Have you ever felt ashamed of your past and the decisions you’ve made? Do you ever wish you could go back and do things differently? If so, you’re not alone. We all have done and said things we wish we could take back, and sometimes, the guilt, the shame, and feeling of being unworthy makes us feel like even if we talked to God, He would want nothing to do with us. But did you know that shame, guilt, and fear are all emotions that God never intended us to feel? In week two of our series Long Story Short, Pastor Sean talks shows from the Bible where mankind went off track to experience this emotions, why they chose this path, and why we are still struggling with the exact same decisions today.

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MESSAGE NOTES

Genesis 3:1-5 – Choice between God’s way or my way.

  • This was her “precious”
  • They felt as if God was holding something back when in reality they HAD all they ever wanted.
  • We can’t be happy with what we have. We want what we don’t have

 

“Sin always promises something better than God.”

It offers an immediate reward in exchange for God’s best.

 

Genesis 3:6-7 – Instantly, holiness/love crashed all around them.

Nakedness at first represented unashamed intimacy, but now becomes exposure.

Fear/shame drove them from selflessness to selfishness.

 

Genesis 3:8-13 –

  • God was personal. Like a Father relentlessly chasing down His lost kids in the woods.
  • Don’t we feel fear/shame when we fall short? We blame/cover/hide to avoid God

Genesis 3:14-19 – The curses aren’t from an irate judge imposing sentence as much as natural consequences they now face.

But God does not leave them without hope.

 

Genesis 3:20-23

  • God does one more thing – kills two animals.
  • This “act of grace” was the first example that he covers shame
  • He offers them compassion and correction
  • God Himself provides a covering better than ours but the cost is high-death.
  • There is a difference between conviction and guilt.

 

Mankind steps out of a world ruled by holiness and love into a world of fear, shame, death, and complete chaos. They now fight/struggle to survive while waiting on this “offspring of a woman”  who will crush the head of evil and undo what they had done.

 

APPLICATION:

Religious or not, we all sense that something is wrong in this world.

This week helps us understand how it became broken, shows us God as the ultimate Rescuer and points to Jesus as the solution to the problems in our lives.

It is not just Adam and Eve – it’s all of us.

Like Eve, we long to be the god of our own lives and end up falling back into the same patterns.

 

But God doesn’t leave us without hope. You don’t have to stay there stuck.