The Story | The Origin

Good morning, everybody. How we doing?

It's good to see you. It's good to see we got some

students here coming back for the school year.

Got folks returning. What's up, Matt and Kylie?

Man, it's like this is the this is the celebration of newly

married folks in the house today at the Garden Hollow.

Good to see you guys. It's you know what it's rainy

outside, but this is it's an exciting time of year.

Ian's reminding us that football season is back.

You know, school is underway. Thank you teachers.

Great job parents. If you made it here this morning

after is starting off a new school year.

Proud of you. Good to good to be here

teachers. Thank you so much.

And, and there's of course a lot going on here at the Garden

Church. If we haven't, if we haven't

met, my name is Josh. I have the joy of serving as

pastor here at the Garden and, and we're we're glad you're here

today. We are a community of people

with lots of we're different in all kinds of different ways, but

we're on this shared journey to to be shaped by the love of

Jesus, to share that in the places that we live, work and

play. That's what keeps us connected.

And if you're looking for a spiritual family, checking out

church, just exploring faith, Hey, we're we're so glad you're

here. Welcome.

We'd love to help you find that gum.

Grab me or anybody with a lanyard back in the back this

morning. We're we're excited to be diving

in this morning to to this to September.

I don't want to say fall not quite yet.

We're not quite there. It feels there, but not quite

diving into September and of course, diving into this new

series that Amy talked about a titled the story.

Maybe you have wondered, maybe not.

Maybe you have wondered how to make sense of the Bible.

Has anybody ever like, been confused by the Bible?

Like this is the Bible is is crazy.

It is unlike any other book that we read.

It's really a whole library of books composed over more than a

millennia. Different languages, different

cultures, different continents. There's a lot going on.

And yet this incredible diverse library of scripture tells a

single story that is so important for you and me.

And that's what we're exploring in the series.

We're going to go Genesis. It's a revelation garden all the

way to new creation and attempt to make sense of what's going on

in this story and how it matters for you and me.

One of my favorite movies is The Bourne Identity.

I'm dating myself a little bit here.

I love I love some me some good action movies.

And in the Bourne Identity, some of you have seen it.

Some of you are are old like me. The the movie opens with this

great scene. There is like a man, apparently

a corpse just floating in the open sea.

He's he's reeled in in the dark of night from the Mediterranean

on to this fishing boat. And and when he comes to and

they they realize that he's alive.

There's so much mystery like what is going on here.

First of all, this dude doesn't doesn't even know his name.

He doesn't know who he is, doesn't know how he got here,

doesn't know how he has bullet holes in his back.

Something is going on, but not only is there mystery around who

he is, but like clearly this is a this is a non typical human.

This guy over here like speaks multiple languages, has like

elite combat skills, processes things like a a seasoned

operative. Something is happening, but

we're not, we're not sure what. And over the course of the

movie, this individual who we end up coming to know is Jason

Bourne, goes on this journey to make sense of, to try and figure

out who, who am I? Because he's so confused in this

setting, trying to make sense of what his, what he's about, who

he is, what his purpose is in the world without the memory of

his story. I love this as an analogy for us

friends, because, you know, I think many of us, maybe you can

identify with this, find our ourselves at at at moments in

life where we're we're moving through the world, we're going

about our day-to-day and and we find ourselves saying like, who

even am I? What, why am I here?

What am I supposed to be doing? What is all this about?

We find ourselves with compulsions, intuitions,

defaults and we're like, where? Where does this even come from?

How do I make sense of my behavior and how I'm supposed to

be in the world? Have you ever felt yourself in

this kind of like a little bit of an existential, like what is

happening? How do I, how do I be in the

world? Well, I want to suggest to you

this morning that it's very difficult to know who you are to

answer the question of your identity or, or to answer the

question of purpose. Why am I here if we don't know

the answer to the question, where do I come from?

Where do I come from? What's my origin story?

And this is what we see in Genesis chapter one.

In fact, the word Genesis is from a Greek word that literally

means origins. It's the beginning.

It's the origin story of where we come from.

And now this is interesting because this story has often

been used to answer all kinds of different questions.

Maybe you grew up in a church context or situation where where

people use the book of Genesis to try and explain everything

about the world. Many people these days are

trying to to answer questions about modern scientific origins,

like how old is the earth? How exactly did everything come

to be? That was like, how did creation

happen? Unfortunately, I'm not going to

talk about those things this morning.

OK. If that's what you were hoping

for when you heard that Genesis was on the menu, I'm sorry to

disappoint you. And, and I won't be talking

about those this morning because I think that those are actually

modern scientific questions that are foreign to what's going on

in the book of Genesis. I don't think that's what

Genesis is talking about at all. Because what we find here, when

we look at these early chapters of Genesis, we find it not a

scientific account of material origins, but we find a

theological account about who God is, who we are, and what our

place is in this world that he has created.

And this is important. Friends, I, I say this not

because I don't believe that the scripture is reliable of enough

of a guide to to to take literally about something.

It's rather because I respect Scripture enough to pay

attention to what it's actually doing.

And I'm going to show you from the text of Scripture why I

think what we have here in Genesis one in particular is a

theological account, the answers some crucially important

questions. So we're going to we're going to

be all over Genesis 1 today. If you if you have a Bible with

you, pull it out. If you have a phone with you,

open it up, dial in in your preferred Bible app to Genesis 1

because I want to show you some things that are happening in the

text of Scripture this morning. In the beginning of Genesis one,

we find this description. It literally says in the

beginning and then we find a painting of disorder.

Genesis 1 paints the world as it exists in Genesis 1.

Interesting point that the world already exists in Genesis 1 as a

formalist and disordered C, like there's nothing but this C.

And into this we see the Spirit of God begin to move.

We read that the Spirit of God is moving above the waters.

And then over the course of the chapter, over the course of

chapter 1 in particular, extending into chapter 2 all the

way to verse 4, we find this record of the seven days of

creation. Now, if you've read Genesis or

been around church about you probably familiar with the seven

days of creation. What's going on here?

Well, each day has a lot of structure to it.

We're going to notice this and I'm going to suggest to you that

the first three days are all about God forming and the, the

the second three days are all about God filling.

And then the 7th day is about culmination.

We see that in the text this morning.

But the the big picture, if I were to summarize it down into

almost like a a single arc, we see the move from at the

beginning of Genesis 1A, space of chaos and disorder to a place

of order generated by the word of God.

So look with me here, there's a bunch of structure over the

course of these seven days. You'll notice first of all,

obviously there's, there's each day it's talked about, each day

begins with God's creative declaration.

And God said, right? We see that show up over and

over again 7 times over here in chapter 1.

And God said, and then as God speaks things into existence at

the conclusion of each day, he kind of steps back.

He, he does an assessment, a building inspection, if you

will. And each time there's a refrain

repeated and it was good six times.

Again, we see this refrain repeated and it was good.

And then at the conclusion of the 6th day, we're going to talk

more about that in just a minute.

We have and it was very good. OK, so and God said and very

good. And then what's going on with

sevens here? There is a bunch of sevens all

over this text. There's seven declarations that

creation is good. There's 7 words in the opening

verse, right? There's seven times that we see

a God say something, declare, speak things into existence.

Of course we have the seven days.

And all of this suggests to us, many scholars have said the

Genesis 1 is like almost a liturgical text again, in the

sense that you have a, you have a piece of paper that talks

about kind of like what we're doing today.

People suggest, scholars suggest that, that the, the 1st chapter

of Genesis was used liturgically in a similar way for the people

of God. And when we look closer, we

began to see like this liturgical structure, this

organizational structure, this poetic structure of, of

parallels that we see throughout the text.

It's, it's not simply a, a literalistic like chronological

history of things. And this is apparent for a bunch

of reasons. One of the most obvious is that

we see, of course, light shows up on day one.

When does the sun show up? Day four.

OK, so like there's some things here that chronologically, if

we're thinking about it scientifically, do not make

sense. But there's something else that

is going on here. If we pay attention to this text

that's super important. Look at this.

I've mentioned already that there's this pattern of forming

and then filling that's present here.

So on days 1-2 and three, we see God used separation to form.

On day one, we see that He separates the light from the

darkness. OK, God creates light and dark

on day 2. We see in verse 6 that He

separates the water from the water.

Now some of you are looking at your Bibles and you're reading

these verses or maybe you've read this in the past.

And if you ever read Genesis chapter 2 and verse seven, you

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

probably had the reaction that I did when I first read it.

I was like, what in the world is going on here, right?

God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from

the water above it. I didn't know there were vaults

in creation, right? We're not talking about bank

vaults here. What's going, what's going on in

this text? Well, in the Ancient Near East,

they didn't have the same cosmology or understanding of

the universe that we do today. People did not imagine the Earth

as a globe floating in a void of space, right, surrounded by

planets and stars. Instead, the imagination was

across cultures that essentially we live on, on a Flat Earth.

It's this big, it's this big flat sphere.

In some illustrations, you could see in the Ancient Near East,

it's supported by turtles and all these other things that go

down and create a pillar. But but under the earth, under

the ground, there is the imagination that under the

ground and around the ground, everywhere there's water,

there's sea and it's chaos and, and the sky they didn't

understand. As we think about it today, we

think like, OK, there's other celestial bodies.

They're these stars. Well, the ancients actually

imagined that we were living inside a Dome.

OK, like if there was just like when you're if you go to a

football game and it's in a Dome thing, you look up and you see

the ceiling. That's what they thought the sky

was, was like there was this Dome and and the stars they

thought were embedded into this Dome.

OK, Dome would rotate had some cool rotating features, but but

that was that was how they made sense of things.

So here in verse, in day 2IN verse 6, when God is separating

the waters below and the waters above, in the imagination of the

writer here, what's going on, if we were to try and make sense of

it scientifically, is is is the waters from below are getting

pushed down and the waters above are getting pushed up above the

Dome. It's not a perfect seal.

Occasionally you have rain, right?

That's why there's rain, obviously.

But the waters above are being pushed up above the Dome.

So God creates in this way by separating the sky and the sea.

OK, so that's day 2. So we got light from darkness.

We've got separation of waters to create sky and sea.

And then a day three, we see God separate the land from the

waters. We see this, of course, here in

verse 9. So God is using this tool of

separation to create order, separating light from dark,

separating sea from sea, separating land from water.

And then we get a one more thing in verse 11.

At the end of this first movement of forming on the land,

plants sprout up, right? God creates the plants.

All right, So that's days 123. Now, when you look at it, days

4-5 and six, this is, there's a parallelism here.

There's like a poetic structure. Days 4-5 and six run in parallel

to the first three days. In the first three days, these

expanses, these voids, almost like a, a canvas has been

stretched out. God has created these three

domains, right? Light, dark sky and sea, and

then land and water. And then we see in verse 4, God

returns to this light, dark domain that he's created.

And what we see created all the celestial bodies, the sun, the

moon, the stars. On day five, God returns to the

skies and the seas. And what do we see created?

Well, the fish in the sea, the birds in the air.

Day 2 is brought into completion.

Day 6, God returns to the land. And what do we see created?

All of the animal life comes into abundance.

And then we have God's ultimate one more thing, one that would

put Steve Jobs to shame, right? God says.

Oh, and one more thing. And then we get to the end here

where he says in verse 27, God creates his final masterpiece,

us humans created in God's image.

All right, so this is the structure of the first six days

of creation that we see through the course of Genesis 1.

And then at the end we get kind of like almost the marching

orders, right? The assignment.

So what what happens then? There's something for God to do.

There's something for us to do. And we see that in these final

verses. So humans are given the

assignment. You're created in God's image,

in God's likeness. So fill the earth and subdue it.

Rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, every

living creature that moves on the ground.

And then at the beginning of chapter 2, we see God completes

his work and what happens? He moves into a 7th day.

The 7th day, we find out in Hebrews is not a 24 hour period

for sure. I don't think any of them are,

but certainly in Hebrews day 7 is ongoing.

God enters into a state of rest now that he has completed his

work. All right, there's a lot of

stuff there. Welcome to Genesis one O 1, I

guess. So what does all this mean guys?

Like what, what's going on here? Why do I point out all of the,

the structures and the symbols and what's happening here, this

poetic parallelism that happens in Genesis 1?

Why, why does it matter for me and you?

Well, first of all, to, to, to really appreciate what's going

on here, we have to understand the stories that Israel is

surrounded by. So Genesis the the, the origin

story obviously speaks of the beginning creation and these as

oral traditions go back to Moses for sure, at least even before.

But but most biblical scholars for a bunch of reasons also

found in the text, they think that these came to be compiled

and composed in the way that we read them today, sometime in the

period of the Babylonian exile, OK, way later in Israel's

history. This is important for a couple

of reasons. The first reason is that in this

moment of history, the people of God found themselves deeply

disoriented right there. There were all of these places

that they had attached their identity to, these these rituals

that they had attached their identity to.

There were all of these things that made them special and by

which they interacted with God and knew who they were.

And it had all been blown up. Jerusalem had been destroyed.

They've been taken away captive, and now they were homeless and

somebody else's land. And so in this moment in the

history of the people of God, where where there's deep

confusion, there's deep questions about who we are.

How do we make sense of our life and our story.

God leads his people back to these stories, these origin

stories, this theological account of how we as a people

came to be in order to ground them.

That's the first thing I want you to notice.

The second thing, which is also really interesting, is that just

like today, this was not the only account of origins, right?

This wasn't the only story that was around that the people used

to make sense of who we are and how we got here and what our

place in this world was. In fact, at New Year's every

year, all of the the Jewish people in Babylon would have had

to listen to their neighbors recount the Babylonian origin

story. If you're super nerdy, you can

still read it. It's one of the oldest extent or

existing documents, the oldest human stories that we have

available. It's called the Enuma Elish, and

the Enuma Elish paints a very, very different picture of human

origins, a different imagination of God and the world and who we

are in this. See Babylon was this Kingdom

located in ancient Mesopotamia, OK Mesopotamia comes from 2

words in the Greek Mesa, which means middle.

And there's a word potamia. Basically is is the Greek word

for rivers, OK? It means the land between the

rivers and Mesopotamia is this area that that was known as the

cradle of civilization for, for the place where some of the

oldest human settlements and cities emerge between the Tigris

River and the Euphrates River. OK, we see the same rivers

talked about in Genesis 214, like this creation story comes

together in conversation with a Babylonian story.

These rivers were very important.

They were in many ways the source of life for these first

civilizations because every year they would flood and that the

silt from the floods would cover the land and it created a rich

space for agriculture. But the the the rivers didn't

just create life, they also were a source of great violence and

chaos. Archaeological digs at cities

throughout the region have found in places like Shrewpak, ER and

Kish that there are these sedimentary layers.

Where there was this big town, there was the civilization.

All these things were happening. There was just obliterated by a

flood. This was common practice in in

this early ancient Near Eastern world, water very often again

symbolized as chaos rose up and just wiped everybody out.

This was a common thing that many of these ancient

civilizations talk about. And in the Babylonian story, in

the Annuma at least, water is personified as a God, The God

Tiamat. OK, some of you know better from

Dungeons and Dragons, but Tiamat.

OK, so Tiamat is this, this ancient God, right?

Who is the sea God? And like the mother of all

chaos, she's constantly sending chaos monsters at everybody and

destroying people, wiping people out.

The storms come, the floodwaters come in and obliterate everyone.

And according to the Babylonian origin story, Tiamat is

ultimately defeated by the patron St. of Babylon, Marduk.

And Marduk is a baddie. Like he comes in and he just, he

rips up Tiamat. It's very gory, like slashes

Tiamat in half and according to the Anuma, A leash.

Like that's how the world comes to be.

Like the earth is Tiamat's ribs, right?

Her, her great tears form the the sources of the Tigris in

Euphrates River. Her tail is still visible in the

Milky Way. This is how the Babylonians

understand the world, right? The world has come to be through

this conflict between the gods. There's great violence, the gods

are competing with each other and ultimately Tiamat, our God

is stronger and so he wins and and creates the earth, the world

from the corpse of his defeated foe.

This is the origin story and you might be saying like what, what

where are people in this? Like where, where do we fit?

Well, if you read the story, basically the gods were

capricious, like immoral and lazy, right?

All the gods in the, in the, in the, in this Babylonian origin

story, they didn't want to do any work.

And it turned out that there was a lot of work to do.

There was like fields that needed to be tended and temples

that need to be built. So essentially the gods got

together and they said, OK, we need some slaves and so we'll

create people. And this is in the Babylonian

story, the origin of people, the slaves, so that the gods can

take it easy. People exist, so gods can rest

all right? In contrast to this violent,

messy, disordered, chaotic story, we have Genesis 1,

Genesis 1 and written at a similar time.

Like it is mind boggling how different this is than the

Babylonian origin story. What?

What do we see in Genesis 1 about the world, about the God

who creates, and about we as humans?

What we see that first of all, that creation is not random,

it's not a conflict to just emerge or happen.

That the Spirit of God enters a space of chaos, not by violence,

not by coercion, but by the power of His Word, begins to

design, to create poetically bringing order to the disordered

chaos of the world. Unlike the Babylonian account,

we don't have a bunch of gods. Like in the Babylonian account,

the sea is a God and the land is the God and the sun is a God.

And honestly, your doorpost is probably a God.

You're like, everything was a God in in the Genesis account,

all of these other gods are depersonalized.

The sea just becomes a force, right?

Natural things. There is but one God who rules,

who moves, a single creative God.

The world is created not randomly, not as a source of

conflict, not the spoils of war. But it is this beautiful,

ordered place which God declares to be very good.

And where are people in this story?

Not the slaves who are just there.

So the gods can be lazy. People in this story are God's

crowning achievement, the the very good, the the pinnacle of

creation created in Imago day in the very image of God.

And this is theologically wild for for a text that's a couple

1000 years old. Like we look back at texts that

are a couple 100 years old and we're like, oh, some messy stuff

in there. This is a couple 1000 years old.

And God says in the image of God, he created them, male and

female, he created them. Not just the king bears the

image of God, not just the dudes bear the image of God, all of us

created in the image of God. This idea of images is

incredibly rich. I could talk just about this for

like the whole, the whole time, but I have to tell you a little

bit about it. So in the ancient Near East,

right, people didn't have telephones.

You couldn't FaceTime somebody. They didn't have Internet

broadcasts. So there were kings still who

ruled and had authority, right. But most people in a Kingdom of

any size would have never physically encountered the king.

Just like you probably haven't met the president or the Pope,

right Then they probably didn't physically encounter they they

didn't have broadcast journalism where you could TuneIn and hear

the voice. You can get an e-mail.

And so how would kings in the ancient world demonstrate who

they were and, and present their identity to their subjects to

the world? Well, at the edges of ancient

kingdoms, and you'll still see this if you travel the

Mesopotamian area, these ancient kings would go and they would at

the edges of all of their kingdoms, they would set up

these images, these statues of themselves.

And these statues would represent that when you arrived

in that place, when you showed up and you saw this, this

towering statue, a beautiful piece of art, it, it would tell

you, oh, in this place that king is in charge, his rule and his

reign extends to right here. And and this is what that king

is about. There would be inscriptions in

cuneiform describing what this king was about, why he was

great, who he was, the image of the king.

And so God says in Genesis One that he makes not statues, but

people to be his image, His representation, his life force

in the world, those who carry his authority.

I need to take just a minute and look at the person seated next

to you. Make it awkward.

Like turn and look at somebody I don't like.

Make eye contact. Hold it for an awkward second.

God created humankind in his image.

In the image of God. He created the male and female.

He created them. Friends, this is you.

You are the image. You are the statue.

You are the representation of the very life and identity of

God that says to the world, this is who I am.

This is what I'm about. He decides to put that in US.

Isn't this crazy? Like is anybody?

I mean, I this stuff blows my mind, but but I friends, I think

this is so significant. This is so significant.

Like I think some people have been so worried about Genesis 1

being a literal historical text that talks about how how

scientifically the world came to be, that they completely miss

the theology of what God is actually saying in this text of

scripture, which is incredible. God, God is saying here to his

people in a space of chaos and disorder, in a space where you

feel lost and confused, in a space where things feel

bewildering. I'm in control by my voice, by

my presence. I'm moving in the chaos and

bringing order, bringing beauty, bringing goodness into the

world. I have created good.

And not just the world out there, but you.

I I've placed my very life in you.

Friends, what does this mean for us, for me and for you?

So I've, I've done a lot of history in this message.

I've done a lot of like big picture theology.

When we think about the scope of Scripture, the story of

scripture that we're going to be talking about over the course of

the next 9 weeks, it all starts here with this origin story.

God creates us. He places His very image in me

and you. And then there are two things

that we already looked at that happened in this text that are

so significant. First off, God gives us

stewardship, dominion, responsibility.

I know this is going to be a shock to some of you.

Work is not part of the curse. We're going to talk about that

next week, OK? Now God actually says she's

getting wild. God could have done things a lot

of different ways. God goes in and says, look like

I have created, I have taken things this far, It is

beautiful. But I've left creation

unfinished. And now my steward, my image, my

representative, you are my deputies to go on and continue

the work of creation that I've begun, right?

To be creative, to bring order out of chaos, to bring beauty

and goodness. I, I freaking love this.

I sometimes we get in a mindset where we imagine that there are

like good jobs and bad jobs. There's like spiritual holy

jobs. And then there's just like, I

just, you know, I got to do something to make, make some

money, friends, whatever you are doing.

I mean, you could be doing something that's creating

disorder and disaster in the world.

If you are, please stop, OK? But for most of us, like there

is a creative ordering, like if you, if you are, if you are

writing software code, right, if you are coming into a classroom

and helping these little learners, right, If you are a

scientist on the, on the frontier of researching chemical

compounds. Friends, whatever you are doing,

do you think about it this way, Like you are continuing the work

of God in creation. Isn't that cool?

Friends? I, I think sometimes, like

sometimes we take ourselves out, right?

We say, well, oh, you know, I don't know, those people have

important things to do in the world.

But little old me, like, I don't, I, you know, I just don't

have very many gifts. I, you know, I don't have the

background, I don't have the education, I don't have the

competence. I don't really have much to

contribute. Blasphemy, like God has made you

in His image, take carry forward the creative potential that He

has put in you for the good of the world.

It's important. I don't know what that looks

like for you, but it's important.

Don't downplay it, don't miss it.

Don't minimize it as a way of keeping yourself safe or secure

or not not feeling very intimidated.

God has placed in you the creative DNA that brought the

world into existence. You are part of this Co creating

endeavor. But I love this.

God not only gives us work, he also gives us rest.

Not only stewardship but also Sabbath.

See, some of us downplay our contribution.

We think like I just don't have that much to offer.

I'm not really a big deal. Those other people over there,

they're the people who really matter.

But others of us, man, we out here hustling, trying to prove

something to somebody, especially in Boston, right?

I'm going to be a big deal. I'm going to get it.

I'm going to get this next certification.

I'm going to get this next degree.

I'm, I'm going to get this next position.

I'm going to do this thing. I'm going to, I'm, I'm going to

get this person to endorse me on LinkedIn.

Like I'm going to get to this next level and and then I'll

have really made it. And I love this even here in in

the first chapters of Genesis, God gives us this, this massive

responsibility of stewardship. And he also introduces Sabbath.

He says, Hey, I worked now I'm off.

And what does he do in his rest time?

We read in Genesis in the following chapters that he comes

and he walks in the cool of the day with the humans.

God wants to like hang out with us to walk and talk with you

friends. You have a crucially important

responsibility in the ecosystem in the Kingdom of God and also

you are not your work. You are not what you do.

You are not what you would produce.

You're not a doing. You are a human being.

And so God invites us into stewardship and he also invites

us into Sabbath to take responsibility for extending his

Co creating energy into the world and then also to rest and

to be with him to enjoy him. What a beautiful picture of our

design. Over the next weeks we're going

to be looking at what that what happens from there.

It doesn't end with creation, but this is the beginning of the

story. This is where it all starts.

This is our origin story and who we have made to be been made to

be the band is going to come and this morning we're going to

enter into a time of communion. We're going to start our

response time this morning with communion.

And so as they come, I want to invite you to sit with what

we've talked about this morning, to sit with this responsibility

to steward and also to Sabbath to Co create and also to enjoy

the presence of God in communion.

I love it because in this beautiful way it's a practice

that invites us back into our identity.

See Colossians explains that that Jesus is the ultimate image

of the invisible God. You mean all of us have been

created to image God. Jesus is the, the perfect

undistorted image of God. And in Jesus God has once again,

just as we see here in Genesis, has come to walk with his

people, to be present to us, to give his life to us.

In fact, in in John chapter 6, when Jesus is talking about this

John 6 · chapter mention

gift, this practice of communion, he, he says that when

we ingest his body, his blood, when we participate in this

right, when we take these elements, we are, we are

participating in his life. Genesis says that it uses the

plural, I love this. God says, let us make man in our

image from the beginning. There is this communion in God

and and we use this word communion to talk about what we

do as we enter into that relationship.

We are getting to participate in the calm together union, the

together union that exists in the very Godhead.

And we get to do this because of Jesus, because Jesus has made

the way back to God open something we'll be talking a lot

about in the coming weeks. So this morning, as you reflect

on what we've talked about this morning, this this fascinating

text in Genesis, There's like 1000 other things I wish we had

time to talk about, but I want you to invite about, I want you

to invite you to consider this simple question, how do I see

myself? What's the story I tell me about

me? Do I believe that God's own

image abides in me? Do I live as if that's true?

Do I walk with that kind of courage and confidence and

responsibility? And also, do I move from the

grounded place that knows that I don't have to produce or perform

in order to be somebody? Because I have what God wants

for me from creation. He's already given it to me.