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Little sins that seem almost harmless still multiply until they leave us too blind even for grace. In Genesis 4, Cain’s story is one of just such little sins and it serves as a caution as we tend our own “harmless sins.”
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The pastor describes “ladybug sins” as small, seemingly harmless transgressions that multiply quietly until they cause major damage. What are some examples of these kinds of sins in your own life or in modern culture that might be growing unnoticed—and what makes them so easy to dismiss?
God offers Cain help and restoration even after his offering is rejected, saying “If you do well, will you not be accepted?” (Genesis 4:6-7). What does this reveal about God’s character, and how might Cain’s story have unfolded differently if he had accepted that offer rather than letting resentment and jealousy fester?
The sermon traces a sequence from small sin to resentment, jealousy, and finally murder. Where do you see that progression in your own life—not necessarily toward violence, but in the way lesser sins quietly pave the way for larger ones? At what point in that sequence is it easiest to turn back?
The pastor uses the World War II Ghost Army as a metaphor for how sin misdirects us—we exhaust ourselves attacking the wrong targets while the real threat advances. How do we do the same thing when confronted with conviction about sin, blaming others or circumstances instead of examining our own hearts and turning toward God?
The sermon closes by connecting God’s grace to the pastor’s uncle—someone the world might overlook but who possessed unexpected wisdom and fierce loyalty. How does that image challenge our tendency to dismiss grace, assume God doesn’t understand our situation, or believe we are too far gone for him to care?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Well, who here loves snakes? Okay, so I thought I’d come… I guess I’m at… Oh, I’m at Little Hills Church. I thought I’d come to the Snake Appreciation Society of St. Charles. Clearly, wrong door. Yeah, this is not that.
But, yeah, most of us, we don’t like snakes very much, do we? Those of us who maybe think about it a little bit, you think, okay, I’m okay with snakes as long as they’re not near me, right? And that’s sort of where I’m at on snakes. But I get really uncomfortable when, say, I’m walking out in the woods and I hear that rustling sound and you look around and you realize there aren’t any animals above the leaves. So you know there’s something crawling underneath. And part of the concern there is I don’t know what kind of snake, I don’t really want to know what kind of snake, and it’s going to sneak up on me, right?
So we don’t like snakes. Lots of things we don’t like, things that sneak up on us. And sometimes it’s obvious, right? You hear that crinkling, you think, okay, I know there’s something nearby, I guess I’ll look around. A lot of times, though, we don’t even have that sort of warning. And so, despite all the dramatic music and how we would wish that would be when something bad is coming, the music would cue up, right, so we’d know it was coming and we could prepare, a lot of times it doesn’t. It’s much more subtle.
A few years ago, a friend of mine who lives out in the country came down with COVID. It’s reminded of this, everyone’s been passing things around the last few weeks and just all the nasty stuff around right now. It’s like, oh boy, who isn’t getting something right now? And so he came down with COVID. He’d avoided it the first couple of years it was around, comes down with it in 2022.
And as he’s laying there, barely able to move out in the country, his furnace goes out. And he said he thought about it and he couldn’t bear to call someone to work on the furnace and ask them to come into his house while he has COVID. He didn’t want to infect the furnace person, so he had a wood stove. He went out in the cold every day, barely dragging himself out to get wood and lighting his wood stove so he could stay warm. It sounded miserable at the time. It sounds miserable to think back to. I just feel so sorry for him.
But what’s interesting about it is that the problem was something that you probably would never guess. There’s all kinds of things you might think. Well, did his igniter go out? Did something burn through in the furnace? Did something like that? No, it wasn’t any of those things. His furnace went out because of ladybugs. Not just any ladybugs, Asian ladybugs. And what you may not know about Asian ladybugs is that, well, based on their name, you can guess where they’re from. They’re not native here, and they arrived here not that long ago. But here’s the part you may not know. They arrived here intentionally.
You see, the USDA decided that we needed to deal with the aphid problem in various crops and thought, we know what we can do. We can bring over these ladybugs from Asia that like to eat aphids. And so they brought them over and encouraged farmers to actually distribute them as widely as possible in order to eat the aphids on their crops, not realizing that these ladybugs would kill the native ladybugs, that they bite and they emit an odor. And so they’re everything that a normal ladybug isn’t, right? It’s one of the bugs even when you’re a kid you don’t really mind ladybugs, right? Just gentle, nice little bugs. Not the Asian ones necessarily. They also multiply very quickly and when it gets cold they go and find warm spots like a furnace. And that’s what happened to my friend.
And so I’m sure before his furnace went out in the fall he may have seen a little ladybug flying here. They’re just a little thing, not really anything that, no dramatic music, nothing that’s going to cue up and say, I need to pay attention. It wasn’t until he was already in a pretty precarious situation fighting a horrible virus, feeling absolutely awful, and I remember I’d check in on him and I was really worried that I wasn’t going to hear back from him. We usually just correspond by email and I’d write and I’d think he’s going to write back because his notes were getting shorter and shorter. You could tell he was just so miserable.
At that weakest point those ladybugs did their thing. They had been in that furnace multiplying all winter until they finally clogged the thing up. I was thinking about that, as I said, as I was thinking about just how we’ve been passing out so many viruses, but as I thought about it it reminded me of what we see as sin develops in our lives and in the lives of the various figures that we follow in scripture because so often it isn’t obvious initially. It seems almost harmless.
So often a few of those little harmless sins are the ones that then lead us into the huge overwhelming sins that are so hard to recover from. Now, to be clear, the smallest harmless sin is deadly. Just bringing a few of those harmless little ladybugs is going to cause a huge problem because eventually they’re going to multiply. It doesn’t matter that there’s just a few and it doesn’t matter if there’s just one or two little sins in our lives. They multiply.
But today we’re going to be looking at Genesis chapter 4 and thinking about the first murder and as we think about that I think one of the things we’re being challenged to do is watch our own lives and our own pursuit of the Lord that we’d be aware of those little ladybug sins. Those little sins that don’t seem that big a deal that multiply and multiply until we do something horrible. That, yes, God’s grace can cover just as it can cover the little sins but by that point we may very well be too blind to see it. And that’s the challenge.
God calls us to respond now when it’s small and not to wait hoping our hearts won’t become hard. Let’s go ahead and pray that our God would show us where those ladybug sins are in our lives and then we’ll dig in.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you for your word and thank you for the grace that we find in it. Lord, would you soften our hearts where they are hard and would you keep our hearts soft where they are already. Lord, we need your grace to do it. We can’t do this on our own but we pray that by your grace you would cleanse us of those invaders, those invasive species, the different kinds of sins, the ones that we are aware of and know are really bad and the ones that we discount and say, that’s just a harmless little thing. Help us see all of them as you see them and by the power of your spirit to escape them. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Let’s go ahead and turn to Genesis chapter 4. We’re going to start in verse 2. And here’s where we find ourselves.
It says, “And again she,” that’s Eve, “bore his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep and Cain a worker of the ground. In the course of time Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry and his face fell.”
Cain here misses the point and it’s easy, we get to the big point, right? Cain, how many of you think Cain’s a good guy? Cain’s not doing so well here and rightly so. Cain is not a good guy. But here’s a telling thing. When we hear about Cain and what he does, we start looking for well what is it exactly that made Cain’s offering bad? Why didn’t the Lord regard his offering? It must have been that he gave inferior sacrifices. Maybe it’s because he was a farmer and not a shepherd and so he wasn’t giving a living sacrifice. He wasn’t actually handing over a young animal and sacrificing it and having a blood guilt offering. It was only agricultural. Maybe that was it. Or maybe he wasn’t giving the firstfruits. It was some inferior portion.
And I think as we go searching in that and I’ve done that plenty of times trying to think what exactly is it? You know what it is is it’s showing us that we have the same problem that Cain does. Because it’s right in there and yet we’re looking for this technical detail that causes Cain’s offering to be rejected and yet what do we see? We see it in Cain’s attitude. Cain doesn’t understand why he’s offering these sacrifices. He doesn’t understand the heart of God and he doesn’t understand what’s different in the life of his brother Abel.
I really think it’s as simple as how they were approaching it. Cain, if he had approached the altar with joy, thankfulness to God, thankfulness that he had a way to contact, maintain a relationship with the Lord despite the broken nature of that relationship thanks to his parents, Cain’s offering would have been accepted.
The problem is that Cain is in a bad mood. Cain resents having to do this. Cain sees the externals of what Abel’s doing and puts on a good face, does a good set of external acts. It wouldn’t be surprising to me if we were there, if we even looked at Cain offering the sacrifice and at first blush thought Cain did a better job than Abel. But he wasn’t offering it with faith.
If God instituted the sacrifices and as we look at the law later on and it goes over those sacrifices, it was intentional that God wanted these sacrifices to be wholly integrated into the lives of the people. So what were they to do? They were to offer the first fruits. Whether they were harvesting a field, whether they had livestock, whatever it was, they offered the first fruits of it. That way, what they were offering was the integration of what they did the rest of the week with worshiping the Lord. That the two were completely one.
Because if you’re taking the first and the best of what you’re doing as you’re working and you’re giving it to God with the right heart, the act of taking what we’ve earned and saying, God, I entrust this with you. I want you to have this back, this thing that you’ve provided to me because I trust you and I love you and I want to serve you. That’s experiencing that integration of worship with the rest of our lives. If we keep those two apart, and that’s what Cain is doing, I believe, here.
What Cain’s doing is saying, okay, I will do it, but I’m not going to do it willingly. He’s thinking about, I’m working my tail off, nine to five, and then I’m working overtime, too, and there aren’t even any laws on overtime or anything yet, so I’m not getting any bonus for that. I’m just working, working, working, and then that pesky God of mine, he wants me to give something. Okay, I’ll give him something. And what he’s missing is that everything he has is from the Lord, and that he can have something so much richer if he’s actually experiencing a relationship with the Lord, as opposed to focusing on resenting giving it.
Hebrews 11, verse 4, here’s what the author of Hebrews says about this incident. He says, “By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts. And through his faith, though he died, he still speaks.”
Now, if you’re familiar with chapter 11 of Hebrews, you know this, and if you’re not, you should go and spend some time in it because it’s one of the most beautiful things ever written. But the journey in Hebrews 11 is a journey simply of this, that there are a lot of imperfect people who trust the promise of God, and they don’t always know where it’s going, but they keep following and doing what he says. Not perfectly, but they keep doing it. And we know they don’t do it perfectly because of the people that get in the list. They do all kinds of bad things, they have all kinds of sins creeping into their lives, but they keep turning back to the Lord.
It’s like we were talking about on Wednesday night during our Ash Wednesday service when we reflected on King David. Not that he didn’t do horrible things, he did. But he kept coming back to the Lord and recognizing that he needed God’s purification and desiring it genuinely, not out of some duty and obligation, but out of a genuine love of God. I think that’s what we’re reading about Abel here too.
I don’t think we’re supposed to take Abel, we know very little about him, but we’re not supposed to take him and say, oh, there was a perfect individual because we know after Adam and Eve there wasn’t a single person who walked on this earth perfect for a moment until Jesus came. But Abel was proceeding in faith. A very limited faith, right? He didn’t have the whole of God’s word to read about exactly what it was he was doing and how it worked.
But that’s part of the beauty of faith. He didn’t need this. He had the Lord and he said, I know I’m supposed to sacrifice to you, Lord. I know that this comes from you. I want to do this. What’s the difference with Cain?
1 John 3, verse 11: “For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. We should not be like Cain who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s were righteous.”
Notice here that John doesn’t say Cain’s deeds were evil when he murdered his brother. He said Cain’s deeds were evil and that leads him to murder his brother. We can sometimes miss that and think, oh yeah, he’s the first murderer. Yeah, I get that he’s evil. But here’s the thing we need to understand. His sacrifices were evil. He had all these ladybugs of sin crawling around, Asian ladybugs, not the nice ones. They’re the vicious, fanged ladybugs. If you’re an expert on bugs, don’t slap me for saying fanged. I know that’s not the right term. But you know, whatever they have, pointy things that can bite us, they’re doing that, but yet we kind of dismiss it.
Most of the time we can’t tell the difference between the Asian ladybugs and the regular ones. I can’t. I just see one outside and I don’t know what I’m dealing with. And likewise, we can’t often tell the difference between something that’s genuinely a perfectly harmless part of life and what’s a sin until it multiplies and our furnace goes out when we’re feeling like we’re on death’s door. And we don’t want to be there.
The difference for Cain is that Cain doesn’t have the right heart behind his sacrifice. He is coming to it and it’s not working. And when it doesn’t work, and God isn’t regarding that sacrifice, he then moves into a second sin. And this is where it starts to multiply.
Because what Cain does when he sees that God doesn’t like his offering, but he regards Abel’s offering, he doesn’t say, I wonder what I’m getting wrong that my brother isn’t. Maybe, I know, I should go talk to my brother and say, Abel, I don’t want to be the guy that kills you later on, so help me out here. I want to get this right instead. And I want to understand why it is that your sacrifice is a good sacrifice and mine’s a lousy, no good, stinking, rotten sacrifice.
He doesn’t do that. Nor do we see Cain pray to the Lord and say, God, I want to be a follower of you and I… I don’t know why my sacrifices aren’t working. Help me to see it.
No, what do we see? This is that no good brother or do-gooder of mine. He offers sacrifices and he, of course, yeah, he’s everybody’s favorite. Even the Lord’s. And he takes his own evil, Cain’s own evil, and allows it to fester until it turns into another evil, which is jealousy. And then, as one commentator put it, the sequence from our own sin to jealousy, to hatred, to murder, is a natural and terrible sequence that’s going to happen.
Now, not every time that we’re jealous do we go and kill the person, thankfully. And we’ve just had the Ten Commandments series, so we know not to do that now. We shouldn’t kill people. But how many times do we kill people with our attitude, just like we were talking about a few weeks ago? And we do that. Why? Because we allow something lesser to fester. We allow jealousy to fester. We allow just our own sin and the fact that things aren’t going the way we want to just cause us to be angry at others because we just want someone to blame.
We cause our own sin to blind us to what’s righteous, and we become angry at God. And those are the things that are happening here. And so, what does Cain do? He starts to take aim at Abel and the Lord rather than himself.
He has the idea that there’s a problem, he knows that, but he doesn’t know what the problem is. And he knows that, but he doesn’t understand the right target for it. And so he starts solving problems by compounding sin rather than running from sin.
I think one of the most interesting things I’ve ever read about World War II is the Ghost Army. Anyone know about the Ghost Army? A few of you do. The Ghost Army had a unique, unique commission in the U.S. Army during World War II. They were to defeat the Germans using inflatables. I’m not kidding. Rubber tanks that inflate, tents that were empty, loudspeakers that played, people doing drill exercises, and then their sergeants cursing them out for not doing them well enough and so on.
You see, one of the problems in World War II is there weren’t enough troops. And they came to a realization that the way to defeat the Germans was to cause them to pursue a Ghost Army. And so they created one. And they created thousands of tanks and extra tents and took various creative folks, actors and such, to do voice acting, to do the speakers, others to do fake marches, others to do fake communication about the movements of the troops.
Why? So then when the Germans were trying to decide where were they going to attack next, they would see these seemingly huge troop movements and go after them and not the real troops that were coming to attack. And it worked. At one point, they managed to simulate 40,000 troops with under 1,000 soldiers working on it.
But the Germans went after them and they missed where they really needed to target. And that was one of the most decisive moments in the war. It helped to turn the tide of the war after D-Day.
One of the remarkable things about that, I think, is that if they could have actually paid attention to what they were seeing more clearly what they were targeting, they would have realized they were targeting a bunch of literal hot air. But they couldn’t. Now, did they have the technology to? Well, maybe not as easily as we could today, but they probably could have. And I think the other challenge was they were so confident in themselves they didn’t even expect to be fooled like that.
And that’s how we are. We don’t expect to be fooled. But here’s the problem. That was a good thing. We wanted the Allies to win, right? We wanted the evil Axis powers to fall. That was a good thing. But Satan loves to use the same techniques on us. And he sets up all kinds of ghost armies. And we start firing at them. And we’re using up all of our bullets, all of our ammunition, all of our tanks, all of our strength, all of our troops as it were to go after those ghost armies. And then he comes invading in with a new sin for us to do instead.
Cain knows he needs to attack somewhere. There’s something wrong in his life. And he is ready to attack. In fact, he is going to attack. But the problem is he’s not going after the wrong thing. He’s going after this illusion that it’s really his brother’s fault. It’s really God’s fault. And he starts firing at those things.
And meanwhile, God says what? That sin is ready to attack. And sin does attack.
Here’s the problem. Small sins serve to actually inflate that ghost army. It’s like we’re actually handing over the compressors and the paint and so on and saying, here, Satan, fool me. And so it’s not just that we’re being fooled. We’re actually actively encouraging that fooling because we become blind to sin. We keep doing just a little bit more and saying, okay, this sin isn’t really so bad. It’s not bad if I’m just a little sharp here. If I think impure things here. If I don’t love my neighbor over here. It’s not really that bad. And what we’re doing is saying, here, Satan, here’s some inflatable tanks to fool me with later. And Satan’s glad to take them. Sure. Great.
Your sin nature’s going to have a great time with these tanks. Small sins mask larger ones. Okay, in small sin, he goes to the offer of sacrifice and he doesn’t have the right attitude. Would that be hard to fix? No, that’s not hard to fix at all if you actually want God to work in your life. If he came to the Lord and said, I just want to learn to be a true worshipper of you.
And if we’re here and we don’t always have the right attitude in worship, but we want to, we’re saying, Holy Spirit, give me the strength to, purify me, show me my sin and help me to overcome it. God’s faithful to do that. He would’ve been faithful for Cain. In fact, as we go on in a moment here, we’re going to see just how faithful God is to Cain.
And yet so often we say, you know, I have this, it’s good, and it’s easier, it’s easier, God, if you don’t fix it because I kind of like the way things are. I don’t care if I can’t see which army is really invading me or not because I just don’t want to deal with it right now. And Cain misses his way up.
Back to chapter 4, verse 6. The Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? And why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. The desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it.”
What’s Cain’s response? Cain spoke to Abel, his brother, and when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother, Abel, and killed him.
Here is the difference from a ghost army. God tells him, Cain, I see where you’re headed. You are headed to go try to blow up those rubber tanks and sin is crouching there. There is an invading army ready to go after you and all you need to do is ask for my help. I’m here. I’ll rescue you from it. You don’t have to figure out which tanks are really and which ones aren’t. Just turn to me.
You’re being invaded. You need help. But by that point, Cain is so angry. By that point, Cain is so convinced that the problem is either there’s an unjust God or just an unjust brother getting under his skin that he knows that the only real solution is to kill his brother. Because then, when he offers the sacrifice, how could God complain? God’s not getting any sacrifices from Abel any longer.
You know, we get caught up in the murder and rightly so. The first murder. What we don’t want to miss is we look at how hard-hearted Cain is. It’s how tender-hearted God is. Because we already know that Cain hasn’t been worshipping him properly. We already know that Cain is falling short. And yet, what does the Lord do? He offers help. He offers a way out.
He says, Cain, you don’t have to be here. If Cain really understood what was going on, he’d understand even the very existence of sacrifice as a sign of God’s care. Because why did God give sacrifice? Was God hungry? No. Was God in need of money? You know, He could take some of the offerings, burn up and they go into the heavenly bank and it allows Him to buy stuff? No.
Why did God create sacrifice? He created it to give a way for those who were sinful back to Him as a precursor to the ultimate sacrifice that would make all things right. As that first step to that true sacrifice that perfect sacrifice in Jesus.
As Cain is complaining about sacrifice and he’s saying, I resent having to give this sacrifice and I resent how God always likes my brother’s sacrifice as better, and what he’s missing is the fact that he can give a sacrifice that God didn’t just wipe him off the face of the earth, and even when it’s imperfect that God then tries to help Cain and doesn’t just reject him.
That’s as thin as crouching at your door and the desire is against you. You think, Cain, that if you just do this that you’ll defeat that ghost army and it will go down, but let me tell you, it’s empty. There’s no victory there.
The very term here goes back to the fall. Genesis 3:6-7 says, the fall. Genesis 3:16, second half of the verse, God says to Eve, “Your desire shall be contrary to your husband but he shall rule over you.”
God says that and Adam and Eve are standing there. God’s saying, the effects of sin are going to be that you no longer relate as you should. There’s going to be a brokenness and a disconnect. It’s going to be hard and frustrating. You’re meant to work against each other an awful lot of the time. That’s going to be your challenge because you’re sinful now.
God, as he speaks to Cain here, says, sin is never working towards you. Sin is working against you. Remember that curse your parents have taught you as you were growing up and what happened because of their disobedience? Sin here is against you, Cain. It’s not going to build you up.
The problem is, Cain wants esteem. He wants people to like him. He wants to be well regarded. He wants people to say, look at Cain, the one who gives the good sacrifices. Look at Cain, the one who’s the good guy around and he’s not getting that and instead of looking at himself and asking God to restore him, he wants an easier out and what seems to be a more satisfying out, is revenge. Because revenge sounds really satisfying.
So as it builds, as those ladybugs cover more and more up and systems start to shut down and Cain, he can’t even see it coming. He’s getting sicker and sicker with sin and he knows it’s getting colder but he just thinks that’s more reason to be angry.
As God confronts him with his sin, Cain has a choice. He can double down, do more sin or he can escape it. Verse 7 once again. “If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you but you must rule over it.”
You can’t miss that first sentence. Cain does. God says, it’s not too late for you to be accepted. God isn’t saying, Cain, nice try, too bad. Here’s a consolation prize. Go home and gnash your teeth. No, God is saying, I’m here and I’m ready to accept you.
He says the same thing to you and to me as we’re dealing with sin and we’re allowing the ladybugs to multiply and it’s getting worse and worse and we’re missing the point. God says, don’t do that. You can be accepted. Just turn to me. Worship me.
The problem is just as sin masks greater sin, sin masks grace. As our sins multiply, those ladybugs cover up the window and we can’t even see out and see the light of God outside. God breaks that window pane for Cain so he can look in and shine that light on Cain and Cain says, here I’ll pull down the shades my window’s broke. We should be blind to what we should hear.
I was thinking and reflecting this week as I knew we were going to have a couple of songs that tied in with my uncle’s death and remembering him and honoring him and I was thinking about that song that David played for us and the hope that we find in it. And thinking about my uncle.
And one of the things that struck me as I was thinking this week about that and then we’re going through this series I thought, you know, a lot of times God’s grace is sort of like my uncle. That might sound a little weird to say. But if you didn’t know my uncle, my uncle had struggled all of his life. He had some learning disabilities and it was hard. He went through a lot that just was hard because things didn’t always work for him.
And he could live somewhat independently over time but he needed help and it was challenging. And one of the challenges is that if you have a loved one who’s in that state, you know that people often just ignore them or reject them or mock them. And there were a lot of times people would just, what’s he have to offer? Go and talk to other people. It’s easier, right? Maybe the conversation is a little harder with him because he doesn’t always go through conversation exactly the same way everyone else would.
But if you hung around my uncle enough, you realize a few really important things. One is that between the conversations that were often about Spider-Man and Superman and Batman and cars and such, in between all that he would spout off these incredibly wise observations that you’d just kind of be floored because you didn’t see them coming.
He wasn’t a deep theologian but sometimes he’d say something about God and it was sort of like that’s… huh. That’s more perceptive than most of us that spend all of our time actually thinking about these things. Maybe all of us.
And here’s another thing that people missed out on when they didn’t hang around my uncle. They didn’t realize that he was one of the most loyal people you’ll ever meet. For his family and for anyone that he was around, he was loyal. I always knew growing up that if I was in trouble and I needed help and my parents weren’t around I could reach out to him and he would be there. And even as I grew up I knew if I had a problem one day, I had a car problem and I couldn’t get somewhere and I couldn’t get a hold of my parents and I couldn’t get there and I called him and he was there in ten minutes.
He was always exhausted after work. He worked really hard but it didn’t matter he was there. And that’s the way he was. He was that way with his company. He arrived to work two and three hours before they opened because he didn’t want to actually accidentally be late and not be there for them.
He had to actually get a special card that he could put in the car from the company so that when the police would knock on his window wondering why in the middle of the night there was someone sitting in the parking lot that he really was supposed to be there. But he was loyal to that company. He served them and he was going to be there no matter what. And he was that way for his family too.
I thought about the things that people missed if they just said oh here’s someone who doesn’t necessarily see things quite the way they probably should be seen often times. Here’s someone who can’t understand everything, isn’t going to wow anyone with advanced degrees or huge worldly accomplishments, but here was someone who often times could see right through the things that we’d miss and would show loyalty in his love.
Now God of course has more knowledge than all the advanced degrees ever and God has more ability than all the abilities in the world, but here’s the thing for us, because of our sin, because of our special needs, we often look at God and think maybe he’s the one that doesn’t quite get it.
And when things aren’t going the way that we want them to, and we don’t quite understand why things are happening, we do like Cain does and we say well you know maybe God just doesn’t care about this or I’m going to find my own way.
And God’s saying I know sometimes when you come to my word and you read about Cain and Abel you’re reading about Israelite troop movements, you’re reading about some struggle in the early church, you think this doesn’t really have anything to do with me, why am I going to sit here and listen? This is just like listening about Batman and Superman and Trans Ams.
How often when I’m feeling that I’m in God’s word do I get to a particular point? The point that God needed me to be at at that moment, that he intended for me to be at at that moment, and hear the wisdom I need to hear.
God comes to Cain and says here’s the wisdom you need to hear but Cain attuned him out. I need to get practical worldly solutions God because I have a practical worldly problem.
We talk about all the other stuff. How often do we do the same? How often are we just blinded to the fact that God is calling us to maybe not an audible voice, maybe he doesn’t say in a voice I wish sometimes he would, here Tim, sin is crouching at your door right here.
But how often if I actually open his word and I prayerfully read it and let the spirit speak to me do I do exactly that? And how often do I walk away from it because I’m just not not in that place at that moment. I don’t want to be in that place at that moment.
Sin starts so small and it just builds and builds and builds until the ladybugs are crawling over the Bible and you can’t read the text.
God’s calling us to say God, take away the ladybugs, deflate the tanks, call me into your presence, help me to listen to you even when I don’t understand why you’re talking about something because I know that you actually have the wisdom I need. Because you know however big sin gets, God’s grace, God’s grace was and is and always will be bigger. And he calls us to it each and every day.
I want to ask Chris to help me out here for a moment as we wrap up here because you know we need reminders of the things that sneak up on us. And so as we’re going through this series, what’s the name of the series? Stories… Stories of Sneaky Snakes. Chris is going to hand you a snake. I guess we are now a snake handling church.
And here’s what I want you to do. So that we remember that yes sin can get big and it can sneak up on us but God’s grace is bigger. I want you to take this friendly little colorful snake and put it someplace you’re going to see it regularly over the next few weeks. So every day you see this snake and as you see this snake I promise it won’t bite you. They’re well trained.
Just use that little snake as a reminder that there’s a lot of things that do sneak up on us in this world. So praise be to God he offers us a solution, an antidote, a hope. And when you walk by wherever you place that snake or you’re in your car and that snake’s sitting on your dash or whatever you do and you see it I want you to pray, God help me to see where the sneaky snakes of sin are coming up on me this season. Help me to see it. Don’t let me slither away from your grace, let me come into your grace. And use that as just a little physical reminder of the great and amazing and wonderful hope that God has for you and for me and he truly does have it for each of us today and every day.
I’m just going to wait a second here for all the snakes to slither.
If you have a, if you’re online, let me encourage you, you know you can go into the image search and find a good snake, print off a snake and do the same. You’re not getting out of this if you’re online. Print off that snake. And if snakes make you squirm a little bit, good because we should squirm with sin but here’s the good news.
If you’re online, let me encourage you, here’s the good news. We have a Savior from all the sneaky snakes of sin.
Would you pray with me please? Father we do come before you as those who so often get blinded by sin who allow sin to build because we’re going after the wrong things. We don’t go after the sin, we go after the illusion that we think is the real problem. We don’t seize onto grace because we’re blinded by our own sin. Lord would you give us sight to see, would you give us ears to hear that we would see the wonderful and magnificent and beautiful and simple truth that your amazing grace has made the only way to salvation and the way that’s open to each and every one of us. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.
Melanie led us in amazing grace earlier in this service and let me yeah okay sounds wonderful. Let me, why don’t you actually go ahead and share right now. Yeah, let’s see, we’re going to need to turn on L-Vocal well that way our online folks can hear you.
L-Vocal, I just wanted to take a few minutes to talk about my friend Jay too.
Can you turn on the congregational mic? They’ll hear me.
I just wanted to take a few minutes to talk about my experience with Jay.
We didn’t have too much to worry about, he liked to be outside, he liked to have fun, he liked to express himself and he was pretty much a joy to be around. He knew I liked hop rocks okay I had cars I liked to go fast this and that and Jay didn’t want to show me where his dad’s workshop was one day. He took me downstairs and he said this is my dad’s workshop ice and this is his welding tank and this is where he worked a lot and it was through that where I said, well you know what, Jay, do you want to go for a ride in my car?
And I looked back at this thing right now and I don’t know what Jay’s mom was thinking but she let him get in the car with me and there wasn’t a lot of red flags back then you know what I mean? A lot of innocence on Jay’s part and anyway I took Jay for a ride more than one time, a couple of times.
He always said he knew I was coming but he said you’re going to be around the corner and I went past, I went through the gears and this and that so we’re going to fast forward 50 years.
I didn’t see Jay 50 years and I heard from my assistant. I asked, where’s Jay? And he said he’s sitting over there getting ready to eat or whatever and when I started walking over there with him I made eye contact with him and he did with me and he immediately knew who I was after 50 years and I was quite taken back by that. I really was and I knew that I had made an impression on him so I started going over and as Jim said he was very dedicated and he wasn’t real sociable and he did have his problems he did communicate kind of hard and it wasn’t easy but anyway he, I found out that one of his things was that he had a job he told me this. He cleaned the tables after lunch and he also wiped the tables off before lunch that was one of his jobs at the home and I respected him for that so I had to tell him that that is not what he wants to do in his life. You know.
And I could tell that Jay after I was there for a while was nervous and he was thinking of me, you know, you know. And one of our favorite subjects was talking about when he was a boy because his dog was named I think Muppet and I remembered that dog and I introduced him to my dogs and then after that he would ask me how’s my dog and I would tell him that my dog was named Muppet and I introduced him to my dog and I introduced him to my dog and I introduced him to my dog and I introduced him to my dog…
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