Those of you who know my wife might be surprised to find out that Bianca Jones loves a good murder. She wants to see a murder pretty much every night and therefore we do see a murder every night. But don't worry, it's not like a gross murder. It's not any of those hard-boiled kind of, you know, SVU, CSI, yucky murders to give you nightmares. We watch what's called cozy murders. A cozy murder is when somebody is found somewhere and the music immediately comes on to let you know, don't worry, we got this. It was probably an accidental death and we will have this wrapped up in 45 minutes. And the coziest of murders, and what's probably our favorite series in that genre, is called Rosemary and Thyme. Rosemary and Thyme are two wonderful British women who are good friends and who go from garden to garden. They are garden experts and they are hired to renovate gardens. So they're called into these dilapidated, worn out, weed overgrown gardens and they're called upon to make them beautiful. Now in the process of making those gardens beautiful, they always find a dead body. At some point, you would think people would quit calling them. But they keep calling them, and they keep finding dead bodies. And so at the end of 45 minutes, they have the mystery solved, the murderer is in jail, and the garden is gorgeous. I recommend it to you. And because it really does And obviously our favorite part of it is renovating the garden. There's something about renovations that are just amazing. They capture us. They've been incredibly popular on television for years from, you know, personal renovations of The Biggest Loser or my personal favorite What Not to Wear to house renovations and, you know, Fixer Upper and extreme home makeover and car renovations and, you know, pimp my ride or whatever it is. We love seeing these old, rusty, dilapidated, worn out things and worn out people and have them not be given up on, but have them to be made beautiful again. We love that. And we love that about gardens. There's something about gardening that's just innately healthy. Did you know that? I actually, in studying for the sermon, I googled the sentence, is gardening good for you? It is unbelievable the number of articles. Actually, the British Journal of Medicine declares it is a great therapy for depression. Gardening is more likely to heal you than Prozac. They say, Forbes magazine says this. Results of another study show that gardening increased life satisfaction, vigor, psychological well-being, and cognitive function. Further research on gardening found it improved life satisfaction and mood. Digging in the dirt really does lift your spirits. Isn't that great? Digging in the dirt. It's almost like God created us in the image of a gardener. Because he did. Because he did. The reason why we love renovations and gardening, the reason why those two things are good for us and fascinating to us is because God has not abandoned us. This is the kind of God we serve, the kind of God who looks at the world we live in and looks at us and says, I'm not giving up. I'm going to make you beautiful again. I'm going to make this wilderness of a world, this dilapidated, barren, Swamp of a world I'm gonna make you into a beautiful garden again that is filled with with trees and a river and Flowers and it's gonna be filled with statues the way every great garden is and those statues are you and me? And and when we when we see each other we're gonna be reminded of what God is like and He's starting that work through us He is starting his work of renovation through us. God wants to make us beautiful, and through us, restore the earth to the Garden of Eden. God wants to make us beautiful, and through us, to make the world beautiful. And the question for today's sermon is, will you let him? Will you let him? Please stand as we read this text from Ezekiel 36. Ezekiel's made clear to Israel why God is angry with them and what he's going to do. He's going to judge them. He's going to let the temple be destroyed. And now he's starting to give them a vision of the future. And he says in chapter 36, hear the word of the Lord. Therefore say to the house of Israel, thus says the Lord God. It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you come. And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them. And the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes. I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean from all your uncleannesses. And from all your idols, I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers and you shall be my people and I will be your God and I will deliver you from all your uncleannesses and I will summon the grain and make it abundant and lay no famine upon you. I will make the fruit of the tree and the increase of the field abundant that you may never again suffer the disgrace of famine among the nations. Then you will remember your evil ways and your deeds that were not good and you will loathe yourselves for your iniquities and your abominations. It's not for your sake declares the Lord that I will act But let it be known to you be he shamed and confounded in all your ways Oh house of Israel thus says the Lord God on that day that I cleanse you from all your iniquities I will cause the cities to be inhabited and the waste places that shall be rebuilt and the land that was desolate shall be tilled instead of being desolation that it was in the sight of all who passed by and And they will say, this land that was desolate has become like the Garden of Eden. And the waste and the desolate and ruined cities are fortified and inhabited. Then the nations that are left around you shall know that I am the Lord. I have rebuilt the ruined places and replanted that which was desolate. I, the Lord, have spoken, and I will do it. As far as the reading of God's word, God's word makes us wise, wiser than, makes us, gives wisdom to the simple. It makes us holy. And it is sweeter than honey. It comes straight from the honeycomb. Please be seated. God wants to make us beautiful. Will we let him? The first thing that probably stood out to you in this text, it did to me, and so I want to handle it first, is that God says two or three times, look, it's not because of you. There's nothing special about you that's going to make me do this. I'm doing it for my holy name. I'm doing it for the sake of my name. And that sounds very selfish about him, doesn't it? It sounds very, we would call that narcissistic, right? It's all about you. If that bothers you, then that's the problem. Because one of the primary root of sin is this failure to understand that history is going on and you and I exist for God, not for ourselves. The root of sin is this belief that I am at the center of everything. It's this belief that we have to get over and move beyond if we're going to function in this world and be a beautiful part of a beautiful world. Hopefully you've made this transition through your life. Okay, when you're a child You just live in the moment and that's great. And we all wish we could go back to fifth grade. We can't sorry Then in sixth grade, but somewhere between sixth and eighth grade We went through this thing called puberty and the first thing that happened was our brains Changed and all of a sudden we recognize like we had a self image, that we understood that people could see us, right? The first thing we started doing was combing our hair. Up until then, we ran around with our flies open, our hair like this, and we were as happy as we could be. And now we're not anymore. And now we're aware that people see us. And for a period there, we began to think, The whole world is staring at us. We feel like there's this spotlight on us wherever we go, and everybody's looking at us, and everything we do just feels icky, and everything we say just sounds dumb in our own ears, and we're just so self-conscious all the time. And hopefully at some point in your life, somebody who loves you looked at you and said, nobody's looking at you. I said it very rudely to my wife when she was my girlfriend. It was funny. She was worried. She was getting dressed for, you know, we're about to go to RUF Bible study. And she said, I need to run up and change clothes. And I said, why? And she said, I wore this last week. And I said, nobody remembers what you wore last week. Nobody remembers you. Great, and I don't recommend doing that. But it was a helpful lesson for her, actually. And it's a helpful lesson for all of us. Just to remember, everybody you know is just as worried about themselves as you are about you. And so nobody's looking at you. The world's not about you. And that was a strange day when it first hit you, wasn't it? It's like, wow. Everybody in all these cars like have a life They go home and they have jobs and families just like I do It's not all about me if you haven't learned that yet Welcome to the reality. But it is important to remember that that is maturity, and the ultimate true fact is we exist for a reason. We exist for God. That's why when we're teaching our children, one of the very first things we teach them in the child's catechism, and the questions go like this. Who made you? God. What else did God make? Me and all things. Why did God make you and all things? For his own glory. We do not exist for ourselves. We exist for Him, and that's important. That's important because that is the music that the universe dances to. That's the music that the universe dances to. That is what's going on in the center of the universe is God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and they are dancing, they are smiling at each other, they are loving each other's company, they are delighted in each other, and they created us because they wanted, that's what love does, love wants more people to be delighted. And they created us for this dance. And they are dancing to that particular tune. Now this, this is an illustration really it's home with me because I cannot dance. I can't. Bianca and I, we took a ballroom dancing class and she kept trying to tell me that I wasn't on the beat of the song and I had to keep telling her there's no drum. And in my mind, if there's no drum, there's no beat. That's how bad it was, right? And when you don't understand the beat, when you don't understand the rhythm, when you don't understand the dance, you just bump into people all the time. And you disrupt, and that's the story of my dancing life. I bump into people all the time, and that's kind of what life is like for some of us. We bump into people all the time because our goal, which is to make me happy, healthy, and wealthy, bumps into other people's goals, which is them living for their own happy, healthiness, and wealth. And we're just doing this. We're bumping into each other. We're all trying to get through the same door and we're shouldering into each other. And that's what causes conflict. That's what causes distrust. That's what causes just the divisions among us and all the ugliness that comes out of that. It starts, you know, when you're a child and you and your brother want to wear the same Green Bay Packers jersey that day and you only have one between you and you fight over it and and you fight over your Legos and you fight over your dolls and you know the lesson I pounded, sorry I did, I was a bad parent, into my kids was your brothers are more important than your Legos and they never believed me and they still don't and you don't either. It's a lesson that you have to remind yourself of every day. love our brothers and our neighbors more than our Legos. So that's the one reason God is doing it for his own name is because that's how we're designed to function. That's what makes the world beautiful. But he also wants, is doing it for his own name because he wants people to know what he's like. When he sees the people of God backbiting and bitter and hurting each other. He wants to shout out to the world, that's not what I'm like. I'm not like that. When Nathan the prophet came to King David, King David had sinned grievously, had committed adultery and had a child by one of his most loyal soldiers' wives and had that soldier killed so he could kind of cover up his sin. And Nathan the prophet came to him nine months later and said to him, he said, And because of that, you'll still be punished. You've given reason for the enemies of God to scorn Him. And that's, we feel that all the time, don't we, when we turn on television and we see documentaries about Hillsong or about all the other, you know, the Duggar family and Happy Shiny People and all the other documentaries about churches gone askew and people being hurt and being abused and we want to cry out that's not what God is like and that's that's kind of our message I came to Tulsa because I believe that Tulsa was a town filled with Christians who were hurt by the church and I want to go to them and say that's not what God is like God is passionate for his name because he wants people to know what he's actually like. That's why Jesus got angry when he was in the temple and he saw a man with a withered hand and he wanted to heal him and it was the Sabbath and he looked around and he knew all the Pharisees cared more about the Sabbath than they did about this man and were told that he breathed deeply and was deeply troubled and angry. That's not what God is like. He doesn't care more about His rules than He cares about people. The rules are for people. That's what He's like. He's good. He's loving. He's healing. He's nurturing. He doesn't want to ruin anyone. And so He has zeal for His name because He is the only good God. out of this zeal for His name, what He's going to do is He's going to cleanse us first. He gives us a necessary cleansing, a cleansing that we can't do on our own. He's going to clean us, and through us, He's going to create this garden. He's going to recreate the garden. He's going to renovate the garden. But He's going to start by renovating us, and He has to do it. And the reason why he has to do it, why he has to give us, take out our heart of stone and give us a heart of flesh, he has to give us a new spirit and he has to cleanse us. And there's multiple reasons why he has to do it. First of all, because we don't even know we need it. We can't see ourselves in the mirror. That's weird. You can't. You know, you don't really know what you look like. I tell y'all this all the time. It freaks me out. I don't, I see myself in pictures and I'm like, oh, that's me. And I realized that I've never seen myself in three dimensions, and that's very weird. But, you know, sometimes it's just more obvious than that, right? One time I was out on a date, and everybody I looked at stopped and stared, and I was like, I mean, I knew I looked good tonight, but I didn't think I was that good. And I walked, we went to McDonald's, because I'm a big spender, and there's, in the pillars in the building there, they had mirrors all around it, you know, so I walked by the mirror, and I checked my look, because obviously I was hot, and I had big bloody tissue right here. where I cut myself shaving, and I'm like, oh, that's what they were looking at. That's what they were looking at. So I picked it up. We can't see ourselves. We don't even know what needs to be changed. We need someone else to do it. James says we're like somebody who looks at ourselves. When we read the Bible, we look at ourselves in the mirror, and then as soon as we put it down, we forget what we look like. We need to be in relationship with other people, and we need God to show us what needs to be changed. And hopefully you have people in your life who are telling you what needs to be changed. But even when you see what needs to be changed, we really can't change our heart enough to want to be changed. He says, I've got to take out that heart of stone, and I've got to give you a heart of flesh, because you don't want to be changed. The guys I usually golf with, I wasn't there last Friday, and so they get teamed up with a stranger, which is great. But this particular one was funny, because, I mean, the second he walks up on the first hole, and he says, bad day for me, guys. By the way, my name's Ricky. Bad day for me. Why? Well, as soon as I'm finished here, I got to go turn myself in for a DUI I got a year ago. But he didn't just say that. He said, for a DUI I got a year ago. just the whole time was just you know usually when you tell people you're a Christian they go oh I'm so sorry I was cussing not this guy but he did say you know I'm a Christian too I mean I love Jesus I just loved a party And he's, there's a lot of things we wanted to say to him. They wanted to say to him, but he didn't give them a chance. But one thing's for absolute sure, he doesn't want to change. And so he's not going to. The first thing God's gonna change about you is your desire. You're going to want to be different before you're ever made different. It's a bad day. But there's a lot of beautiful days in front of you. He has to change us because we don't want to be desired. He has to change us because we have dirt all over us, and so we can't change ourselves. We can't cleanse ourselves. He says, I have to cleanse you and make you clean. It's a picture of baptism. It's a foreshadowing of what Jesus says when he's talking about being born again. You have to be born of the water and of the spirit. You have to be cleansed. You're dirty. And when you're dirty, you can't clean yourself. You ever try? Got grease all over your hands, and you're looking in the mirror, and you see there's grease on your face, and so you start wiping the grease off, and you're like, hey, that didn't help. You just get more and more grease. My kids used to love to go play in the mud. And I loved for them to play in the mud. It was fun to watch. And then they would just think they were just going to walk right back in the house. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. You're going to strip down right now. And I just got that water hose out. Like I don't want you. I don't want you touching the water hose. I don't want you touching anything. Anything you touch, you're just going to make dirty. And that's why God has to cleanse us, because anything we touch, the thing we need to be cleansed of is us, our usness, our selfishness, our belief that we can fix ourselves. That's what we need to be washed up. And we can't get the us off us. So we need Him to wash us. And the final reason that we need Him to do it is real change just hurts too much. And we don't want to hurt. Real change hurts. It means giving up something that you've come to love. And it hurts. The best illustration I know of it is one that Josh actually told recently from the book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. And the kid that I identify with the most, my screen name on most video games that I play, which is chess and chess, is Eustace Scrub. Eustace Scrub. turned into a dragon one day, because that's what his heart was like. He had a dragonish heart, and he turned into a dragon. And then, when he was able to see himself as a dragon, and see how other people responded to him as a dragon, then his heart began to change, and he wanted to change, and he didn't want to be like that anymore. And he saw Aslan one night, and Aslan says to him, Aslan's the god figure in this book, he says to him, he takes him to this beautiful pool, And Eustace wants to wash in that pool. And he says, you have to undress. If you want to wash, you have to undress. And he remembers how reptiles shed their skin. And so he's like, OK, I can undress. And he rips his skin off. And he goes over to the pool. And he's still a dragon. He sees his reflection. He's still a dragon. He says, you have to undress. And he does that two or three times, trying to take his skin off. And he realizes, finally, Aslan says, you're going to have to let me undress. And he says, Aslan stuck his fingernail into his chest, and it felt like he was piercing his heart. And he ripped that skin off, and it hurt. We would never cut deep enough. I made a new friend this week through a ministry called the Samson Society, and he's recovering from an addiction to online sex that almost ruined his marriage. And I said to him, have you mourned it? Have you cried about giving it up? Have you realized that you're never going to do it again? One day, after worship, somebody came up to me. Same opportunity I give you today to come and pray with me. And I anointed her and she was bawling and crying. And she said, I've gone back to using cocaine. I've been using cocaine for the last four months. Please pray for me. And I prayed that the Lord would heal her. And then as soon as I finished praying, I looked her in the eye and I said, I said, do you want me to help you get into rehab? And she said, No, I think prayer's enough. It's just tragic. It's not. It's not. We don't want to change, so God changes us. And as He changes us, then through us, He begins to unleash His ultimate plan, His secret garden. Somehow it's a secret because we don't talk about it enough. Because I don't talk about it enough. But God's plan is to renovate this entire world, to make it new creation. We are new people and He is making new creation. But if you look at Genesis 1 and Revelation 21, you're going to see something amazing. That His new creation looks just like His original creation. What's that better? The new creation had a river running through it. The original creation did and the new creation has a river of life that is lined on each side by trees. The original creation was a garden filled with trees for fruit, for food. The new creation will have 12 different kinds of fruit trees in it so that there will be a new fruit every month. The original creation was filled with people. who are the image of God, and He could walk in their midst, and the new creation is gonna be filled with people, and there's not gonna be a temple there, for we will all be face-to-face with God. That's His secret garden, that's what He's building. And he's building it through us. He's building it through the church. And wherever the church is, when it's thriving, when it is being the community of grace and love that it's supposed to be, that church is becoming more and more like that garden. And it's claiming space, and it's claiming areas is claiming dominion over works and jobs and schools and businesses heard a beautiful illustration this this week about a a business that everybody in it is is sad it's not doing well but everybody in it was just giving a testimony to God's grace in that company that's why they were so sad about it was a business that that was looking like the Garden of Eden and God's now Doing what He does, He's spreading them out so they can go create more gardens. That's what God does. He turns us back into the image of God, the way we were at the beginning. A garden filled with living statues, pieces of art made as His own image. He's renovating this dilapidated, abused world, and he won't stop until it is a beautiful, perfect garden, a garden that is lined with gates that are encrusted with jewels made of the finest jewels. His renovation plan begins with us and through us extends to the new creation. Will you let him and will you join him? Please pray with me. Father in heaven, we do invite you to come in and change us, make us look more like Jesus. And Father, would you work, would you be at work in us and through the works of our hands to make this world look more like your beautiful garden? Well, we long for the day when the nations will look at it and say, that's the Garden of Eden, that is paradise. Would you use us to get there, we pray. In the perfect, precious name of Jesus. Amen.