After The Beginning

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Merry Christmas, and it is a messy time of the year, especially if you have children or if you happen to be in Buffalo, New York right now, or anywhere up north. There is a mess going on up there, and I'm sure the highways are a mess today, as so many people are traveling, and the airports are a mess. And we get so upset when it's messy, don't we? I think part of adulting, which I'm still learning to do, is being okay, or content, or at home in the mess that this world is including myself. God seems to be ... I mean, it's not that he is happy that it got messed up, but he didn't abandon it, he didn't say, that was a bad idea, not at all. And we're going to see that in this series. We're in a season called Advent, as some know that word, Advent. It's from a Greek word, parousia, which means appearing. It means that Jesus Christ, he appeared first in a messy manger, he will appear again as king of the universe. Isn't that amazing? And so we prepare for both at the same time. We're living in between the two, and yet we prepare for both at the same time. And God has chosen, by the way, a way that looks really messy, that we would have never chosen, for the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisest thing that any human being ever conceived. That's what Corinthians talks about. And Paul deals with not only a messy church there, but a messy time, and, in a sense, a messy Messiah, okay? And that's what we're looking at today. God got messy. He really did. He chose to get messy. And I like what Mike Iaconelli wrote. He wrote a book, Mike Iaconelli has passed away. He was in charge of youth specialties. He worked with youth groups all the time. Any of you ever work with a youth group? You know what it's like, right? They're kind of, they smell often. They've got these hormones raging. Their minds are all over the place. And any time you're trying to bring them together to do something, it can be kind of messy. But in the end, it can be the most worthwhile thing. And anyways, Mike Iaconelli wrote a book called Messy Spirituality, and we're going to use a couple of quotes from that book. I think it's not a bad read. It's not real profound. But he starts out by saying, spirituality, as most of us understand it, is not spirituality at all. We think so often it's got to be clean, hygienic. When we use words like godly, we have a very, very puritanical understanding of it, if you want to say very prim and proper. Then you look at the life of Jesus and who he hung out with, and he was the most spiritual person I knew. No, right? So he goes, spirituality is not about being fixed. It's about God being present in the mess of our unfixedness. We just sang a song called God With Us. That's what the word Emmanuel means. God has chosen to be with us in the mess of this world. And we find that out almost at the beginning. Genesis 3, 1 through 15. By the way, this story is so profound. It's so simple. There are so many ways that you just need to inhabit that story, and much of the rest of the Bible builds on it. In one form or another, there are little hyperlinks from this story all the way through the rest of the scriptures, even to the book of Revelation. And you will find numerous different ways this story is just profound in its simplicity. And we're going to just not even be able to cover most of it today in the sense of how profound it can be. I think in my Hebrew Bible class that is going to be next semester. By the way, you can come. If you're 60 and over, you can register for free and take it. Oh, okay. Well, I'll let you fake it there, Kathy. You just show up. We'll just go wink, wink. We know. We know. You're in your 50s yet. But it's at 9 a.m. Tuesday, Thursday. For most of the students, they're just like, they can't believe it's that early in the morning. They're like, I know. But Matt, they don't understand what work really is, right? When do you have to get up? Yeah, there you go. Right? Yeah. Yeah. 6 a.m. Yes. All right. So Genesis 3. Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. There's so much just right there. But we're going to move on. He said to the woman, did God actually say? There's so much right there. You shall not eat of any tree in the garden. Notice how he pushes for hyperbole. Notice also the serpent in this story is the first person in the Bible to speak about God. Not to God, with God, but about him. You've got to watch about that God talk sometime, because when you speak about someone, when he or she is not present to a third party, that's called triangulation. It's called gossip. And it's also called theology at times. And he's the first theologian in the Bible, and boy, is he off. And already he is showing us just how subtle it can be. Did you do a paper on the whole serpent thing in the last Hebrew Bible cla...