>> Well, thank you all.
Am I the only Presbyterian here?
Is that possible?
Looks like it.
No tomatoes, okay?
No, don't throw any tomatoes or dead cats or
anything.
I'll mind my manners as instructed.
I do want to thank you for the invitation.
About in 2007, me and a few other families
planted the first reform church in Lafayette,
the only reform church in Lafayette.
There had been some PCUSA churches that I
think were faithful many years ago,
but had long since apostatized.
But we were the only reform people in Lafay
ette, and I would visit Baton Rouge
occasionally,
once a month for the Founders' Ministry
meetings, which was a Southern Baptist
ministry,
and there I met Brother Dale and Philip and
many others.
And it was just nice to be able to know that I
'm not crazy and that I have some friends,
even if I have to drive over the bridge to
make it here, which I just did,
and it took me about three hours, and I am
Bert on driving right now.
But I do appreciate the invite.
I do think sectarianism really is one of the
unrecognized sins
of American evangelicalism, not that we don't
have division of labor and division
of perspectives and division of preferences,
amen?
But sectarianism is that rivalry and that mal
ice and that just turfdom,
and I don't think Christ is honored by that.
The world is supposed to see our love one for
another and know that we have been with Christ
and that we are His disciples, and really,
what does Solomon say?
A threefold cord is not easily broken.
You know, there's victory in unity.
There's not a lot of victory in fighting all
the time,
and so I really do appreciate the invitation,
and I'm blessed by it, I'm blessed by it.
So my assignment is to preach on pre-Fall Man,
and that's what I'm going to be doing
from Genesis chapter one, starting in verse 26
, pre-Fall Man.
A lot to say here, and so we'll try to narrow
it down a little bit,
but let's go to the Lord and ask for some help
.
Father, we do come to you and we ask that
through the preaching of your word
that you might compel us to be a salt and
light in this world.
We ask that through the preaching of your word
that we might be challenged and transformed
and perhaps corrected and encouraged and
comforted by your spirit.
We pray, Father, that you would do this, even
though I have some frailties
and even though I have some weaknesses, I pray
that you would work through those,
through the preaching of your word and by the
power of your spirit this evening,
in Jesus Christ's name, and all who agree,
would you say amen?
>>Amen.
>>Amen. Let me read this for us.
Genesis chapter one, verse 26, then God said,
"Let us make man in our image after our liken
ess,
and let them have," I see it's on the screen
there, "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, and 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, amen.
And there was evening, and there was morning,
the sixth day.
The sixth day. There's so much to say here,
honestly.
There's so much to say. I struggle for a few.
Am I too loud, or is it totally normal? It's
good.
I struggle with what exactly do I say in 30 to
40 minutes, you know?
There is so much here. The Book of Genesis
lays the foundation for the rest of the entire
Bible.
I mean, some commentators over the years had
said,
"If you only had one book from the whole Bible
to take with you to a desert island,
you'd want to take the Book of Genesis,
because everything is there,
even though it's only in seed form."
It's the foundation of all sorts of things, so
it's very rich, very deep.
Every ism in our world today, every false ism,
every false teaching,
and every false doctrine that is all
throughout the West today
is refuted by the Book of Genesis, and in fact
, you can refute nearly all of them
just with the first chapter of the Book of
Genesis.
It's a very profound book, very rich,
and so what do you preach about? Pre-Fall Man
in 30 minutes, and so...
What I wanted to zero in on is right there in
verse 31.
It's the last three words of verse 31.
See if we can put it up verse 31.
It's the last three words, the sixth day.
That's interesting, right?
You know, when the Book of Genesis was first
written,
it was written in Cuneiform.
Anybody know what that is? Does anyone know
what that is?
It's the use of a hammer and a chisel.
You know, many people theorize that the reason
Hebrew is written backwards
is because they had to write it with a hammer
in the right hand
and a chisel in the left, and so it's
backwards.
You know, it's not written with an ink pen, it
's backwards,
and they had to chisel it on stone.
And you've got to think, if you're chiseling
on stone,
you're not going to put any extra fluff words,
right, amen?
Every word's going to count. Every word's
going to count, you know?
And of course, the Bible says that man does
not live on bread alone,
but on some of the words of the Bible. Amen?
No, no.
Man does not live on bread alone, but man
lives on every word
that proceeds from the mouth of God.
Every jot and every tittle is very important.
So I have zero in on these three words and say
the sixth day.
God, why do I need to know that He was created
on Friday?
Well, why do I need to know that?
And these days and all can be a little
complicated.
So, you know, you have to Google it, the sixth
day.
What is the sixth day? Well, it's Friday.
Oh, God, why are you telling me among all
these other things
that man has created on Friday?
I think there's a lot of answers to it.
One is, I think, is that because man being
born on Friday
was then killed on Friday and then raised
again
on the first day of a new week.
That's interesting, right?
The number of Adam is what? Six.
But then now we have the number of Christ, the
perfect man,
who is seven.
You really see the pre-fall man, the fall of
man,
the redemption of man, and the glory of man
in the transition from the number six to seven
,
all right there in the very first chapter.
There's a lot here, but the one thing I wanted
to focus on,
I think, I think, and there's good reason to
believe
that the reason we are told that man is
created on Friday
among a thousand other reasons.
But one is to let us know that when God was
done with creation
and he put a man in that garden and he stepped
back
and he said, "This is good, amen.
Now my creation is complete.
It is finally culminated and the sun goes down
and the very next day, the first day of this
creation
is Saturday, which for the Old Testament is
what?
It's the Sabbath, the first day that man,
pre-fallen man, created perfect, created
righteous,
created in the image of God, the first day
that he experienced as a man.
He was created as a man, he was a little
toddler,
you probably know that already, he was created
as a man.
I don't know if he had a belly button or not,
but he was a man.
He was created to commune with his Heavenly
Father,
the sovereign God, on the Sabbath.
Remember, the Bible tells us that he walked
with God
in the cool of the morning, amen?
He had fellowship with God, communion with God
,
koinonia with God, consecrated rest with God.
The first day, it's like God is saying to us,
"This world that I have created,
"there's a lot of work to be done.
"Man has a lot of work to be done.
"I've created man to rule, to exercise domin
ion
"over the fish of the sea and over the birds
of the air."
But first, let's have church.
Like, let's first, let's walk together
in the cool of the morning and let me bless
you.
Like, let me delight in you and you worship me
.
The first day, the essential thing, the
essential of man,
of pre-fallen man, that he was in right
relationship with God.
That's the most important thing.
He was a creation designed to worship, and he
worshiped.
Now, we know how this ends up,
but that's Pastor Brian's job in the next
sermon.
But man was created good, he was created
complete,
and he was the king of the world, so to speak,
and we'll talk more about that, and he rested
with God.
Now, where, where was man created?
Where did this Sabbath rest on the first day
of this new creation when the sun came up
that Saturday morning?
Where was man, and where was God?
They were in the Garden of Eden, amen, right?
We know the story, but what is, what's the
Garden of Eden?
It's distinct from the rest of the world,
right?
The Bible tells us that the Garden of Eden
has four rivers coming out of it.
So you wanna know about pre-fallen man?
It helps to know a little bit about his house,
his home.
There he was in the Garden,
and four rivers flowed out of the Garden.
And now rivers flow up Hillardownhill, they
flow downhill.
So commentators and scholars for years
have always speculated that the Garden of Eden
was on top of a mountain, or on a plateau of
some sort,
so that these four rivers flowed out
in four different directions, the Tigris, the
Euphrates,
the Peshon, and the Geon, that's right.
One of those they can't find,
they're not sure exactly where that is these
days.
But four go out, I speculate that those four
went out to the four corners of the earth.
So you have this, this mountaintop garden
with God and man on Sabbath, it's beautiful.
Now the Garden has a gate, right?
So if it has a gate, there must be some sort
of,
you know, natural wall.
You don't just walk up into the Garden
any which way you want.
You don't just walk up into the presence of
God, right?
You have to be, you know, invited.
You have to be worthy.
And there's a gate, and you remember after the
fall,
I won't get into it, but angels guarded that
gate,
no man could enter that gate
without coming under that fiery sword.
Now which way did that gate face?
Do you know your book of Genesis?
It faced east.
They were cast out east of Eden.
Now what else faced east?
Well, it's the temple, the temple, the temple.
You see, Genesis is narrative.
It's not didactic theology like the book of
Romans.
It's narrative.
So you have to get into sort of the narrative
mode.
But what we have here, the very first day of
creation,
pre-fall man, no sin in this world,
is man and God together walking
in the cool of their garden temple, right?
Atop of the world.
I like that.
It's beautiful.
It's fellowship.
It's koinedia.
It's really, it's church.
It's what we think of as church.
The gathering of the saints in the presence of
God.
Now we don't gather in a garden top temple,
and we don't gather in a temple in Jerusalem.
We gather, when we gather, we are the temple,
amen?
We're the culmination of this original
narratival theme from the book of Genesis.
But that is what the world is essentially
about.
God and man and fellowship together,
ruling the world as co-laborers,
one sovereign, the other one, the vice regent.
Ah, it's a beautiful thing.
It's a beautiful thing and, you know.
But here's the question.
I wanna dive into it a little bit more today.
That was Saturday.
That was the Sabbath.
But what about the rest of the days?
What about the rest of the days?
What did pre-Fall man have to do with his,
for us, the Monday through Saturday, right?
What was he supposed to do?
Was there a work to be done?
Was he always just in church?
Always in a holy huddle?
Always just praying and singing psalms,
and, you know, right there with the stained
glass windows,
just fellowshiping with God, you know, hearing
sermons.
Is that all he did for all of his life?
No, he had hands.
He had feet.
He wasn't just a worshiping heart and mouth,
right?
He was designed to take hold of something, to
rule,
to use his reason and his logic and his
language.
Look, we don't have to guess.
We know what his job was to do.
Now first, let's rest, Adam.
Let's rest together in the garden.
But now tomorrow morning, equipped for service
,
I need you to go out.
You're gonna follow those four rivers
off to the four corners of the earth,
and you're gonna turn, I think,
you're basically exercising rule over this
earth
to make it like this garden.
This is how to do it, Adam.
This is how to do it.
But look, we don't have to guess, verse 27.
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God, he created him.
Male and female, he created him.
By the way, male and female is essential to
your humanity.
Amen.
Race is not essential to your humanity.
There's only one race, ultimate.
Now race is important.
Culture is important.
Race isn't essential to your humanity.
Male and female is essential to your humanity.
Isn't it something that the world
actually says the opposite?
Right, and that's something, yeah.
But no 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, here's what you're gonna do, Adam
.
You're gonna be fruitful, and you're gonna
multiply.
And you're going to fill, read that with me,
fill the garden.
It's what it says, no.
Fill, make sure, your screen is the same as
mine, right?
Fill the earth, and subdue it, and have domin
ion.
That means rule, that means kingship.
Now of course we understand that God is
sovereign,
and so Adam is ruling over this earthy area
as his vice regent.
Would you nod your head if you've heard this?
This is not the first time you've heard this,
I'm pretty sure, and God blessed them,
and God said, be fruitful, multiply and fill
the earth,
and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish
of the sea,
all the way down to the bottom of the depths,
Adam.
And over the birds of the heavens,
all the way up into the atmosphere.
And over everything that moves on earth,
I want you to fill the earth,
and I want you to rule the earth,
and I want you to subdue the earth.
That's the purpose statement of man.
He creates them in his image,
and the first thing he says is exercise domin
ion.
Rule, rule well, of course, according to the
name of God,
and in the glory of God, according to the laws
of God,
but you have a job to do, you have a job to do
.
And what was the domain that Adam was to
exercise
his rule over?
The whole earth, the whole earth, the whole
earth.
And I do believe that the church,
as Pastor Brian was saying,
must recover a biblical view of man, amen?
And that's the biblical view of the will of
man,
the biblical view of the nature of man,
the biblical view of the destiny of man,
the biblical view of the purpose of man,
which is what I'm particularly focusing on.
The purpose of man,
which is to exercise dominion over the earth.
Now there's a lot to say about this.
It's a big topic and we don't have much to get
into it,
but look at Psalm eight, verse four.
What is man that you are mindful of him
and the Son of man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him a little lower,
we don't have this one on the screen,
but yet you have made him a little lower
than the heavenly beings and crowned him with
glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of
your hands.
You have put all things under his feet.
What's the purpose of man?
The modern evangelical church desperately
needs
to be reformed in the area of biblical
anthropology,
a biblical understanding of man.
In particular, the church needs to come to
understand
what we're doing down here, amen?
Why we are alive.
Now we see this dominion immediately start to
happen.
We see the first farmer.
Who's the first farmer?
There's not too many of us in here to say a
little something.
Who's the first farmer?
Cain, that's Cain, right?
Am I right?
It's Cain, right?
And who's the first shepherd able?
So we have right out of the beginning,
we have husbandry and we have agriculture.
We see man beginning to exercise dominion.
Now we know sin affects it.
And so the man often, usually with sin,
exercises dominion in his own name
and for his own glory and for his own kingdom.
So we need redemption.
We need the Holy Spirit.
We need that that's coming in the future.
But we see man beginning to live out his
purpose
even if flawed by sin right out of the gate.
You know, the world would tell us
that man was first created.
Or no, the world would tell us
that man happened by chance,
a small meaningless bit of sludge and a swamp
somewhere.
You've heard this, right?
You've heard this silliness.
And then, you know, what do you, what do fish
have, right?
Not wings, fins just emerge
and they just walk up on the shore and grow
some legs.
And at some point in time, some ape-like
creature
went through some mutations and became a cave
man.
And the caveman grunted, you know, grunted
and was rather dull and, you know, didn't
really,
he understood fire, he figured out fire
after like 10 million years.
But no, the Bible says immediately upon
creation,
man is engaged in the domestication of animals
.
And if anyone has ever had a farm or even had
a chicken,
the domestication of animals takes time and
effort
and brain power and work.
You all understand that the chickens that you
see
would not live in the wild, right?
They have been domesticated by men fulfilling
their purpose.
And even when man fulfills their purpose,
not in the name of God, God still uses it
for his own glory and for the advancement
of his own kingdom.
He still uses them, you understand, right?
Even though they might mean it for evil,
he means it for good.
Metallurgy, you read the first few chapters of
Genesis,
you start to see metallurgy and music and art
and war
and civilization being built.
You know, Cain builds the first civilization,
a civilization to his own name and his own
glory.
But the mission is clear, man is to build,
man is to spread out, man is to fill the earth
,
to subdue it, to bring about its fullest
potential
in the name of God and for the glory of God
and for the good of one another.
You know, what if the church took up this task
?
The canes of this world have always been good
at it.
And God, of course, uses that,
but what if we took up this task?
We do the church thing, we've got that down, I
think.
Now worship needs to be reformed.
Don't hear me saying otherwise.
Worship in modern evangelicalism needs to be
reformed.
But even in the reform world, I think we have
to recognize
that a huddle is only as good as the play that
you call
and then run, amen.
We're not just supposed to hold the huddle.
Now we need to holy huddle.
The Lord's Day is a non-negotiable
and worship is essential
and the ecclesiastical sphere is absolutely
important
and God has its role for it.
But the ministers are to equip the saints
for the work of the money through Saturday
ministry, amen.
That's all a part of this particular purpose.
You know what, just as a thought experiment,
and I don't know the answer to this,
but what if every human in Baton Rouge, Living
ston Parish,
all of the surrounding parishes,
I don't know the names of them, all right, all
of them.
What if all the humans started going to church
every Sunday?
Like Tiger Stadium or all the big stadiums.
Is that the name of the stadium?
Tiger Stadium.
I'm a raging Cajun, so sorry.
No tomatoes or dead cats, right?
All the stadiums are filled with all the
people.
I mean, the churches are packed.
They're having, the parks are packed.
We don't have the buildings for it.
We'd have to start renting spaces and
everything
and everyone went to church.
Do you think with the churches that we
currently have,
teaching what they currently teach
and engaged in the ministries
that they are currently engaged in,
do you think Baton Rouge and the surrounding
area
would be transformed into a glorious place,
into a Christian place?
Do you think it would be transformed?
It's a tough question, isn't it?
You know, Billy Graham once lamented that
even though millions of people were making
decisions
and being moved, at least psychologically or
emotionally,
very little transformation was taking place
Monday through Saturday in the everyday world.
You know, how are we to explain that?
How could that possibly be?
I think it's because we don't have a biblical
view of man
and in particular, we don't have a biblical
view of man's
point, his purpose, his purpose.
Especially Monday through Saturday.
If all the people in the world, in Baton Rouge
,
went to church, would we see Christian media?
Would we see media transformed?
Would we see journalism transformed?
Would we see all the wicked civil magistrates
taken out of office?
Would we see education completely reformed
so that King Jesus was over all of it?
Would we see this?
Or would people simply get an emotional
experience,
have some psychological effects, sway to the
music
and the sentiment, and then go back to life on
Monday
and pretty much do the same thing they were
doing before?
I don't know the answer to that question,
but I lean towards thinking that the church
has got to be reformed.
The church has to begin to teach the mission
of man
under King Jesus, if we're ever going to see
any real transformation and change.
I think of the passage in Revelation
and it's been used and abused for many years,
but you've all probably heard of it.
It's the one where Jesus is knocking on the
door of your,
yeah, they say the heart, but if you read it
clearly,
he's knocking on the door of a church.
And I thought about this, what is that church
doing in there?
I think they're having church.
I think they're having church, but Jesus is
outside
and he's like, hey guys, remember me, remember
me?
And Jesus is not satisfied with the state of
the world.
He is not satisfied with the state of the
world.
And we're in church doing church stuff,
maybe we're doing it really well,
but we are not getting the ball and running
any plays.
We don't realize that we got to come down
out of the garden, mountaintop,
because there's some gold to be mined in those
hills
and some bidellium.
And to put it into a New Testament contest,
there's some souls that need to be saved
through the preaching of the word of God
and to be taught to observe all that Christ
has commanded
and he has commanded stuff in every area of
life.
We've got, what happens to salt that loses its
savor?
It's trampled underfoot by tyrants.
Do you see what's happening in our world?
But what if the salt doesn't even know the
purpose of salt?
I think that's where we are.
I'm not even sure we think that it's even
worth
sowing the salt.
In my opinion, I think this is a crucial issue
that needs to be dealt with.
And I really think that if you want the young
men
just to speak frankly with you,
if you want the young men, they love this
stuff.
Give them a mission.
You want to understand why video games
are so exciting to young men?
It's because in a video game, you get to
exercise dominion.
Now it's over a virtual world.
But you get to kill the dragon.
You get to build a city.
You get to save the princess.
You see what's happening here?
You get to beat the bad guys.
You get to be a man, but no sweat, no risk.
And you can figure out how to do it in about a
half a day.
That's why they're so famous.
That's why they're so popular.
Because you're getting to vicariously live out
the way God designed you.
Well, we need our young men to get a hold
of the actual mission so that they can begin
to fulfill their purpose and exercise them
dominion
in the real world.
And I think if you give them that,
give them something to chew on,
I think you'll fill your church with them.
I really do.
Because a lot of the church is not giving men
this particular mission.
They're giving them the Sunday morning,
but they're not telling them how to live
as a Christian Monday through Saturday.
What did Paul tell Titus?
He said, teach what?
What did Paul tell Titus to teach?
He told him to teach sound doctrine in chapter
three.
But in chapter two, he told him to teach
that which accords with sound doctrine.
That's right.
That which accords with it.
And then he goes on to describe what he's
talking about.
Teach the older men to do this.
Teach the older women.
This is what you need to be doing.
Oversee these particular ministries.
Tell the slaves to be behaving their masters
and engage in their employment in these ways.
See, very earthy, very tangible,
very Monday through Saturday Titus.
Teach sound doctrine, amen?
But you also have to teach that
which accords with sound doctrine
so that people know how to fulfill
their particular vocational callings
as men and women of God in the real world.
I think that is absolutely essential for us.
Let me look at some of the tools that we have
been given
and we can pull some of these from our text.
First of all, Adam was given a job to do,
exercise dominion over the whole world.
That's a big job, right?
That's a big job, okay?
But he's the head of a new race.
He's the federal head and Pastor Brian's
gonna talk about that in a little bit of a
whole race
and he is the exercise dominion over the whole
world.
And so God creates him in his image.
In his image.
How much time do I have left?
15 minutes, all right, that's good, that's
good.
That's all I need, that's all I need.
He creates man in his own image.
What are some of the aspects of the image of
God?
There's a lot.
But one is that man is in covenant.
He's in covenant with God.
When you nod your head if that is somewhat
familiar with you,
he's in covenant with God.
You've heard Christianity is not a religion,
it's a relationship, you've heard that.
I think I get what they're saying,
but it is a religion, right?
Man, it is a relationship.
But that relationship is not ooey gooey smoosh
y.
The relationship has a structure called a
covenant, all right?
Man was created in covenant with God
and man was created in covenant with his wife
in the household, the marriage covenant.
And then if they had any children,
those children would be in covenant.
Man is a covenanting creature.
He's created in the image of God, right?
We're not like, we're not lone wolves.
We are created to live in packs.
We're created to be covenanting.
Just as God is covenanting, amen.
He's an individual and he is a community.
He is a unity and he is a diversity.
He is a tri unity.
He is one and he is many, amen.
And we are created in his image as one and we
are many.
There are covenant structures that we have
been put in
and that we belong in.
And one of them is First Baptist Livingston
and all these various churches.
You're in these covenants.
And you also are in families.
I was a Neely family and you're in a town
and you're in a state, amen.
Now, this is vitally important
because remember what I said earlier.
How are we gonna exercise dominion over this
earth
without some help, without a little help from
our friends,
without a diversity of gifts and a diversity
of labor
and without some organization, amen.
We couldn't exercise dominion over one bird,
over a chicken by ourselves.
We need structures.
We need covenant bonds.
The army understands this.
The government understands this.
Churches though, however, have forgotten this.
Churches think, you know, we're just
individuals out here.
We just do our own thing.
We don't have a job to do that.
We need one another in the gifts and the
structures
and the hierarchies of this church and of
these families.
We're just individuals.
And if we get mad, we'll hop to another church
.
And if we get mad, we'll hop to another church
.
If we get upset with our spouse, we'll just
divorce them.
We're just individuals out here.
And you know, the bummer about that
is that no one is ever an island unto
themselves.
It just makes you perfect fodder
for the covenant of the state.
The word federal means covenant.
So you strip out the meaning of the church
covenant.
You strip out the meaning of the family
covenant.
And what do you have left?
You, your babies and your government.
No, we cannot go that way.
The church has to recover the image of God and
man.
And that is the idea that we are covenanting
people.
When a young lady turns 18, they're not single
.
Okay, they're not single.
They have a mom.
They have a dad.
They have a brother.
They have a sister.
They're in a family.
They're not a single amen.
You understand what I'm trying to say.
You see, we're, the world is aiming
at our covenantal structures,
trying to remove them from our minds
so that we just jump from church to church.
Can you imagine a military unit being
effective
if anytime someone got upset,
they just jump to another one?
Because they have a mission they're trying to
solve.
They want to win.
What do we want to do?
If we're going to win, we need some structures
.
We need to recover biblical anthropology,
especially the image of God,
especially the covenant nature of man.
Amen?
Within every one of these covenants,
there are hierarchies.
That's how God established it.
Right there in the beginning,
we saw man and woman.
Man is the head of the household.
The woman is under.
What does the world tell us?
No, let's flatten it all out.
They don't say that about the government.
They don't say that about the state.
No, no, only flatten out the family.
And if a father tries to exercise authority,
he's a control freak.
He's the bad person.
He's toxic.
You see what they're trying to do?
They're not only trying to destroy the family.
You understand, Satan has got bigger plans
than just destroying your family.
He destroys your family
so that he can exercise dominion,
so that he can win.
We have to maintain our family structures
and the hierarchies of them
so that we can be effective in our mission.
You need a hierarchy to be effective.
You need a captain.
You need a XO.
You need squad leaders.
You need hierarchy.
Think about the church.
Anytime a pastor and a parishioner disagrees,
oh, well, who does he think he is?
The world wants to flatten out the hierarchies
of churches.
Make us all egalitarian.
Flatten the family, flatten the church,
which makes us slightly ineffective
in our particular mission.
Adam was given a nature which was covenanting
and he was in a family
and there was a structure and a hierarchy to
it.
This is essential for us.
This is strategically essential to recapture
in America and in our church.
He gave him, I think, perhaps the most
important thing.
He gave him a wife, amen?
'Cause I gotta be honest with you.
If I were Adam looking out over the earth,
I'd say, well, that's a lot of space for me.
I'm just one man limited by space and time.
Now, the God man, who is now seated at the
right hand
of the Father, exercising dominion over the
whole earth,
who has a Holy Spirit sent out
to the four corners of the earth,
he could do it by himself.
Now, thank God, he doesn't do it by himself.
We get to participate, but Adam couldn't do it
by himself.
He's just normal man, right?
And so God gave him a life giver and a helper.
Help him with what?
His mission.
What are you supposed to be doing?
That's right.
Why did he need all those babies?
To help him with his mission.
Fill the earth, be fruitful, multiply, subdue
it.
It's a big earth out of there.
You know, let's have some babies.
Lord willing, let's have some babies.
Let's do this, amen?
Let's don't abort our babies.
Let's have babies so we can accomplish our
mission.
He gave him language.
He gave him reason.
You know, tell your children in school,
when they're developing their reasoning
abilities
and their verbal intelligence,
that they're honing the skills that God gave
them
so that they can be who God wants them to be.
They're honing their skills.
They're sharpening their swords,
the tools that he has given them.
It's more important than just vocabulary.
It's about the tool that God has given you
to accomplish your mission.
Starting on Monday morning.
He gave them resources, light and heat and
stars
and animals and plants and cell phones.
Why can't we share the gospel with the world?
We have cell phones.
What's stopping us?
I'll tell you what's stopping us.
We're not on mission.
That's what's stopping us.
He gave him the law.
The law is absolutely essential.
Any man who's going to repent and get back on
mission
and wants to exercise dominion over his voc
ation
and over his field and over the resources
that God has given him needs to start with his
own heart.
Amen, that's where you start.
You start with your heart.
And you use the law of God as a tool
to help you get that heart subdued.
You start with your heart and then you go to
your family
and then you move out to the church
and then you move out to your vocation.
That's generally how it works.
I do believe he gave him, well, he's given us.
Well, let me just mention this
because I think others will mention it.
He gave him a will to choose and prefall a man
was free.
He actually had free will to choose
to keep the terms of the covenant
or to disobey and break the terms of the
covenant.
Amen.
But for us, what do we have?
Listen, I'm gonna jump into the rest of the
conference
just for a second.
We have way more than Adam ever had.
We have the new Adam, the second Adam, the God
man
who has been given all authority in heaven and
on earth
and must reign until he puts all his enemies
under his feet
and you can argue about the timing on all of
that.
I don't care about that that much,
but Jesus is on the throne.
We say it all the time, right?
What's he doing?
He's doing what Adam was supposed to do,
but he's not gonna fail.
Amen.
Now, but here's the thing.
Does Adam get a wife and the second Adam not
get a wife?
Oh no, he gets a wife too.
He gets a life giver.
That's the church.
We have to evangelize.
We have to be evangelizing our own children
primarily,
but also we need to be evangelized in the
world
that we might be fruitful and multiply and
fill the earth
and he gets a helper if we will get on mission
.
If we will wake up to what he's doing in this
world,
he's not satisfied.
We've gotta come down out of our garden palace
,
equipped for the mission, right?
Rejuvenated for Monday morning.
Amen.
And get to work.
We've got to.
We've got to get to work.
Amen.
And he told us, he said,
that he would send his Holy Spirit to help us.
And I think really honestly, that's all we
really need.
I think we have every spiritual blessing in
the heavenlies.
If we would just repent and recover that
biblical view
of manhood and the purpose of man in our lives
.
Amen.
All right, do we stand?
All right, we can stand and close in prayer
or we pray and then a break.
That's right.
Let's stand together.
We pray and we will come back.
So it's 7.30 right now after the prayer,
we'll come back at 7.45
to begin the second half of the conference.
So let's go to the Lord in prayer.
Father, we thank you for bringing us all here
tonight.
Lord, as we enjoy fellowship and some refresh
ments now,
Lord bless our food, our fellowship, our time
together.
And Lord, more than anything,
draw our churches near to one another
that as we labor for the kingdom
that you would bless our churches,
our pastors, our deacons,
all members represented here, all churches,
fellowshiping and working together for the
kingdom.
We ask these things in Jesus' name.
Amen.
(upbeat music)
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