Welcome to this podcast from Harvest Community Church of Huntersville, North Carolina, where our vision is to make disciples who make disciples. I'm your host, Meg Robinson. On today's podcast we hear a message from the preaching series on Genesis called Beginnings. This sermon focuses on how evil spread in the early years of the human race. Let's listen in to Dan Martin's message from Genesis 5-1 through 6-8, the fall on full display. Well, good morning. It's good to see you, and I'm thankful for this opportunity. I love being able to open the Word of God and share. I believe that as the Word of God is proclaimed and it finds root in people's hearts, it brings life. And so it's an exciting time to be able to share that this morning. We're going to be jumping into Genesis. We're going to be in a pretty wide section of Scripture. But before that, I want to ask, have you ever heard of the Streisand effect? As in as in Barbara Streisand Back in 2003 Barbara Streisand sued a gentleman and pictopia.com because they posted pictures of her house and She didn't want the picture of her house going out. And so she sued them until the lawsuit only six people had accessed the site two of them were her lawyers and After that, 420,000 people visited the site and downloaded the picture of her house between then and when they could take it down. And so the Streisand effect is this idea of an unintended consequence when you try to do one thing and maybe suppress a picture or suppress some information, and all you really end up doing is exacerbating the problem. and getting a lot more attention on what you were trying to remove attention from. Unintended consequences. Back in the 1800s, in 1876, at a big exhibition at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, The Japanese introduced something to America that we had never seen before and that was kudzu Is anybody familiar with kudzu? It's called the vine that ate the South in the 1930s and 40s farmers were paid $8 an acre to plant kudzu to prevent erosion Well, I think we know that it has had some unintended consequences. As it grows up to a foot to two feet a day and begins to take over things, electric companies spend millions of dollars every year just trying to keep the kudzu off the poles, off the power lines. And did you know that kudzu has been responsible for train derailments? as it grows so thick over train tracks, and then trains come over it, and the juices and all of the other things, the vines and all those things, they have actually caused train derailments. So, unintended consequences. We're gonna be jumping into Genesis, and if you wanna turn there this morning to Genesis chapter five, we're gonna be seeing what happened as a result of the story we found earlier in Genesis at the fall. when Adam and Eve never expecting to take of the fruit and to create the consequences that we see today. So I've entitled the message this morning, the effects of the fall or the fall on full display. And we're gonna be reading Genesis chapter five verses one through five. Then we're gonna skip to Genesis chapter six and read the first eight verses of that chapter. So Genesis chapter five. Read along with me this morning, if you would, in your Bible. Genesis 5-1, when God created mankind, He made them in the likeness of God. He created them, male and female, and blessed them. And He named them mankind when they were created. When Adam had lived 130 years, he had I'm sorry. He had a son in his own likeness in his own image and named him Seth After Seth was born Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters altogether Adam lived a total of nine hundred and thirty years That's a long time nine hundred and thirty years now jump with me if you would to Genesis chapter 6 verse number 1 Genesis 6 1 when human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful and They married any of them they chose Then the Lord said my spirit will not contend with humans forever for they are mortal their days will be a hundred and twenty years and The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown. Verse number five, the Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. Genesis 6, 6. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth. And his heart was deeply troubled. So the Lord said, I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created. And with them the animals, the birds, and the creatures that move along the ground. For I regret that I have made them. But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. This is a pretty incredible section of scripture. It's a very broad, there's a lot that we're gonna be covering here, but you have to remember that as we go back, in Genesis chapters one and two we find creation, in chapter three we find Adam, in chapter four then we find Cain, Abel, and then Cain's descendants are gonna come along. So in these first four chapters that cover all of this segment Then we come to a chapter and a half that seems to be a time-lapse It seems to compress a lot of time and a lot of information into a few years and then suddenly we come at the end of Genesis chapter 6 verse number 8 to Noah and And so this section from 5.1 to 6.7 that we're gonna look at encompasses a very, very large span of time. And so the first thing I want us to look at this morning is the arc of the passage. And the idea here is multiplication and movement forward. You'll see here on the chart that I've kind of put together that if you take Genesis chapter one through chapter four, verse 16, It's a little sliver of time at the beginning of our history, at the beginning of what the Bible gives us from the creation until the fall of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and those stories. Then we jump forward and we find the flood here. But there's a huge gap between there. Genesis actually covers all the way till Joseph dies, which is about 2,500 years. There is some discrepancy on that, but if you take the most conservative figures, that's about 2,500 years. Now if we back up then, this period is going to cover about 1,500 years. That's what we're covering this morning. Now, Jerry, I've thought that if I'm covering 1,500 years, I'm covering 60% of Genesis, when you get back two or three weeks, you should be able to finish the rest of the book. I think he said something about two years. I'm not sure why it's taking you that long, but I'm gonna try to do 60% of it this morning, and so hold on with me as we jump into that. But the big picture here, the thing I really want you to see is that we're covering a very broad span and there's a reason for that. Genesis in total is going to cover about 2,500 years. Now, some people would change that. Some people say, well, the flood happened 1,656 years after creation. That's what the Masoretic text shows. Some people go up to 2,200. Some will put gaps in there and make it even longer. Here's the point. If we end up extending If this time, then what we're saying is we're just covering even more than 1,500. So that is the most conservative estimate that we can take. So as we step into the passage this morning, the first thing I want us to see in the arc of the passage is the pass of time. It's a lot of years. 1,500 years. If we go back 1,500 years from now, We're in about the year 500 A.D. 500 A.D., Rome has fallen from its legendary former self. King Arthur, the legendary King Arthur is alive. The classic period of the Maya civilization in America is ending and that civilization is going into decline. It's going to be, if we go back 1,500 years from today, it's going to be still a hundred years in the future that Muhammad would live. The Quran hasn't yet been written. Do you realize how long ago 1,500 years was? So in 1,500 years in the passage that we've read this morning, a lot is going to change. Experts estimate that the world population was about 190 million people 1,500 years ago 190 million people that's a little over half the population just of the United States We have other countries in the world today who have many many more than that 1,500 years ago the largest cities in the world are Madurai India Odessa Turkey Nanjing China 1500 years ago, the Americas were nothing like they are now. The Americas maybe had a few people, the Native Americans, maybe here. The world's largest city had maybe 500,000 inhabitants. Istanbul would be growing quickly. Alexandria would be in a 300-year decline along with Rome. This is what I want you to get. It was a long time that we're looking at here. The second thing I want you to notice in this passage are the generations that passed. If you start in Genesis chapter 5 and verse number 1, it says this is the generations of Adam. This is the story of Adam and the children that were born to Adam. And then it begins to lay out, it says after verse number five that we read, it says, when Seth had lived 105 years, he became the father of Enosh. And then you drop to verse number nine, when Enosh had lived 90 years, he became the father of Kenan. Verse number 12 when Kenan it lives 70 years. He became the father of Mahal and so we see throughout chapter 5 Name after name after name 10 generations are laid out here 10 generations here in Genesis chapter 5 if you go back to Genesis 4 you'll find the generations of Cain listed there that were eight there were a lot of people and they were living a long time and and the generations are passing by. Not only generations, but also population. So imagine for a minute if you would with me, how the world has grown from the population of 1500 years ago to now. If you go back to just after Adam and Eve, and we see that the average lifespan of people was 857 years. How many children could they have? If Adam had had one child every 10 years for half of his lifespan, he would have had 40 children. If Adam's 40 children had had 40 children, that's a lot of people. It's an exponential growth, and because the population can explode, we don't know how many people may have been alive in those days, but it could have been huge numbers. In fact, if we take the population growth of the year 2000, where we have birth control, 2,000. In 2,000, we have abortion going on, but our population growth rate in the world was 1.2%. If you take that, which is a very low population growth rate, in India, it's well over 2%. In other parts of the world, it's up to 3%. So if you just take 1.2% growth rate, The population after 1,500 years could have been 750 million people. If you increase that by 0.1%, it would have been over a billion people on the earth at that day. I don't know how many there were, but here's the point I want us to get. A long time, a lot of people, a lot of generations, a lot of growth. It wasn't just a few little villages with a few hundred people that were around when the flood came. Not only population, but knowledge was growing. In chapter 4, verse number 17, if we go back in the genealogy of Cain, we see Cain lay with his wife and she became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch. This is a different Enoch. Cain was then building a city and he named it after his son. They're learning to build. They're not just living in caves or in tents or anything like that. He's literally building a city. If we go to verse number 20 in chapter 4, it says the following, verse 20, Ada gave birth to Jabal. He was the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock. That's different. There's a distinguishing, there's a differentiation between him living in tents, but he's learning animal husbandry. If we drop down to verse 21, it says his brother's name was Jubal. He was the father of all who play the harp and flute. They've learned now to create instruments. Dropping down to verse 22, Zillah also had a son, Tubalcain, who forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron. So 1,500 or more years, and through this time, there's been the incredible growth of generations and population and knowledge, but also we find in chapter six that there was this incredible expansion or multiplication of wickedness and evil. The Bible says that not only was the world bad, but that it was corrupt. In Genesis chapter 6 and verse number 5, notice here it says, the Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. These are the symptoms of a heart that has fallen and has become a wicked heart. The overwhelming fleshly pursuits of pleasure and possessions and supremacy. men building cities, men taking women because they just wanted them and they liked their looks. They were filled with sin, but they never seemed to be satisfied. The desire could not be satiated because something in them had so broken and ultimately the issue was a heart, a heart that had turned away from God and things were bad. And the situation on the earth was dark. And people were not seeking generally after God. So if the writer of this passage crams so much into these few verses, his point wasn't to comprehensively detail dates and people and accomplishments. What he wasn't trying to do was to lay out and explain to us every generation and every person that was born or exactly how large the population was or everything that people had learned or every evil that was going on. His point was that he wanted to take us on a time-lapse from the fall to see the full effects on display. Get this, a path may look almost parallel to another. You may take off traveling in one direction and it may look like your path is almost parallel to the other path. But as time goes on, those paths begin to diverge and get further and further apart. And what seemed like such a small and innocuous thing in the garden, we are now seeing what's happening. what what seemed to be just a seed that was planted has now grown up to be this this great and Magnificent tree that is having fruit and continues to expand and continues to to get bigger and and grow further What we're seeing here is how different the world was from what God intended It's the contrast from the Garden of Eden to the dark days of Noah from the peace and the beauty of the garden, to the violence and the destruction, from communion to antagonism, from light to darkness, from one simple choice that seemed to just be a desire to a total disregard of God. So the first thing I want us to grasp is how large this passage is and how the writer, how I believe it's Moses, but how the writer is trying to take us from that moment when it seems like things are just getting started to show us where it ends up. Now, as we go through the passage, we find several challenges. One of the challenges in the first challenge of the passage is in chapter five, and here we see that all of these generations that we talked about, and there are a number of challenges we could talk about, but I've just kind of selected three that seem some of the biggest, but it talks as these generations come along. For example, in 5.5, it says, altogether, Adam lived 930 years, and then he died. In chapter 5, in verse number 8, it says, altogether Seth lived 912 years, and then he died. Verse 11, altogether Enosh lived 905 years, and then he died. When Kenan had lived 70 years, he became the father. And verse number 14, all together, Kenan lived 910 years and then he died. And this goes on and on and on, but then suddenly in verses 21 through 24, something changes. When Enoch had lived 65 years, verse 21, he became the father of Methuselah. And after he became the father of Methuselah, Enoch walked with God 300 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Enoch lived 365 years. Now notice suddenly something changes. Enoch walked with God, then he was no more because God took him away. Dead, dead, dead, dead, gone. Something different was happening in the life of this man who walked with God. What happened? Well, Hebrews chapter 11, if you'll turn there with me, you'll find out that he didn't die. It's not like he just died and no one was able to find his burial or his body. It's not like he went out into the woods and just passed away and people said, well, he's gone. It wasn't the euphemistic use that we have today where we say, well, he's gone, so-and-so passed. Something else happened in chapter 11 verse number 5 of Hebrews. It says by faith Enoch was taken from this life So that he did not experience death He could not be found Because God had taken him away There's a lot of debate about exactly how this happened. I'm not exactly sure There are some parts that are similar in 2nd Kings chapter 2 if you want to take time to read through there as Elijah is taken up in a chariot of fire There's means shown there how he went up here. It doesn't say how he was taken away Did he just suddenly get transported? Was it like a beam me up Scotty and suddenly got Adam in heaven? I don't know exactly how it happened. I But I know this, that when God says that he was just no more, that's exactly what happened. God took him literally into his own presence. Now the second challenge of the passage is the intermarriage that happens in chapter 6. This gets a little wild because in chapter 6 verse number 1 It says when men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they chose, and they married any of them they chose. Verse number three, then the Lord said, my spirit will not contend with them, with man forever, for he is mortal. His days will be 120 years. The daughters, it says the daughters, the sons of God saw the daughters of men. previous version of the NIV uses the daughters of humans and it talks about that. Here we're finding a challenge where something very unusual is happening in intermarriage. We don't know exactly what and there are several different views that have been proposed. The first view is that the sons of God are powerful rulers. They're the men who are ruling these cities and maybe entire clans. In Near Eastern cultures, kings were often called the sons of God. in Egypt and other places like that. The Hebrew word Elohim is even used and translated judges in the NIV in Exodus 21 verse number 6. So it's talking about leaders in the community and it calls them Elohim, it uses this term. So some people have argued that this is talking about leaders, it's talking about royal class, and it's talking about non-royal class, it's talking about commoners, and that this is the intermarriage between royalty and commoners. Alan P. Ross states, the sin of these rulers was their lust for power and women. They were trying to achieve immortality through immorality. The weakness of this view is that the judgment doesn't seem to match the sin. If it was just powerful men taking commoners or royalty taking commoners, the judgment of God seems to be out of proportion. And that probably wouldn't have been just a normal understanding of Moses' listeners when this passage or when this was written and read to them. A second view is that the sons of God refers to the godly descendants of Seth. So, remember Adam had a son named Abel who was killed, and he had Cain who killed him, but then later he had a third son, Seth, who walked after God's ways. And so, some would say, well, there are these two lineages, these two lines, One that comes through Cain, who are wicked and evil men who turn their back on God. And then the line of Seth, who were godly men and women who sought after God. And so the contention is that this was the intermarriage between godly and ungodly people. The late R.C. Sproul held this view and wrote in previous chapters, we're given a glimpse of two competing lines. The godly line of Seth and the wicked line of Cain. We see Seth's line about the business of exercising dominion. in submission to the Lord. We see Cain's line dishonoring the law of God and making names for themselves. The great change, what creates the great downward spiral of humanity on the earth is that the two lines come together as one. The end result isn't mere delusion. It's not that the now joined line becomes morally lukewarm. But the evil spreads. Sproul continues and says, this shouldn't surprise us, for as Chuck Swindoll reminds us, if you drop a white glove in the mud, the mud doesn't get all glovey. Finally, a third and very common view is that the sons of God refers to fallen angels or demons. who came to earth in human bodies and cohabited with women resulting in a superhuman race called the Nephilim. Many respected Bible scholars hold this view, including John MacArthur, James Boyce, Charles Ryrie. It goes back as early as the Septuagint in 200 BC. Justin Martyr and Tertullian held this view in the early church. The primary argument against this is that angels are asexual. The Bible says that, and Jesus said that they're not given in marriage. So some say, no, that couldn't be. It's pretty wild to think of demons coming and having children with women on the earth. I'm not sure which is right. That's why I've called it a challenge of the passage. I've read and I've studied and here's the point. It's pretty easy to get so wrapped up in one of these challenges that we miss what God's really trying to tell us. So let's quickly go through one more and then move on. And that is the phrase, the Lord regretted in chapter 6 verse 6. It says, the Lord was grieved that he had made man on earth and his heart was filled with pain. In some places that's translated, the Lord regretted and his heart was deeply troubled. The King James uses the phrase and it repented the Lord Here's the point or here's the challenge Numbers chapter 23 verse number 19 says that God does not repent like man Some people say, well, if God regretted, then suddenly he recognized that something happened that he wasn't expecting. That something surprised God, and nothing can surprise God. I love this phrase, has it ever occurred to you that nothing has ever occurred to God? That's true. So some would say well, this is a problem because then it seems like son suddenly God realized Something that he hadn't realized before But I think that studying the passage a little more and studying the word that word could be translated in many different ways and for example In judges, it's translated as grieved and in Genesis chapter 5. It's translated as comfort In Judges chapter two, it's translated as relented. And so the idea is not just that God suddenly recognized something, but that God's heart was deeply troubled. And God was deeply grieved. So the phrase doesn't mean that God was surprised or had made a mistake in creating man, or even allowing man the choice between good and evil. But he was grieved and sorrowful. because sin deeply disturbs and grieves God. We can see a change here from creation and God looking at all that he had made and saying it was good to now looking at what he had created and the estate of that because of the fall and saying it's not good and being deeply grieved. In chapter 6 he says, I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created, and with them the animals, the birds, and the creatures that move along the ground, for I regret that I have made them. I grieve. It hurts me that I have made them. This is a climactic moment. Chapters 3, 4, 5, and the beginning of verse 6 are all building to this moment. What started as a seeming inconsequential conversation beside a tree between a woman and a serpent is now chaos and darkness and sin. And we find in the midst of that questions to which we don't have clear answers. But the questions should never overshadow the clear truths and what God wants to tell us this morning. So what does God want us to see in this passage as we conclude this morning? Number one, we need to come to terms with the progressive nature of sin. We can look around us today and go, oh, Look at this and look at that and look how bad this has become. But do we see that that is just the result of the trajectory of what started in the garden? Do we understand that that's just the tree that grew up from the seed that came from that simple, seemingly small act? that one small thing can continue to move forward. And as that path continues to go further and further apart, we finally end up at a place where we say, wow, this is horrible. And here's the point where we as believers need to be very careful because we can step back and look at ourselves or maybe you this morning who you've never come into a faith relationship with Jesus Christ. and you look around yourself and you go, well, I'm not as bad as them and I'm not as bad as that and I'm not as dark as this, but you don't realize it just hasn't yet had enough time to maybe get to that point. Because sin is progressive and it still comes from the same seed and from the same root, all of that evil and darkness and wickedness. It ends up taking us to a place where God is not in any of our thoughts. Thomas Talmadge once wrote, no man becomes evil all at once, but suggestion brings on indulgences, indulgence, delight, delight, consent, consent, endeavor, endeavor, practice, practice, custom, custom, excuse, excuse, defense, defense, obstinacy, obstinacy, boasting, boasting, a seared conscience and a reprobate mind. James says it this way, then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin. And sin, when it is full grown, gives birth to death. That's the progressive nature of sin. And we need to be honest enough with ourself to look at where we are. You see that from wanton marriages and from people just looking and seeing what they want and taking it, the passage in Genesis tells us that then they came and their thoughts were only evil continually. The effects of the fall are interwoven into our world and constantly pull us away from God. This is the fall on full display. John Owen, in his book Overcoming Sin and Temptation, writes this, sin diverts the heart from the spiritual frame that is required for vigorous communion with God. It lays hold on the affections, rendering its object beloved and desirable, and so expelling the love of the Father, it becomes the delight of the heart. So number one, we need to come to terms with the progressive nature of sin. Number two, we need to identify with the heart of God and Genesis chapter six as, as the Lord looks at the wickedness of man and the evil and all of those things in chapter six, verse six, it says, and the Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth. He hurt, he sorrowed. Can I be honest with you? That's often not my reaction to sin, especially when it's in someone else. My first reaction can often be judgment and holding myself up an accusation and looking at them and talking about how bad they are in comparison to how okay I am. Let me give you maybe some examples. racism. It's really easy to look at our history in America and to begin to scream and yell about racism that occurs today and someone who is a racist today, yet in our own hearts to feel ill toward a different group of people that maybe are not historically recognized as the racist issue in America. Let me give you a very personal example. This evening, I'm flying to the Middle East for ministry. I grew up in Latin America as the son of missionaries. I knew Mexico. I knew Hispanic people. I speak Spanish fluently. That was my world. I've come to the United States and gotten to know the racial issues, and I look and I'm thankful to God for racial diversity in a church. And as I pastored, God allowed us to have great racial diversity. We had Hmong people in our church, and we had African Americans, and we had people from Nigeria in our church, in a small, little bitty town in the northwest corner of Texas, where there was not a lot of diversity. But in our church, God allowed us to have diversity. And for me to feel like, well, I've got that problem solved. And then God confronted me with Arabs and Middle Easterners. You know, they look scary. 9-11. Do I really want Muslims coming to my country? I had to begin to deal with what was in my heart. when it was really easy to accuse other people of a sin that I thought I didn't have. What about addictions? When I look at someone who is enslaved in an addiction and maybe I don't have that same addiction, to be able to look down on them and rather than grieve for what has been lost in that life, to judge them because they didn't have the willpower or the choice. They didn't make the choice to abstain from that thing. You know, we could talk for a moment about same-sex attractions. It's really easy to judge very harshly and to talk about those who are practicing what we would consider an abomination against God, yet not to feel grief. And here's the point. God grieved. It sorrowed him. He felt like something had died and he lost it. Colossians chapter 3 verse 12 says, therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Is that, that's the heart of God. Yes, he is holy. But he is compassionate. Because the next thing we need to see is the grace of God. In chapter six, verse number eight, but Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. Some passages, some versions translate it grace. Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. All through the story of Genesis, we find grace. Grace in the garden. As God shows up, and Adam and Eve admit that they've taken of the fruit, God clothes them. And even in grace, keeps them from the tree of life. Grace on Cain. Placing a mark on him, he said, Lord, this is too much. People will kill me. And God says, then I'll put a mark so that no one will kill you. Grace. Grace in the promise of the Messiah. Grace. Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Grace. Noah. Roy Hessen calls it the most beautiful of God's attributes. Listen to this. He says, the love of God becomes the grace of God when it has for its object one who quite patently does not deserve it. Then love acquires a glorious new name of grace. It's like the difference between the sun and the rainbow. The sun shines, but when the sun comes and shines on the water droplets in rain or the sun shines on water droplets in the cloud, suddenly we see something that's just superfluous. We see a rainbow. Something extra. And that's just grace. It's God's showing His pleasure, His goodness to those who don't deserve it. And can I tell you this morning, just as Noah found favor, I found favor in the eyes of the Lord. Not because of who I am, but because of who He is. And he sent Jesus Christ to die in my place so that I could live. The one who was under the curse of the fall, who had maybe not in the degree of someone else, but who had the seed of sin in him, who had the fall fully active in him, had no claim on the goodness of God, but Dan found favor in the eyes of the Lord. And God extended his riches to me. God extended his grace to me so that I might become a child of God. Let me tell you this morning, I don't know where you may be in your spiritual journey. I don't know if you know Jesus Christ as your personal Savior and you understand that Jesus came and died and suffered on the cross and gave his life. in exchange for yours, so that you might have eternal life. But if you've never come into a faith relationship with Jesus Christ, may I encourage you to do that this morning. The Bible says, when the kindness and love of our God, our Savior, appeared, He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of His mercy. The beauty of the gospel is this. It is love for the unlovely, grace for the needy. It's good news for bad people. It's the good news that Jesus Christ himself is ready and willing to deliver us from the curse of the fall. Let's bow our heads this morning. With our heads bowed just for a moment, friend, if you're here this morning and you're grasping the radical, costly thing that God has done for you, the favor that God is extending to you this morning, I encourage you to place your faith and trust in the truth of this message and to step into faith. Admit your need because that's the first step. toward appropriating this grace. For you see, each of us, regardless of where we stand, we need the grace of God. Father, thank you this morning for your word and for the opportunity to step into it and to see this morning some of the effects of the fall And we don't understand how all of this works and there are things in this passage that are challenges that we don't have all the answers to. But in the midst of it all, we see the ugly nature of sin and your heart and your grace. And so this morning, help us to rejoice in the grace that has been extended to those of us who know you. Father, this morning, I pray that if there's someone here without Jesus Christ that has never stepped into a faith relationship this morning, they would choose to do that in their heart. They would come clean and they would confess their need and their sin before you. and they would be reborn in Christ. In Jesus name I pray. Amen. Thank you. God bless you. Thanks again for joining us today from Harvest Community Church. This podcast is also available on our website HarvestCharlotte.com. 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