Sleepwalking part 1
I very rarely preach, or teach, or Rant, or talk about, or acknowledge sin. Which, as a pastor, I know raises a few eyebrows. Because most of the church world seems obsessed with it. "Cleansing the camp" and all this other stuff. Big time sin hunts all over the place. Well, for the next couple of days I'm going to Rant about it. About sin. But probably not how you're used to necessarily thinking about it. So stick with me. I want to start in Genesis (and I might just end in Revelation, but we'll see). "So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. While the man slept, the LORD God took out one of the man's ribs and closed up the opening" (Genesis 2:21 NLT). Now catch this, because it's important. God put man to sleep, but the Bible never says God woke man up. And from that time on in the account things got weird. Man and woman were seperate. The sepent showed up. Woman, and then man, ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. What most people define as "original sin" or "the fall." But to me, it all stemmed from the fact that Adam was sleepwalking. And remember, God CAUSED the man to fall into that deep sleep. This wasn't something man did in rebellion to God, or anything like that. Even when Eve swallowed the serpent's lie and ate from the tree of death, she didn't do it to spite God. She did it because she wanted to be LIKE God. She just didn't know that she was ALREADY like Him. Fast forward to Jesus. "Then he said, 'Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but now I will go and wake him up'" (John 11:11). God put man to sleep... and Jesus came to wake him up! It's the idea that we were CREATED in God's image, but it wasn't until the cross that we were CONFORMED to the image of His Son. We didn't know who we were. So we tried to do the best we could with what we had. We built a tower up to heaven to make a name for ourselves. But God didn't want us to make a name for OURSELVES. He wanted to give us a white stone with a new name in it. HIS name. HIS nature. HIS identity. God doesn't want you to be someone you're not. This phrase, "God loves you just the way you are, but He loves you too much to leave you that way" drives me nuts! He either loves you just the way you are, OR He wants to change you. Spoiler alert: It's the first one. He loves you just the way you are. There's nothing wrong with you. You just need to wake up. You need to "Awake to righteousness, and sin not; for some have not the knowledge of God: I speak this to your shame" (1 Corinthians 15:34). And, listen, I'M not saying anything to anyone's shame. I'm just trying to help us (and me) understand that we don't "sin not" in order to "awake to righteousness." Awaking to righteousness--who we really are in Him, who He really is in us--is HOW we sin not. 1 John 3:9 says it like this, "Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God." Once you wake up to the truth, the lie can't have any effect on you. And that's what sin IS; sin is unbelief. Believing the lie. And Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. He came to wake us from sleep. To awake us to righteousness. To show us who WE are, by showing us who GOD is!