When the warnings are there that we’re falling into sin, do we turn and go the other way? Or do we keep spiraling forward and crash?
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The sermon emphasizes that Cain had a clear warning from God about sin “crouching” at his door, yet he ignored it. What are the “warning signs” or “alarm bells” in your own life right now—and what makes it hard to heed them before the spiral begins?
The preacher uses the illustration of a man throwing a box of Oreos in anger over an empty coffee maker as an example of how small frustrations can escalate into serious harm. Can you think of a time when you escalated a conflict by “picking up the box” instead of stepping back? What practical steps can help you pause, seek God’s help, and de-escalate before things spiral further?
Why do anger, envy, and disappointment so often lead us to blame or harm others rather than examine our own hearts—and how does one sin so easily lead to another, as Cain’s anger led to murder and then lying to God?
The sermon critiques churches and parachurch organizations that cover up abuse to protect their reputation and mission, arguing that “we never protect the gospel by covering up sin.” How does this principle apply beyond institutional settings—in families, workplaces, or personal relationships?
Cain’s identity as a farmer is destroyed by the consequences of his sin; he becomes a fugitive and wanderer. How does sin undermine the callings and identities God has given us—and how does finding our identity in Jesus free us to confess sin honestly instead of hiding or covering it up?
Good evening and welcome to Steadfast. I’m so glad to be with you on this rainy, wintry day. I hope all of you had a safe and hopefully warm day as we faced ice. As we’ve had that ice over the region, it struck me that we’re basically living in an illustration of tonight’s message. Although I think this has actually gone nationwide, especially if you are here in St. Louis, you’ve probably seen a video shared today. For those of you who aren’t in the area, we’re going to go ahead and play this video too, and you can see a little bit of what’s been going on here today.
As you can see on this video, there’s a fire engine going—I don’t really know what the call was about. It doesn’t look like it’s headed someplace that has an actual fire, but out this morning, not too far from here, just about 30 minutes from here, as you can see, it is spinning down the road. Fire engines weigh thousands and thousands of pounds, just spinning down the road on ice. I don’t know if they took the corner a little too fast or if there was something they could have done to avert it. But the thing is, and I know talking to some of you and other folks, I know a number of people were working from home today or otherwise staying off the roads.
What do we know about icy conditions? There was at least an ability to know something could happen because we’d been hearing for days it was going to ice today. How predictable is it that a fire engine couldn’t handle the roads? I’m not sure. Some things are more predictable; some things are less predictable. You may have just heard a moment ago a beeping in the background—that’s the beeping of an old watch of my uncle’s. I don’t know how it continues to beep. My uncle’s been in a nursing home or assisted living now for six years, and yet that watch continues to beep.
I have a watch, but the battery doesn’t go nearly so long. That watch goes off every day at this time. I don’t know what the reason he had an alarm set for this time of day, but that watch goes off every day at this time. So that’s predictable, in a sense. I don’t think about it, and so I wasn’t necessarily expecting it to go off just now; I wasn’t having that on my radar. Yet it is predictable if I’m paying attention. Maybe a fire engine not being able to handle the roads is less predictable. We expect them to, but there are some conditions in both cases that we can see: the little watch going off if I just pay attention to the time. I can know when it’s going to go off and keep going off for whatever miraculous reason this battery keeps going. And if I know the roads are icy, no matter whether I have a fire engine or a little subcompact, what I know is that the roads aren’t going to be like normal.
The question is, what are you going to do with those predictable things in life? Because sometimes it’s something really, really severe, like trying to keep a fire engine from colliding into everything in its path. Sometimes it’s just being aware of that little interruption that’s going to happen from an alarm. But we can watch those things and be aware of them. If we think about where we picked up last week in Genesis chapter 4, that’s the sort of thing that God is encouraging Cain to. Cain is angry. Cain was angry because he’d offered a sacrifice to God, and Abel, his brother, had offered a sacrifice to God. God favored Abel’s sacrifice; he didn’t favor Cain’s.
Now, as we talked about, we don’t know the exact details, but what we do know is that God gives him a verbal warning. God says, “This sin is coming at you, Cain. You’re going to have to deal with it.” And it looks like part of that reason, that was predictable, it was more like the ice; it wasn’t just a little beep in the background. It was something really big and severe coming at him. Cain was already in a bad place. It seems more than likely his attitude was bad as he was offering that gift to God, and so he was being set up for sin.
So God says that sin is crouching. But as we continue here, as Cain wrestles with that sin and what to do with it, we see that the alarms are going off, the weather warnings have been issued for days, you can see the clock advancing to the time when the alarm’s going to go off, and Cain keeps plowing ahead. So things spiral out of control, and just like that fire engine going down the road, he’s going to take out whatever comes in his path.
Let’s go ahead and pray as we get ready to read this, that we wouldn’t just see some distant sin that happened in the past, but that we’d see how that spiraling out of control of sin also is in our lives. And that God would help us tonight to think of where those alarm bells are going off, where the road is slick ahead for us, and how we can be prepared to lean on Him to have His strength as we face those. Let’s pray.
Father, it’s so hard with sin. We should see it coming. We know what time of day the alarm is going to go off. We hear the alerts about the roads, and yet what do we do? We just keep spiraling out of control. We don’t heed the warnings. We don’t heed the warnings in Your word, even if, like Cain, we received an actual verbal warning from You. We really look at our hearts. I think we know that we would ignore that too because so often we just want to go ahead and do what we want to do. We want to feed our anger. We want to feed our discontent. We want to feed our greed or envy. Not a very pretty thing to think about, Lord. But would You help us as we think about this subject tonight to see it, to see Your love of us in the midst of us having these things, and through that to be better equipped to heed Your warnings and to receive Your strength that we might do what’s pleasing to You and not fall to the sin that is constantly seeking to ensnare us? We pray in Jesus’ name. Let’s go ahead and take a look at verses 8 and 9 of Genesis chapter 4.
It says, “Cain spoke to Abel his brother, and when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is Abel your brother?’ He said, ‘I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?’”
We see several things happening here, and this is a very familiar passage once again, so we have to be careful. We know the phrase “Am I my brother’s keeper?” That phrase is embedded in our culture, and pretty much any culture, I think, where the Bible is present, it’s very, very familiar. And in that, it almost sounds like Cain’s just saying a cliché. But think about what’s going on here if we really think about it.
We start with Cain committing the very first murder. There’s never been a murder before. There haven’t been people that long, and here Cain plunges into the very first murder. His brother is laying on the ground. He just leaves his brother’s body behind, and then that’s where this phrase is uttered. It’s not uttered in the way that sometimes people might mention such a phrase today. That’s the context here.
How did we get there? How do we get into this place where we get to God and Cain talking about what’s happened? How do we get to the point that there’s been a first murder? It starts with Cain going out, and there’s that weather warning. God’s given him the warning: the roads are slick here. Cain, sin is crouching. God uses that animal imagery. It’s like a tiger getting ready to pounce upon Cain, but Cain knows it and can escape. He doesn’t.
Cain, apparently, we have every reason to think, doesn’t really argue why his sacrifice should be good. He’s willing to speak up for himself. He doesn’t say, “Well God, my sacrifice was clearly okay.” I think Cain knows that there was something wrong with what he offered. But instead of going back and fixing that, instead of hearing God’s warning and saying, “Okay, I shouldn’t feed into my anger, and instead, what I should do is see what I’ve already done,” Cain’s already been sinning here. The spiral is already starting.
What does he do? He just keeps building on it. He embraces that sin. And in that, it’s interesting because what we see is that last week we talked about how we’re starting to see normal life established. Cain and Abel are both doing professions. They’re a second generation of human beings, so normal, quote-unquote, is happening. And now we’ve reached a new non-normal. There’s someone dead—not dead because he grew old, but dead because his brother killed him.
And just the absurdity of it: Abel hadn’t done anything to Cain, as far as we know. I mean, they’re both sinners, so presumably at times they had sparred with each other. There were times that maybe Cain had gotten his feelings hurt, there were times that maybe Abel had taken advantage of his brother, or his parents had favored Abel over Cain. All those sorts of things that happen in life may have happened. But we’re not meant to go and look for why Abel was bad, because in this context, Abel’s doing what’s right. He’s offering a sacrifice to God, a sacrifice that’s pleasing to God. Cain isn’t, but Cain doesn’t look at that and say, “Okay, I haven’t done this right, and God’s even taking the time to warn me about where this is going. I’m going to improve. I’m going to try to right the ship and just get back to normal.” No, Cain plunges.
Yeah. Cain plunges into the non-normal. And don’t we as well so often? We say we want normal. We want stability. We want things to be calm and good. And yet, when given the chance, we’ll go ahead and rock the boat all the more. We’ll go ahead and jump into the brokenness. That’s what we see here. Just look again at verse 9. This is right after Cain has murdered Abel, and this exchange with the Lord:
“Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is Abel your brother?’ He said, ‘I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?’”
We see here just how non-normal things have gotten. You have a second generation of human beings. You have them just establishing what normal life sort of looks like, and presumably part of that being Cain and Abel being in relationship to each other. And the breakdown of this relationship—on the one hand, Cain has decided to take out his anger on his brother.
And in that, we can’t really even just say, “Well maybe Cain didn’t realize what he was going to do. Maybe Cain didn’t realize he was truly going to kill his brother. Maybe Cain didn’t really understand what death was, and he thought if he just attacked his brother, that his brother would lay there for a while and then, sort of like a modern video game, suddenly just come back to life and get his next life or something.” Maybe Cain didn’t really get it; we might try to make excuses for him. But note here is he exchanges that conversation with God. We see it seems like Cain gets what he’s done.
And so what’s he trying to do? He’s trying to do what murderers for all of history have tried to do: try to set up a reason why he wouldn’t have any idea what’s going on with Abel. So there’s not a lot of people, and it seems like Cain is relatively solitary at this point, so he doesn’t try to say, “Well, I was over at the city down the highway at a party with lots of people who knew where Abel was.” He can’t say something like that. But he just says, “Well, why should I know?” as if he didn’t really have a relationship with his brother.
No, this is the same man that has enough of a relationship with his brother that he’s aware of how God responds to Abel’s sacrifice even as God rejects Cain’s. So it’s absurd. And yet Cain’s trying to cover it. He’s not filled with grief that his brother died, that he went too far. He’s not still trying to figure out exactly what’s going on; he’s trying to make sure that God doesn’t think that he has anything to do with it.
We talked about that last night in Sunday School Express a bit about how we tend to think, “Well, maybe we can get away with sin.” Clearly that’s where Cain is here. He’s thinking, “Well, maybe I can just get away with it.” And so what does he do? He kills his brother, but then not only does he kill his brother, then he starts lying directly to God. God’s conversing with him; he’s lying to God. So he compounds one sin with another, just keeps building here.
And that’s what we see with sin: when we don’t heed the warnings, and we allow that spiral to start, it just keeps spiraling and spiraling. I read a story a while back of John Sandoval. He’s not anyone that you necessarily should know the name of; he’s not a famous man. He’s famous for one particular crime that he committed last year, and that’s that he became so angry at his wife, who hadn’t filled up the tank on the coffee maker, that he threw a box of Oreos at her and knocked her to the floor.
Yes, you heard that right. When John Sandoval became angry, what did he do? He grabbed a box of Oreo cookies and attempted to throw it at his wife. Now, I suppose Sandoval gets credit, at least when the police came, he admitted that he knocked his wife over with the box of cookies. He threw it incredibly hard, hit her in the chest with it. He admitted what he was really doing was aiming for her head. He was going and throwing this box so hard that he could knock her over with it, aiming for her head, which meant he was really trying to seriously injure her. It wasn’t that he just was trying to be absurd and he grabbed a box of cookies and was being silly.
No, no, he was really trying to hurt her. Now, I don’t know their full story. I know enough from the story I read that they’ve been married for quite some time, but what it comes down to is this: Maybe they divided the chores; maybe they hadn’t. Maybe she was the one that always filled the tank and was supposed to, and he did some other things around the house. Maybe he’s just a lazy guy who expects her to do everything. I don’t know the details. But what’s very clear is even if he had been sinned against by her not putting the water in the tank, well, it wasn’t right for him to take it out on her physically.
And you think here about how this escalates. He wants a cup of coffee; maybe he’s going to have one of those cookies with his coffee. It could have been a nice morning, and he turns it into a situation where now the police come, now he’s knocked his wife to the floor. Who knows what happens to their marriage after all these years, and now he’s being charged with a felony for attacking his wife—all because you need to take the tank off the coffee maker and put some water in.
Sort of really, when you think about it, like Cain’s situation—as it starts—is not that hard to fix. God didn’t approve of his sacrifice. If Cain was coming with a sour attitude or something like that as he was coming to God, which is what it appears to be, and God doesn’t accept a sacrifice, all Cain needed to do was to say, “God, I want to have the right heart. I appreciate that you’re warning me that my anger is getting out of control. I want to start over. I want to set down the box of cookies, and I’d like to sit here, have a relationship with You, have a relationship with my brother, maybe eat some of those cookies. Things don’t need to be bad.”
But Cain picks up that box of cookies, and he aims it right for Abel’s head. He says, “I am not happy. I’m now going to take it out on my brother because my brother is doing what’s right, and I resent the fact that he’s doing what’s right.” And I think that’s where we find ourselves an awful lot of the time, as sinners. We may not go and kill someone. We may not actually seek the weapon of Oreos for harm directly, but we do it with our words, we do it with our inactions, and we do it with our other actions throughout the day. How often do we do things and build on what’s been done wrong to us or what’s wrong in ourselves?
Sometimes it’s self-inflicted. Maybe, for all we know, on that tank of the coffee maker for John Sandoval, maybe he was the one that normally filled it, and he was just grumpy that it was empty, or he’s grumpy that his wife had already had a cup of coffee. I don’t know those details. But what we do know is we run into those situations sometimes—self-inflicted, sometimes inflicted by others. But the question is then, am I going to move further into sin? Am I going to continue the spiral, or am I going to sit down and say, “Let’s share some Oreos instead?” Am I going to take the situation that’s bad and use it to turn into something good?
And certainly, if you have a box of cookies, and maybe you’re in the middle of an argument, maybe sitting down with the person you’re arguing with and having a cookie together, sharing a little joy together, is a way to step away from that, to instead of escalate, to de-escalate, to stop the spiral, to hit pause.
Maybe what Cain needed to do was to say to Abel, “I don’t know why God didn’t like my sacrifice. Can you help me understand how you approached it?” Or to say, “I’d just like to follow you around because I just don’t have the right attitude. I want to learn from you a little bit, Abel.” What does he do? He lures Abel out into the field and kills him.
How do we share the Oreos rather than using them as a weapon? How do we take our mistakes, not keep building on them, but to step away? Because here’s the thing: Sin inevitably escalates, and escalating sin leads to a compounded mess, and that’s what we see here. Cain turns up the heat, he keeps going, he doesn’t heed the warning, he’s speeding down that street, and he’s now spiraling out of control. And then it’s just going to keep getting worse. It’s going to get worse not just because Abel’s dead and now he’s lying to God, but now Cain is going to face the consequences of the sin. And that’s what we see as we move into verse 10.
It says, “And the Lord said, ‘What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to Me from the ground. Now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength. You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.’”
This should sound familiar to us if we think about Genesis 3, the chapter before that, the chapter where the fall occurs, because what happens when Adam and Eve sin? Well, God declares a curse. What happens there? We see the consequences of sin corroding the way the earth works. God says the land isn’t going to easily yield its fruit. The calling of Adam and Eve both is going to be affected by sin. And so, in a sense, we see a replay there for Cain. It’s more severe in the sense that not only is the ground going to be hard for him, but as a farmer who’s been raising crops, he’s now going to find that he can’t raise it at all. It’s not going to work.
But it’s not just a worsening curse. It’s a worsening picture of sin, and we see how we feed into each other’s sin, and things grow worse because, for example, we look at Genesis 3:12. When Adam’s confronted with his sin, notice that he responds to God in contrast to his son later on. It says, “The man said, ‘The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree, and I ate.’”
Now, a lot has been said about that phrase. It’s not a good way to answer God when He confronts you with your sin. The answer to God is not, “Well, this other person made me do it,” and certainly not, “You put this person in my life, God, and she made me sin.” That’s really not a good answer. But compared to the sin, it’s actually a better answer.
This is the interesting thing on how sin works, because Adam at least does admit he did eat the fruit. He’s admitting his sin. He says he did throw the box. He did do it. What does Cain do? He says, “I don’t know where Abel is.” So in both cases, we see two generations of human beings. They both are confronted directly by God for their sin. Something that, in a sense, abstractly we might say, “Well, that would be nice. Wouldn’t that be helpful if God would just help me to understand where I’m sitting?” It wouldn’t actually be that nice if we were constantly confronted by sin because we would understand just how sinful we are.
I think we think we deal with it better than we actually would, and that’s what we’re seeing revealed in chapters 3 and 4. Adam and Eve have a close relationship with God; Adam can’t deal with it well. Cain still has somewhat of a relationship with God; he can’t deal with it well. What would we do today if we were in that place? We wouldn’t deal with it better either. Not to say that we don’t want God to help reveal it to us, but we need to understand when we say something like, “Well, only I were there, only I were there, I wouldn’t do very well,” we see that this sin just keeps building and corroding because now we’ve gone from, “I’m going to come up with excuses for why I sinned” to, “I’m going to pretend it didn’t sin at all.”
So the consequences of sin are more sin, and the consequences of sin also include the suffering that comes from sin both for ourselves and for others. For Cain, someone who has made his living on the land, now the land itself is going to be hostile to him. He’s going to go from someone who had a stable position in that land to someone who roams the land. He’s going to be a fugitive, and in that we see that something that God’s going to say very clearly over and over again in Scripture, which is that sin does have consequence. Sin does actually cause pain to the person who sins.
Take a look at Deuteronomy 28:16: “Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the field. Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. Cursed shall be the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground, the increase of your herds, and the young of your flock.”
That’s the curse that God offers to the people if they choose to turn away from Him, if they choose to do what’s evil rather than what’s good. And it’s really describing the sort of thing that Cain experiences, the sort of thing that we experience too. Maybe not as dramatically often; we don’t often see the full revelation of our sin in the moment. And like I said, I don’t think we’d really handle it well if we did. We do see its destruction, and we do see how it affects even our ability to do our callings.
Here’s a people in Deuteronomy: they’re getting ready to enter the promised land, to farm it, to prosper, to be God’s people. And we can see that curse is speaking directly to their ability to do that thing if they choose to sin instead of following the Lord. That calling of their lives is going to be undermined. And that’s true for us too. As we sin, as we embrace anger and envy, as we choose what’s evil or choose to avoid what is good, what do we do? We destroy our self-identity as it has been given to us by God. We eat it away, and that’s what’s what Cain’s going to experience here.
He’s no longer going to be a farmer. In the sense that he’s known Adam and Eve, they tended a garden in a fixed place. Cain and Abel, it appears they were doing their work as farmers: one with livestock, one with crops in fixed places. Certainly as a man raising up plants, Cain wasn’t traveling around, but now he’s going to essentially become a nomad. His whole identity is going to have to change. He’s going to be faced with a dramatically different situation. Why? Because of his sin, because he chose to use the ground to try to cover up this, and he just left that body of his brother laying there, bleeding out on the ground.
Now he is no longer going to have the calling that he had in life. He could have fixed that calling when he wasn’t worshiping God correctly by bringing the proper offering to him of the fruit of the ground that he was being allowed by God to raise. He could have corrected the warnings. They were there; he knew the roads were slick, but instead he embraced it.
I think all of us need to confront the question in our lives: Where are those places where we’re embracing sin rather than actually doing what God’s called us to do with the very things that we associate most deeply with ourselves?
Now, it doesn’t mean every time we encounter a problem in doing the things God’s called us to do that there’s some deep, dark sin that we have to root out in ourselves. We can drive ourselves absolutely crazy constantly thinking, “Well, this didn’t work because I must have done something wrong,” and that means we’re putting it all on us. And there we’re actually falling into sin, the sin of pride, thinking it’s all about us and the success of what God’s called us to do in life is really all about us. It’s not that. But we certainly should be willing to ask the question: If I’m hitting bumps in the road, if things aren’t going well, if I feel like I’m being torn away from the things I’m supposed to do, how am I contributing to them?
That’s the thing that Cain isn’t willing to ask, and I think that all of us need to be willing to ask. I saw a professor of ethics last week ask the question: Why is it that many Millennials and younger folk don’t like a lot of the really solid gospel teaching that we see being put out by some of the big gospel organizations? I’m not going to drag any particular one into the mud by mentioning their names, but a lot of the big pastors and the movements they founded, by all accounts, they’re trying to engage culture, they’re trying to speak the truth of the gospel.
Why is it that many people who are, say, in their early 30s or younger find those organizations repugnant, even if they’re somewhat interested in spiritual things?
As I contemplated that question, what struck me is that one thing we’ve seen over and over with these movements is they got many big-name pastors about them, the sorts of pastors that you and I probably all read. Many of those pastors have over the last few years been found to use their churches to cover up different forms of abuse—sometimes physical, sometimes spiritual.
But what we see is that they use their platform to do that, and the people around them, including these organizations, would provide a shield to them because they were too big to fail. They had these huge ministries and these huge reputations and these big publishing operations, and the last thing that organizations like the ones this professor was referring to wanted to do was admit the people in their midst had done wrong. So they did more sin. They would do things like try to attack the victims or to cover up the victims or to push them quietly out, get them to sign non-disclosure agreements—all these sorts of things.
And they do that because they thought somehow they could hold on to their identity by doing that, of speaking the gospel into culture. And here’s the remarkable thing if you think about that professor’s question because it’s spot-on: This is really true.
If you probably know some of the sorts of groups I’m talking about that do this sort of cultural engagement with the gospel, and maybe you’ve wondered the same thing, why do the younger people not want to engage with it? This is supposed to be for them.
What I hear over and over again by those very people that are turning away from those groups is that they see the hypocrisy of covering up deep sin in the church, and they want nothing to do with groups that would do that. And so here are these groups that are meant to be bringing people to the gospel. They’re actually turning people away from the gospel. Their calling has been turned on its head.
That’s because they’ve chosen to embrace more sin. They’ve embraced the spiral of sin, even as they’re trying to justify it by saying, “It’s because we want to protect this mission to spread the gospel.”
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. It needs to be said regularly by the church: We never protect the gospel by covering up sin. We never protect the gospel by trying to make the church look like it’s done right when it’s done wrong. We never protect the gospel by doing more sin. It’s really that simple.
And that’s the problem Cain runs into. If you want God to like his sacrifices, he shouldn’t have needed to kill Abel so they didn’t have competition. He needed to just offer a better sacrifice. When the church does wrong, when parachurch organizations do wrong, they don’t need to try to cover it up or find some flaw in their victims’ characters so they can excuse it. They just need to do better. We all need to do better as the church. We need to be as faithful as possible, and we do that by turning more to the Lord. We do that by saying, “God, I can’t do it. We can’t do it on our own. We want You to help us to do it. We don’t want to spiral out of control. We know that You don’t honor sin, so the last thing we want to do is do more sin or somehow try to exonerate ourselves wrongly of the sin that we’ve committed.”
Here’s the problem, though: A lot of times it’s hard to even bring that up with these organizations, and people have, and they just ignore it. Why? Because trying to protect the organization and keep the status quo has become the new normal. That’s what we do for generations after Cain. What happens when someone wrongs you? For all the generations after, we go after the people that made us look bad. That becomes the new normal.
And then Cain’s faced with a truly new normal, an ugly new normal. He’s a wanderer, he’s rejected, and he has to say, “I don’t know what to do with us as we find ourselves in that position.” But how much better if we can hear the warnings first. We hear that the ice is on the road, and we take preventative measures. We feel the anger boiling in us, and we don’t pick up something to attack somebody else. We say, “Wait a second, what’s happening in my heart? God, help me. This is not what I want to be.”
Too often, the sin tastes good in the moment. It looks attractive, like that fruit in Genesis 3, and so we run after it. What we need to know is, when we embrace and when we try to cover up sin by sending more, it only begets more sin still. It’s a true spiral, a spiral towards death.
What do we do? I say, “I’m already spiraling down that road. I don’t know how to get out of it.” Here’s the thing: We need to hear very clearly, it’s not about us getting out; he didn’t need to get out on his own. He just had to hear God’s voice. They got help.
If you’re listening tonight, and you’re in the midst of sin and trying to figure it out — because we all are in different ways — you don’t need to figure it all out on your own. The thing to do is just set down that box you’re getting ready to throw to hit. Quit trying to somehow solve the problem as you’re spiraling down the road in this massive fire engine, and say, “God, I’m out of control, but I know You’re the one in control.”
When we do that, God is faithful to answer. Let’s pray that He’d help all of us in the places we’re out of control.
Father, would You help us? It’s so easy to get out of control, and when we’re out of control, a lot of times we almost kind of like it. It feels like we’re more in control than we think or what we think. “Well, this is really exciting,” or “How exciting and great will it be when I have gotten it back into control, under control myself?” That was more about us still.
Here’s the thing that Your word tells us over and over again: We can’t be in control. We won’t be in control. So Lord, in those places where we know that already, would You help us to be with us in them — those places we are still hanging on to the illusion that somehow we can do it on our own? Would You take away that illusion, You pick us up, and help us to be where You want us to be? We pray this in Jesus’ precious name.
Friends, as we spiral out of control, that identity of the sin that ensnares us becomes our identity, but it doesn’t need to be that way because our true identity is in Jesus. And if you join me in that prayer, or you were listening to it thinking, “I’m not sure what he’s going to say. I’m not really sure if I want to join him in that prayer,” well, just hit the rewind button and join me in it now.
If you think about it, and think, “I do want a part of it,” because your identity doesn’t need to be in the sin you’ve done in the past, the sin that you feel like you’re about ready to go careening into, identity can be and should be. God is willing to make it be. Their identity isn’t. Jesus, and that’s our hope.
If this has been an encouragement to you tonight, would you please give it a share? Stick it up on your social media, send it out by email, call someone up and say, “Let’s watch this together.” I know we’ve both been struggling through something. Let’s hear what God’s Word says, and what God’s Word says is that there’s hope and that He’s here, that He’ll help us as we’re spiraling. We can help each other.
One of the key parts of that is to be willing. This is where, when I mentioned a moment ago about churches trying to cover things up, church organizations trying to cover things up, one of the dangers of those parachurch organizations is thinking we can’t admit that we mess up. We can’t just say it and then ask God to help cleanse us because somehow that will be bad.
But friends, our identity is as sinners healed by Jesus, so we can say it. We can fess up to the things we’ve done because we’re not going to hide it from God, but God is going to be faithful to restore us, and that’s our hope. That’s what He’s faithful to do, so we come to Him in prayer.
And so I want to encourage you — we’re going to be praying for our community and our world on Thursday, and if you have five minutes or you have hours, it doesn’t matter. We’re going to have an online community prayer walk with believers all around the world, and we’re not going to pray as people who have everything together, who never sin, who are perfect or never mess up in any way. We’re all people careening out of control, but we’re people who are going to come to the God who is in control together.
You can come and say, “I need prayer in an area.” You can pray for others. You can just sit quietly and listen. It’ll be looping throughout the day, so you can turn it on as you have time. Here’s the beautiful thing about it: I love to just have it on in the background. I hear the different prayer prompts that come up, the people sharing God’s Word, encouraging us to areas of prayer, areas where we need to grow as Christians, areas where people are hurting in the world, and knowing all the other people that are listening and praying alongside that together. It’s just such a beautiful, beautiful thing, and I hope that you’ll join us on Thursday for that.
You don’t want to miss it. It’ll be live streaming all day, from a.m. to midnight, on both Facebook and YouTube. I sure hope to see you there. If you have any prayers or questions, you can always text us at 833-356-4032. That’s right on the screen, or leave a comment in the comments below, and we can pray and encourage each other there.
Hope you have a wonderful, blessed week. Stay safe with these slick roads. I look forward to seeing you again at the prayer walk, hopefully on Sunday, and then back here next Monday.
Start the Conversation