. And as a good father, I have to do something about that. And he gets very creative, he gets very clever. In fact, I have kind of my own tree as an example. Uh, it's just very fitting for this morning. I had a 15-hour drive with my son a couple months ago. It was from Missouri, all the way here, uh, one drive, just me and him. So it should really take 12 hours, but we stopped a bunch of times, give him, you know, a break, let him play. And we were at this one park uh in the middle of nowhere at the very tip of Missouri and Kentucky. And we're in this park, we'd had lunch, and I wanted to let him play. So he's playing, and he gets to the point where he has to use the restroom. And I'm looking around, there's there's no place to go. And I know that you know, time is of the essence, and it's just us in the park, there's no one else. I mean, there's a road that's close by, so I'm like, okay, Liam, come over here. So I bring him over to this big tree and I bring him around it so it blocks his view, you know, to the road. And I said, son, you can you know you can you can pee on this tree. And he looked, he looked at me very confused, very confused. And I was kind of in a hurry because I know that I mean I don't want to have to have change him, I don't want to know all that stuff. So I'm like, come on, come on, hurry. And he's like, Dad, mom won't let me pee outside. Okay, and so what I told him was, and this is a terrible choice of words, but I wasn't thinking, I was just trying to hurry. I'm like, well, sometimes daddy lets you do things mom won't let you do. Okay? Terrible choice of words. So fast forward to about two, three weeks ago, uh, he asked Megan, I'm at home with Megan, and he asked her if he could do something. And she said no. And he threw an I mean an amazing fit. I mean, he's throwing toys, he's running around the house, he's stomping, he's doing what three-year-olds do. He's throwing this huge fit, and then he stops and he looks at me and he goes, Dad, can I do whatever he just asked Megan to do? And I said no. Mom said no. And with this look of intense anger, he stomps his feet on the ground and just screams at me, you let me do things mom won't let me do, and runs off. And it was amazing because it was two months after that, and I realize that at three years old, he's figured it out. You know, he's manipulating me. He's he's conscious, like he had a moment where he said, I know I'm doing what's wrong, I'm doing what I'm not supposed to do. But what can I do? How can I figure out a way to get what I want despite what I've been told? I mean, it wasn't a reaction, that was a conscious choice. And so as he's gotten older and he started to do things like that, I have to be different with him than I was when he was a baby. When he was a baby, he would lose his temper all the time, he would throw stuff, and and what do you do in those situations? You laugh. You don't discipline a six-month-old child for losing their temper, but when they know it's wrong, it changes the relationship. And I say all that because when I think about the tree of life, it just it just makes me wonder if when God created us, if he wanted our relationship to be like a father with a newborn, more than the relationship of a father with a child that needs correcting and taught. I can't speak for God, but that's just what it, that's just what it reminds me of. So Adam and Eve have these two trees, regardless of what God originally intended, they have a choice. Are they gonna choose the tree of life or the tree of knowledge of good and evil? Sometimes choices are hard, and Satan shows up in Genesis chapter 3 to make this choice a little bit tougher. So in Genesis 3 1, it says the serpent was the shrewdest of all the wild animals the Lord God had made. One day he asked the woman, Did God really say you must not eat the fruit from any of the trees in the garden? This is interesting because Satan's already twisting God's words. God didn't say that. But he asked the question, and this is what Eve says. Of course we may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, the woman replied. Again, God never said exactly this. She's kind of putting her own spin on it. Satan's kind of doing his thing, he's twisting words, getting her confused. And then, here comes the big lie. You won't die, the serpent replied to the woman. God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil. And this is a really tragic deception. And it's so indicative of what Satan does in us all the time. Because the temptation is to be like God. And we might use the word godly, and oftentimes that's the aim of religion: to be godly. Not to necessarily let God live through us, but to just be like him, to look like him as much as we can by doing this and not doing that. And here's what's tragic about this is that in Genesis 1.26, when God first created us, it said, Let us make human beings in our image to be like us. So Eve is being tempted to be something that she already is. But Satan begins by getting her to forget who she already is in God's eyes. And that's oftentimes what he does with us. He tempts us, he gets us to lose sight of who we are, that we are God's children, that we were created in his image. And if we lose sight of that, things get confusing. So Adam and Eve take the bait, and there are consequences. They eat from the tree, and Genesis 3 tells us that at that moment, the moment that they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, their eyes were opened and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves. They feel shame. It's the first time that shame has ever existed. It's the first time people have ever looked at themselves and not liked what they saw. Not been okay with who they were. That didn't exist before the knowledge of good and evil. So they feel shame. Our whole relationship with God changes. In Genesis 4, we get a really weird, like small verse that comes right after a description of a man named Enosh, who is the son of Seth. Seth is one of the sons of Adam and Eve. And it says that it was during the time of Enosh that people first began to worship the Lord by name. We might read that and think, oh, that's a good thing. But what we're seeing here is a shift from this informal relationship to this very formal worship. That changes. There's a curse. There's a curse that applies to both men and to women. To Eve, God says this I will sharpen the pain of your pregnancy, and in pain you will give birth, and you'll desire to control your husband, he will rule over you. So giving birth is going to become painful, and you and your husband are gonna be at odds. And we've created epidurals to help with the first part. We're still waiting for a solution for the second one. Marriage counseling is the best we've come up with so far. And it's not bad. To men he said this: Since you listened to your wife and ate from the tree, whose fruit I commanded you not to eat, the ground is cursed because of you. All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it. It'll grow thorns and thistles for you, though you will eat of its grains. By the sweat of your brow you will have food to eat until you return to the ground from which you were made. For you were made from dust, and to dust you will return. So, in other words, he's saying that you're it's gonna feel like everything in the world is fighting against you to succeed in this world. I don't know if any other men can relate to that. Or at times it feels like no matter how hard you're working, no matter how hard you're trying, everything in this world is fighting against you just to provide for your family and to do what you want to do. That was part of that. But the big, the big consequence came right at the end of that statement, and it goes a little bit further and explains what happens after this. It says, The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. And the Lord God said, The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever. So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life. So, in other words, we chose something other than life. So life was kind of taken from us. Death came into death came into this world. And death didn't just come into this world, it it reigns in this world. Death is is everywhere. It's unavoidable. You can't shield people from it, you can't shield your children from it. We try really hard to shield our children from having to come to terms and even understand the concept of death when they're really small. But no matter how hard we try, we can't do that. Not to use another story of my son, but it just fits. When my son was two, my wife and his parents took him to the beach for the first time, and they're walking along the beach and they come across a crab that had died. And Megan, you know, thinking, okay, well, he's two years old, he doesn't need to be introduced to the concept of death. He's gonna worry about his grandparents dying, you know, Justin and I dying. So she just said, hey, come on, Liam, let's go, that crab's sleeping. And Liam looked at Megan and said, Mom, it's dead. And we're really careful with what he watches on TV. I don't know if there was a Sesame Street episode that talked about that. I have no idea. But as far as I know, I have no clue how he heard about that or understood that, but he did. Even at the age of two, death is something that we start to understand, start to think about. And death reigns. You would think that understanding death at a young age, and also the fact that in human history we've been dealing with death since like forever, thousands and thousands and thousands of years of people living and dying, you'd think by now we would have come to grips with death. That we'd be okay with death, that we would have this attitude, like, yeah, it's death, everyone dies, not a big deal. Even as believers who know what's waiting for us at the end, you would think we would have that perspective. But it's hard. Death is hard. It doesn't matter how inevitable we know that it is, it doesn't matter how many people we've seen die, it doesn't matter how much history we read and how much we realize that death is everywhere. When we encounter death, it is hard. Even if someone dies in an old age and they've lived a good life, there's still a part of us that goes, that's not right. It wasn't their time. I mean, it's rare to have a situation where someone we love dies and to feel total peace about it. It happens, but it's rare. And I wonder if that's because there's a part of us that's still a little bit connected with the garden, that just understands on some level that death is not supposed to be part of our life. It is foreign to us. We were not created to die. But we do, and death reigns. And in Romans chapter 5, Paul wrote that when Adam sinned, sin entered the world, and Adam's sin brought death. So death spread to everyone, for everyone sinned. Yes, people sinned even before the law was given. But it was not counted as sin because there was not yet any law to break. Still, everyone died from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even those who did not disobey an explicit commandment of God as Adam did. So sin entered this world and it affects everyone. Sin reigns. But there's hope. It doesn't seem like there is, but there is. You know, we go back to the drawing that Ben had, and this is kind of the first chapter. This actually represents Genesis chapters 1 through 11. And there's a lot of death in chapters 1 through 11. You know, it starts at this tree, the tree of knowledge of, or sorry, the tree of life, and it looks like it's going to be a perfect circle for a while, but then we have some things happen that get in the way. We have the fall. When we choose the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and once that choice is made, everything really starts to fall, literally in the drawing. It falls off, and everything gets out of whack. And so we have other things that happen. Cain and Abel. Adam and Eve's first two children. Cain is the oldest brother, he's jealous of Abel, so he kills him. So we have death. We have the flood. There's a lot of death. The world has become so wicked that God has to start over. He saves one family, two of every kind of animal, but wipes out the rest. And that's hard for us to reconcile sometimes, to look at a loving God that we know is love and to see how that happens. But you know, the cool thing about God is that he is not bound by time, life, or death like we are. There's a verse in 1 Peter that opens a big can of like, what in the heck does that mean? And I don't even know. But it says that after Jesus died, he goes into the depths and he preaches the good news to those who had perished in the flood. I don't know how that's possible, but I'm not supposed to know, because that's a God thing. What I do know is that God's love is so strong, it's not bound by anything in this world. But still we have death. And even after all that death, even after all of that punishment, you'd think that people would have learned their lesson, but no, we have the Tower of Babel where people have become so prideful and so arrogant in their attitude toward God that he has to scatter them and disperse them. Confuses their language so that they can't work together. So it's just death and failure, and all hope seems lost. It seems so far off from what it was originally supposed to be, but like we said, there is hope. And it's interesting because that hope is first hinted at in the curse. But it's not the curse to Adam or to Eve, it's the curse to Satan. There's a curse that takes place before that. It says the Lord God said to the serpent, Because you've done this, you're cursed more than all animals, domestic and wild. You will crawl on your belly, groveling in the dust as long as you live. And I will cause hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel. So this is interesting. This is prophetic. There's a couple cool things here. First of all, Satan gets a really powerful enemy in women. It's true, it's true. This is this is cool. Women just tend to have this connection to the spiritual that men struggle with. And that's not true all the time. I'm not saying anything bad about us men, but I remember a few years ago, Steve asked this question to everyone in here. He asked how many men had been woken up in the middle of the night, prompted by God to pray for someone or something. And a few men raised their hand. And then he asked the same question to women, and it was like a sea of hands. There's something about women that have this sort of spiritual insight, and it's powerful. In fact, I had a friend, a couple friends, that came to me a few weeks ago. They have a friend that needed some prayer about some really spiritual stuff. And the first two people that came to my mind were Irene Stout and Lori Torelli. If you know Irene and Lori, they're amazing, super godly, and powerful prayers. And I literally had the thought, well, if I was Satan and I saw Lori and Irene walking toward me, I would run. I would run. And if you know Lori and Irene, you'll know what I'm talking about. They're a friend to everyone except for the devil and a powerful enemy to him. So there's something cool about that, but it's even more than that. It says, your offspring and her offspring will be at odds. And then it says, He will strike your head. There's this hint of victory. And it's going to come through the child and the offspring of Eve. And so fast forward a few thousand years, and we have Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, and he is doing what everyone has done throughout history. He is dealing with death. In Matthew 26, he says, My Father, if it is possible, let this cup of suffering be taken away from me. Yet I want your will to be done, not mine. So he says, God, if there's any way for me to avoid death, let it be, but I will be obedient. Paul wrote that Jesus was obedient even to the point of death on a cross. But he praised that. He's dealing with death. He's experiencing the anticipation of death. You could even say the fear of death. And he experienced death itself. Just like everyone in creation had for the most part. But there is a major difference between how Jesus dealt with death and how we deal with death. It's really simple. It's that Jesus wins. Jesus beats death. He doesn't skip death, he could have. He doesn't avoid death, he could have. He experiences death and then he gets back up. But unlike some of the other people that have been raised from the dead by prophets, no one raised Jesus to life other than the Holy Spirit, other than God or Himself. Jesus beats death. And this is powerful because it's not just beating death for himself, he beats death for us. Romans keeps going on. It says, For the sin of this one man Adam brought death to many. But even greater is God's wonderful grace and his gift of forgiveness to many through the other man, Jesus Christ. And the result of God's gracious gift is very different from the result of that one man's sin. And it goes on to say, for Adam's sin led to condemnation, but God's free gift leads to our being made right with God, even though we are guilty of many sins. For the sin of this one man Adam caused death to rule over many. But even greater is God's wonderful grace and his gift of righteousness, for all who receive it will live in triumph over sin and death through this one man, Jesus Christ. We get to live in triumph over sin and in triumph over death. And that's really powerful. Now think about how that kind of plays out in my life and some things that that affects me with. I first experienced the fear of death when I was 21 years old. I worked at Chili's, I had a daily diet of French fries and boneless buffalo wings with blue cheese dressing. There's two types of people that eat wings. There's ranch and there's blue cheese. And I don't like to step on toes and be politically correct, but if you use ranch, you're wrong. So blue cheese dressing and boneless buffalo wings. I ate those every day. And I kind of unknowingly got my cholesterol checked. And I went in and I was just gonna do a routine physical, and he wanted to draw blood, and so drew blood, and it turns out I had really high cholesterol and blood pressure at a young age. And when I when I heard that and experienced that, it wasn't like my attitude was like, well, hey, that's a pretty easy-to-manage problem. I just need to eat better and change my lifestyle up a little bit, and then I'll get under control. I was like, I'm doomed. I'm doomed. My dad has high cholesterol, he's had heart problems, my grandpa died at 52. I'm like, great, I'm the next in line, I'm doomed, all hope is lost, death. And even though it's kind of silly, it really affected me for 10 years. My attitude for the most part has not been like, yeah, I have a cholesterol problem. I'll just eat better. I've just been like, I'll eat cheeseburgers and I'll just think, it's this is killing me. This is killing me. It's a fear of death. A legitimate fear of death. But Hebrews tells us this: because God's children are human beings made of flesh and blood, the Son also became flesh and blood, for only as a human being could he die. And only by dying could he break the power of the devil who had the power of death. Only in this way could he set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of death. So because of Jesus, because he beat death, we don't have to be afraid of death. We can triumph over the fear of death. We know what's waiting for us on the other side, and it's only through Jesus that we can have that. Job was an incredibly awesome man of God that lived before Jesus. And he experienced death and that his sons and daughters died. And he comes to this point of hopelessness. And in Job 14, he says, Can the dead live again? If so, this would give me hope through all my years of struggle, and I would eagerly await the release of death. He says, if I could just know that the dead could live again, I'd have hope. And if he knew what we know, if he could have seen that Jesus rose from the dead and proved to us that yes, there is life after death through Jesus. I wonder if he would have echoed the same sentiments that Isaiah wrote, the same ones that Paul quoted in 1 Corinthians when he said, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? It's so cool that the way the Holy Spirit works, because that was a line in the song that we sang right before the message. And I had no idea that was a song we were doing this morning. They had no idea that's what we were talking about, but God works things together. He says, For sin is the sting that results in death, and the law gives sin its power. But thank God he gives us victory over sin and death through our Lord Jesus Christ. So we have victory over death. And here's what happens, guys. This is what's so exciting is that we get to go back to the tree. Because of Jesus, we get to go back to that moment personally that Adam and Eve have, and now we have a choice again. We're not under the decision that Adam and Eve made. The tree of knowledge of good and evil. We have a choice now. We get to go back to the tree. If we choose to, we get to go back to the tree of life. We have that opportunity to choose life. To choose Jesus. Because he is life. He is the author of life. He is the sustainer of life. He's the resurrector of life. He is life itself. He called himself the bread of life. He said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. And we get to choose Jesus. And we triumph over death. We don't have to fear it. We can be like Job, but knowing that yes, we do live again. So if you're here this morning and you've never chosen the tree, this morning we have a chance to go back to the tree of life. Marlon painted this tree for this morning. He's actually going to do a different tree for every single morning that we do over the next several weeks. We're going to put them all up in a hallway and have kind of the whole story laid out. It's really cool. And you can kind of see the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the background. But you have to almost know it's there to look at it. Because when you really see the tree of life for what it is, you can't take your eyes off of it. So our chance this morning is to choose the right tree, to choose life. If you're here this morning and you've never made that choice, you've never started that relationship with Jesus, it's just choosing life. It's saying, I don't want death, I don't want shame, I don't want a curse, I want life, and I want life abundantly. That's what Jesus gives. And it's ours for the taking. Normally we finish with a prayer, and then we do another song. But this morning, the last song really is our prayer. It really is. And so we're going to uh we're gonna finish with a loud declaration this morning, with a prayer. And I actually think it's kind of appropriate for for us to do it is the hands in the pile, because if I can think of one word that gives us freedom to celebrate, it's the word Jesus. It's his name. So let's do this. If you stand up, if you've never been here before, you'll figure it out. It's pretty simple. Just put your hand out around someone you're around. Okay, yeah, come by, circle up, put your hand with someone. You see, sports teams do this all the time. And we're gonna we're gonna count down. We're gonna start it up, stir it, and on three, we're gonna yell Jesus, and we're gonna celebrate that death has been defeated. Okay, so here we go. I'll do it with you guys. Here we go. You ready? Alright, start one, two, three, Jesus! Woo!