Take your Bibles if you would. Genesis chapter 3. We're gonna start in verse number 6. Genesis chapter 3 in verse number 6. Thankful to preach this morning. This is the message that I was planning on doing tonight. And I got something else. I got something else for tonight. But, you know, when you get the call, you make things happen. I did know that he was sick yesterday, the day before, and so, you know, had some time to prepare and get things ready, which I'm thankful for that, and thankful to preach. Now, this is the message that Pastor Bill mentioned last week that I didn't do last week. And so, figured I'd put some work and effort into it and bring it this week. And so, we're going to read from verse 6 down to verse number 13. The Word of God says, And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired, to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her. And he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. And they heard the voice of the Lord walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. And the Lord God called unto Adam and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself. And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is it that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. Let us pray. Lord, we're thankful for Scripture. this morning. We're thankful for the lessons that we are going to learn from this passage. May what is spoken through the preaching of your word this morning benefit our lives not only for the immediate but also for the eternal. We're thankful that we can go to scripture and see how to better improve our lives for the cause of Christ and may the teachings that we go over tonight impact us in a mighty way. May you remove distractions from our minds, and speak to each individual individually. In Christ's name we pray, amen. The title of the message today is called the Darvo Tactic. If you saw in your bulletin, that was the title that I had given for this evening's sermon, the Darvo Tactic. And the reason I named it the Darvo Tactic is because that term was coined by Jennifer Fried, she was an American psychologist who identified certain behaviors in individuals when they failed. We would say as Christians, when they sinned, when they have done wrong, she identified certain characteristics and things that humans typically do when they find themselves in trouble, when they find that they have failed, when they have done wrong. These are the typical responses that individuals normally have. She did not come up with this, but she did identify those specific things. Because the truth of the matter is that mankind has always been the same. Mankind has always been the same. I'm not sure what it is, but people typically like to divide everybody in all these different categories. Oh, this category here, or this age group here, or the people that grew up here. Humanity, in general, is always and has always been the same. We may have differences. We may have grown up different. Maybe you grew up poor. Maybe you grew up rich. Maybe there were those that have lived during the Depression time, and they were big savers. They kept everything. They hoarded things. And, you know, rightfully so, what they had been through, And yes, there are those things, but when we get down to the human core, to the nature of humanity, we are all the same. You may say to yourself, well, I'm sitting here and I'm 80 years old, or I'm 70 years old. There's not that much of a difference between you and I. Because at the core, you and I are exactly the same. Do you believe it? Yes, we are exactly the same. And so these responses, when we have failed, these responses that we are going to go over, humanity has done this for thousands of years. You're gonna find that as we dissect this passage, verses six through 13, what you're gonna find is that we are all just the same. The same things that Adam and Eve did, thousands of years ago are the same things that I am guilty of doing today. And so how beneficial is it for us to look through these things? Mankind has always been defensive. And it's important for us to understand that all of us are going to fail. All of us are gonna sin. All of us are gonna do things that we couldn't imagine that we were ever gonna actually do them, but somehow we fail and we come short and we shame the name of Christ. Every person in this room is guilty of one time or another shaming the name of Christ. But the key of what we're gonna go over this morning is not just identifying how we respond, but yet trying to implement how we respond to sin that we find ourself in. You may look through some of these things and try to point the finger, so to speak, at somebody else. I know this person that does that. I've got this neighbor. They're always doing these three things. I've got my husband. You better listen up. No, this morning is for each individual to identify and not be guilty of doing these things. And by the end, when we have come full circle with this topic and with this idea, we're gonna talk about how we should respond when we've sinned and we've failed God and we've shamed the name of Christ. And Lord willing, we'll be better for it. The first thing, now we're gonna see, as you're gonna look here behind me, each one of these letters stands for something. And we're gonna look in scripture and see that all works together. The first one, D, is for deny. Deny. Verse 7, read it with me again. Hopefully you have your Bibles open. If you don't have a Bible, there should be one in front of you in that row there. It's a red-covered Bible. You're more than welcome to take that. And if you don't have a Bible of your own, we are more than happy to get one to you. But Verse 7 is where we'll be looking, Genesis 3, and it says, And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together, and they made themselves aprons. Adam and Eve, in this moment, they tried to cover up themselves. They tried to cover up the sin that they had identified in their life, and this was just a facade, because they were not covering up anything. Why did they do this? They did this because their innocence was now gone. They felt bad about what they had done. They identified the wrong that they had committed and their eyes were open. We often are guilty of doing the same thing. We try to cover up our wrongdoing. We try to move on from what we have done without actually dealing with the problem. And we move on to the next thing in a facade, acting like everything is just okay. The truth of the matter is, until sin is dealt with, everything is not okay. And you're gonna see here, you can run, you can try to hide as a Christian, you can try to get away from the reality, but God will bring it up at one time or another. But we try to cover up just like they tried to cover up. Their fig leaf clothes were the best that they could possibly come up with. They took time, they took effort, they sewed the leaves together, and they, as the Bible says, they made themselves aprons, which is like clothing, to cover up their nakedness. And in their best efforts to try to fix their problem, they fell drastically short. What we see later on is that God identified their sin, saw what they did, and ended up making them proper, appropriate, coverings, taking the life of an innocent animal and making clothes for them, which is a symbol of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, that He was going to die for our sins and cover and redeem our sins and justify us. The sad thing is, is that the most of the world today is in denial of their sin. They're trying their best to cover it up, and they do it in a whole lot of ways. When you ask a person generally, are you going to go to heaven when you die? They say, I think so, I hope so. You say, why? They say, well, I'm a good person. I try to do good things. What is that? What are they saying in that moment? They're saying, I'm making fig leaves. I'm sewing things together. I'm trying to cover up my sin the best way I can with all these superficial external things. They may fool themselves in that moment, but when they stand before Jesus Christ, the judge, they will not be able to have the facade. Our best efforts are not good enough. I hope in the size of this auditorium today, I hope that every single individual in here is a born again believer. That's somebody that had their sins forgiven, trusted in Jesus as their Savior, believed that He died on the cross, was buried and rose again for them, and that you've repented of your sins and turned to Christ for salvation. I hope that's every single one in here, but I would guess the amount of people we have in here, there are some that are clinging to fig leaves this morning. There are some that are clinging to other things besides Jesus Christ and Christ alone. which is the only proper covering for our sin. We see this denial that they have. They try to hide, verse 8, and they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. Sin brings guilt. Sin brings shame. Sin makes you want to hide. We all remember maybe as children and when we maybe had a bad day at school, we disobeyed, we smart-mouthed the teacher, we got in a fight with another student, we maybe disrespected mom, and we are at home now waiting for dad to come home. The terror, the torment that you had waiting for your father to come home. I remember several of those instances vividly in my mind. Now most of the time, I'm real happy to see my father. I run up to him, I grab him, I hug him, I kiss him, and I'm so happy to see him, but there are those times where I am terrified to hear his car pull into the driveway. I'm terrified to hear his keys jingling as he unlocks the door. Adam and Eve hid themselves. How often does the dad come home and say, where's Johnny at? And the mother says, well, he's in his room. He knows you showed up. He's not looking to greet you. He's trying to do everything to avoid that confrontation as much as possible. And Christians, when we sin, do we not do the same with God? Adam and Eve are guilty here of hiding themselves from the presence of the Lord amongst the trees. Verse 10, look at it with me. He says, And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself. Adam and Eve had a close-knit relationship with God. The closest, I think, out of any human that have ever lived, Adam and Eve had a close-knit relationship with God. They were, yes, they were God and mankind, but even on a deeper level, they were friends. I honestly believe that. They had fellowship one with another. And what had sin done? Sin had taken a friend and made a friend an enemy. Those of us in here who may have sin in our lives, sin's gonna make God feel like an enemy to you when He is not, when He is a friend. Some, even in this room, are hiding. You say, well, I'm here. I'm dressed up. I came prepared. You're hiding because there's sin between you and God that you don't want to deal with. Hiding. Oh, at one time, like Adam and Eve, you ran to the presence of God, excited to have a moment in the Word of God, excited to have some time in prayer, in the prayer closet. But what has happened? Sin has came in, and you're not running to your Bible like you were. You're not running into the prayer closet like you were. Your friend has become your enemy. Some are terrified of the preaching that's gonna come next week, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday for revival. You're terrified because you're worried about God putting His finger on something in your life that's not supposed to be there, and you're hiding from it. Some are sitting in this room this morning and have totally tuned out every word that I have spoken this morning because they continue to try to hide their sin from God, acting as if, I'm just gonna hide it and it's gonna be okay. I like how Adam and Eve, they only come clean after they were confronted. They tried the fig leaves. They tried hiding. Nothing was working. Eventually, God had to directly ask them, where are you? God had to come looking for them. God had to come find them. God says, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eaten? They weren't searching to find God so that they could confess and get things right. It wasn't until God had put His finger on it and had directly asked them that they gave an answer. Do you see the importance of responses as believers? When we sin and we do wrong, the first initial human reaction is to run, is to try to make the best of it we can with fig leaves, is to try to hide. A better response would have been Adam and Eve searching for God, but yet they didn't do that. They waited till God cornered him. Is God saying to you this morning, where are you, so-and-so? Where are you, so-and-so? Trying to get your attention. Is he going to have to root it out of you? Or are you going to come forward with it on your own? Note that God was not angrily hunting and searching for them. and he doesn't appear to be wanting to smite them with his wrath the moment he sees them, do you get that indication from the scripture here? We have this idea in our minds, and I'm not sure where it comes from, but I have this in my mind, and maybe you do as well, that when you do wrong, you're flinching, hoping that God's not just gonna smite you down. That's not what I see God doing here. I see God lovingly coming to Adam and Eve like He had done probably hundreds, maybe thousands of times before. I read through the Old Testament. Not do I see God's judgment on Israel, but I can't help but see God's mercy, and God's mercy, and God's mercy. God even gave opportunity after opportunity after opportunity for the Israelites to get right about certain things. Let it go for generations before He finally divvied out judgment. God is not this mean man who is wanting to just strike you down every time you do something wrong. God understands your humanity. He understands my humanity. It's not an excuse for our sin. But God understands. And when they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden, they hid themselves. It's what we do. Not only do we want to deny, we want to hide our sin, but we also are guilty of attacking, attacking. It says in verse 12, and the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. We like to downplay sin. We say, everybody else is doing it. I can't tell you how often I hear that as a dad. Everybody else is doing it. Their mom, their dad lets them do that. Okay, but they ain't your mom, and they ain't your dad. Everybody else is doing it, and we often use that as a standard for what's right and wrong. Adam says, the woman, hey, she's doing it too. She did it, as if that somehow makes it more okay for him to do. We're guilty as adults of doing the same thing. We speed down the road, you get pulled over by the officer, and the officer says, were you speeding? You say, well, I mean, I was, but you know, there was like seven or eight people who were speeding too. I mean, why'd you pull me over? They were going faster than me. That's not the question the officer was asking you. He wasn't asking you about what everybody else, I was going with the flow of traffic. I love that one. We have excuses for everything. Christians, we often compare ourselves to others, and we do that to make ourselves feel better about how bad we actually are. Some sit in here and say they're not, some are not actively looking to evangelize and be a witness and to share the gospel, and the excuse that you keep giving yourself is that, well, so-and-so doesn't do that. They seem like a pretty good Christian. They're not doing that. That's no excuse for you. That's no excuse for me. We don't get a break just because the whole world is doing wrong. We don't get a break just, well, I'm doing better than most, don't we like to resort to that? I'm doing better than the majority, and if I'm doing better than the majority, that must be okay. Just like Adam saying, well, the woman, she was a part of it, she was doing it. We downplay our sin with excuses, and we downplay our role in it with excuses, not taking full responsibility. My children, when I find out something that they're doing, maybe they're fighting, getting on each other, whatever it may be. You know, you hear yelling and screaming from the other room, and you've got to go in there and tear them off one another. You know how that stuff goes as parents, and there's always something. And one of the things that I've discovered is when you ask a child a direct question, they never give you a direct answer. Ever. When you ask them a direct question and say, what did you do? They immediately say, well, my sister, she was doing, or he was over here doing this, and they want to give you this 20 minute long explanation before they say what they're doing. They're trying to downplay their role in the problem. Downplaying their role. We like to blame shift. He says, the woman, the woman. The woman said, the serpent, the serpent. There's a little catchy word that's been floating around for a little while now called gaslighting, and it's real popular among young people today. Talking about gaslighting, they use it very flippantly, but it's the idea of getting attention off of one thing with a distraction, and often we do that. We like to blame shift. We don't like to take full responsibility, so we attack others. Often, you may have heard of circumstantial psychology. Pastor Bill's talked about it from time to time. And the idea behind it, which is not biblical, is just because you may have a hard life or hard circumstances does not give you or I an excuse to sin. You do not have an excuse to do wrong just because you have bad circumstances. I'm not saying it's easy to do right, but you do not have the right to do wrong just because you have poor circumstances. All throughout Scripture I see people who had horrible situations but chose to live for God regardless. Joseph, I think, is the best example. I mean, you can't talk about a guy who's betrayed more, lied about more, than a guy, Joseph, but yet he determined to do right and God blessed him, regardless of his circumstances. Most people, they would have laid down and said, okay, I'm just gonna use that as an excuse. The Hebrew boys that ended up in Babylon after Israel was taken into captivity, they went and you have, out of all the best and the brightest young men, of Israel, only a few stood up for principles that they believed in. We're not going to eat the king's meat. We're not going to defile ourselves. Same thing when the statue was built up, they didn't bow down. Most of us, if we found ourselves in that same exact situation, what would we have done? We probably would have said, well, Israel's gone. I mean, my life is gone. God will probably cut me some slack for compromise in a little bit. We don't get to just do wrong because our circumstances are poor and do this blame-shifting game. In the premise, the idea of the whole sermon is found in the third thing. The R, V, and O are all together in one idea, reverse victim and offender. Reverse victim and offender. Here's what Adam said. the woman whom thou gavest to be with me." What was Adam doing? Blaming God. It is God's fault that he did what he did. You gave her to me. Adam was the perpetrator, he was the offender, and he is now accusing God while making himself out to be the victim. God did wrong and I did right. You say, that's foolish. How could somebody possibly do that? Don't put it beyond yourself. Adam says, if you hadn't given her to me, this wouldn't have happened. She tempted me. And in situations what I have found from personal experience, and this The idea of this sermon, which has been talked about between Pastor Bill and I for a long time, has come from this idea about the offender turning themselves into the victim. I've got countless examples, I'll share maybe a few with you, but countless examples that my 10 years here at gospel have seen This is a defense tactic used to get the attention off of you and get it on to somebody else. As long as it's not on us, when we've done wrong, we're OK. We want to push it off, get it on to somebody else. Sadly, almost every parent does this with their child. Every parent does this with their child almost. I'm guilty of having a tendency to do this and I, Heather and I make a conscious effort Often not to do this with our children and I'll tell you and I'll give you an example Often kids are disobedient They're bad. They've done wrong. They fail they've messed up at school. You name it and when I see When I see the letter from the teacher when I get it As a parent, I mean I have birthed this child I love my children more than I love anything in the entire world I'd give my heart, give my soul for them, and when I see this paper which talks about how poor their character is, it bothers me. And I want to believe anything else in what that paper says. You've maybe found yourself in that predicament. Parents often do this where their child is never wrong. I've had parents sit to me with a fourth grader in the office and tell me to my face that their child has never lied. You may think to yourself that your child has never lied, but it is not true. The question is how many times did they lie today is the question. We try to justify How does this offender turn into victim? Well, I see it in parents with their children. The teacher ends up being the bad guy. Often, when I have parent meetings, I wish I just had a tape recorder and before any parent talked, I just could play a tape recorder because it's literally like almost every single one of them says the same thing. Oh, you know, the teacher was doing this, teacher was doing that. It goes on and on and on and on. Listen, it's human nature. I get it. But we gotta fight it. The teacher's not the problem, the student's the problem. But yet it's easy to try to get the attention off of ourselves. I'm guilty of doing it and have to fight against it. As a general rule, as parents, when your child is in trouble, here is just a general rule. Always assume your child is in the wrong and the teacher's in the right. You say, well what about the one time that they... Listen, I heard Pastor Bill said something to me a long time ago that made Perfect sense to me. They said, if your child gets one more spanking that they didn't deserve, it just makes up for all those that they missed all those other times. I think he got that from his dad. Every once in a while, that is right, but 99.9% of the time, the authority is in the right and the child is in the wrong. 99% of the time. Don't turn the offender into the victim. I had a friend in college who became a pastor of a church and after several years of him being a pastor of a church, he found, he ended up having an inappropriate relationship with another woman in the church that was not his wife. And the reason I say an inappropriate relationship with another woman that was not his wife, I say inappropriate relationship and not say fornication, not say adultery, is because from everything that was known and confessed was that it was an inappropriate relationship. There was no immorality or adultery or anything like that, but it was going down that road. That's what we will say. And it was discovered and it was caught and found out. And this person talked to me and said, you know, people just, you know, they addressed it. They addressed it, you know, with their church and got everything squared away. They repented of it and got right. And then he came back to me and said, people aren't treating me the same. You know, I can tell they're just not as happy with us as they were. Well, yeah, you betrayed their trust. I mean, what can you expect? And he began to say, well, this and that, you know, they didn't really handle this really well. You're the offender. You don't get to make the rules. And so my friend was trying to make himself out to be the victim when he was the person that had done the wrong. The church is the problem. Sadly, they ended up leaving the church because they just couldn't take it, didn't want to deal with it, day in and day out. Not good. Say, the church is full of critical people. They were too hard on us. Not from what I heard. I thought they were pretty easy. First of all, they weren't. Second of all, when you commit the crime, you don't get to be the judge. I've never experienced a situation, ever, nor has Pastor Bill told me of a situation, as we've discussed this, where a person has done wrong, has failed, has sinned, and they've said, Chris, they've said, Pastor, or they may be in their personal relationship, said to God, I was wrong. Wicked. I neither expect or deserve any mercy. I will totally support your judgment and decision making." I've never heard anybody say that. Ever. They all go to the deny, the attack, the reverse victim and offender. Never, I'm in the wrong, I am at your mercy totally. That's the response you ought to have. That's the response that I want to have. No one does that because we want to self-justify ourselves, and if we can convince ourselves that we didn't do wrong, it makes us feel better. There have been pastors that have swindled money away from churches, ran off the members, sold the property, and taken the money for themselves. And they say, well, you know, all those years the church really wasn't paying me what they should have been paying me. And so they justify. We are so wicked that we can justify any situation that we come across. That's how wicked we are. We may be able to fool ourselves, but we are never going to be able to fool God. And if they do confess, and if we do finally confess, it's always at the end. It says in verse 12, and the man said, the woman who now gave us to be with me, she gave me of the tree and I did eat. Adam has tried covering his shame, he's tried hiding among the trees, he tried to not declare his fault, he blamed the woman, he blamed God, and then when there were no other options left, the last thing he said was what? I did eat. I did it, finally. When that should have been his first response, yes God, I did it. Before hiding, before covering it up, before blaming others, before victimizing himself, God, I did it. And why do we, as we look at the application, why do we play these games ourselves? 1 Corinthians 11 31, For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged. My encouragement to you today is act, when you come across sin and you find yourself to have sinned, act on sin so God doesn't have to be the one that acts on it. Numbers 25, Israel and the Midianites, they had committed whoredom with the Midianites and they were worshiping Balapur. God had gotten on to the entire nation of Israel, they were mourning, there were some that were even put to death, and while the nation is in mourning, an Israelite man goes and takes a Midianite woman and brings her into the tent with them as they were having fornication. Phineas, the son of Aaron, takes a javelin, runs in there and spears both of them through end to end. And it says in that same verse that the plague was stayed from Israel. Why? It was in the face of everybody, it was in the face of God, but thank God Phineas and Aaron, they dealt with it in the moment so God didn't have to do it. Folks, let's deal with our sins so God doesn't have to do it. How nice is it when a A student cheats and then they come forward about it. I did this and it was wrong, rather than having to find out about it. You know, every time that happens, I am merciful on the individual. You don't think God's gonna have mercy on you when you come forward about something? Rather than Him having to do what He did to Saul? where he had to root it up out of him. He had to literally ruin everything in Saul's life. How much different would it have been if Saul would have responded correctly at the beginning, God, I've sinned. He stole the sheep and the prophet Nathan had to point it out. How much better would it have been for Saul and his family had he addressed it at the beginning? Have you found yourself denying, attacking, reversing victim and offender? If there's sin in your life, I encourage you, don't go down the same road Adam and Eve did. Don't make the best of it. Don't hide yourself. Don't come up with all sort of excuses. Judge yourselves that we should not be judged. May God help us to understand this and get this. In Christ's name, we pray. Lord, thank you for the time that we've had to look into this. If you would like to know more about the Lord Jesus Christ, you may contact us at the church website, gospelbaptistchurch.com, or you can go to Facebook and type in Gospel Baptist Church, Bonita Springs, Florida. Also, you could call the church office at 239-947-1285. Thank you, and God bless.