Matt Chandler - Sanctification: The Perfect Storm

If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab them. If you don’t have a Bible with you, there should be a hard black one somewhere around you. If you don’t own one, that’s our gift to you. Let’s start in Genesis chapter 2. I want to take the ideas we’ve been covering and move them out of the realm of theory and get them down onto the ground. Specifically, what we’ve covered regarding justification, adoption, and sanctification. I now want to move that from just ideas that are nice and plug it into how certain issues play themselves out in our lives, namely guilt, shame, anger, abuse, and lust. Next week, we’ll cover fear and anxiety, so it’ll be a chipper couple of weeks. With that said, I want us to start again with how God designed us, and that design gives us insight into what God wants to accomplish through the person and work of Jesus Christ for His glory and on our behalf. So with that said, Genesis chapter 2—let’s pick it up in verse 18. I’m going to read a lot of verses here simply for context, and we’re just trying to get down to verse 25. But I think it’s important for you to see a single verse in regard to its context. So here it goes. Verse 18: «Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that man should be alone; I will make a helper suitable for him.’ Now out of the ground, the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. Whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock, to the birds of the heavens, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam, there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept, took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man, He made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, ‘This is the first song in the Bible! ’ My good friend Pastor Leon Crump in Atlanta says this is the first R&B song in the Bible, and he said here’s what it says: ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman because she was taken out of Man.’ Verse 24: ‘Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.’ Now the big verse for our time together is verse 25: ‘And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.’ Now you keep your shirt on while I unpack this text, all right? When we’re talking about the idea of nakedness and lacking shame, what we’re really looking at is that God created man to walk in innocence and honor so that God’s plan for you and God’s plan for me in the Creative Design is that our lives would be marked by innocence and honor. See, as human beings, we alone stand higher than anything else in the creative order. We alone have been made in the image of God. That means you and your dog are not of equal value. This means human beings and whales are not on par with one another. This means sea turtles and children aren’t on the same line of worth and value. Now, should we steward the environment? Absolutely! So I don’t want that email from you, all right? But to line up these two things—sea turtle eggs or children? Gosh, it’s a toss-up. That’s not so. As human beings, we have an intrinsic value that exceeds that of anything else in the creative order because we alone have been made in the image of God. So God’s good design is that you and I would have lives marked by innocence and honor. But if you’ve read your Bible, you know there’s something that happens in chapter 3. We’re literally going to watch innocence and honor dissolve before our eyes. Let’s pick it up in verse 7 of chapter 3. Sin has now entered the world. Man has rebelled against his Creator, the Creator who made them innocent and full of honor. Now, they have rebelled against that God, and we’re going to watch what happened, starting in verse 7: „Then the eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you? ’ Now, I’ll just stop there because we literally just watched it disintegrate. We watched innocence give way to guilt, and we watched honor give way to shame. Now the normative human experience is no longer innocence and honor as God rightly designed it, but rather our lives are marked by guilt and shame. Now, here’s what’s interesting to note: guilt and shame are often talked about as though they are synonymous, but they are most definitely not. Both guilt and shame…