Do you have your copy of God's Word? I'm going to be reading the first 13 verses in Genesis 3. Genesis 3 1-13. Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, Did God actually say, You shall not eat of any tree in the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die. But the serpent said to the woman, You will not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, The man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, Where are you? And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself. And he said, Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I command you not to eat? And the man said, The woman whom you gave to me to be with me. She gave me fruit of the tree and I ate. Then the Lord God said to the woman, what is this that you have done? And the woman said, the serpent deceived me and I ate. This is the word of the Lord. May he be pleased to add his blessing to it. We have been for five weeks working through the garden and I had labored to be labored the issue as long as I possibly could. because I really wanted to build up this beautiful vision of what the garden was, who we were created to be, the relationship God had with us. And I wanted us to long for that and just have this sense that we have lost something so profound. And I found that to some degree, this, the way we live and the context that we live might be like people that live in Los Angeles in the smog, and they just grew up in it. And they don't really understand that there's something profoundly different about it. Until someone from Wyoming shows up there, and you come over the mountains, and you see the smog, and you're into it, and you're trying to explain to people, how could you live like this? This is so profoundly different than what it should be. And I wanted us to have this sense of just the clean, beautiful, crisp air, mountain air that we're so familiar with. that when we get to the fall, it's like entering into LA and entering into the smog and it's just gross and we can feel it and it's suffocating us and we're struggling to even comprehend how we could live in this context. Unfortunately, if we are going to talk about any component of our life, we have to do so in light of the reality of the lives that we currently live. And we do live in a sin-cursed, broken world. I do not like our Christian language. We speak with a vocabulary, and the language is often difficult to connect with people that come in to see me, especially. They come from different faith backgrounds, unbelievers, no knowledge of the Bible. And so even the term that I just said, that we live in a sin-cursed, broken world. I have found to be a concept that is so familiar to me, I don't even feel like we need to explain it. But often, they do not understand what I'm saying. And even for us, we use that term. I hear it all the time in our preaching, in our ministry here, because it is a summary of the context in which we live. We live in a sin-cursed, broken world. And today we're going to just unravel that a little bit to clarify what exactly does that mean to live in a sin-cursed world. It really is a summary for all the brokenness, the suffering, the heartache, the trials, the temptations, the guilt and shame we experience in this life. I've worked hard to help us understand the glory of the garden and what it was like to be image bearers. And I've spent a lot of time working through that so that now as we come to this place where there's such a breaking of that, such a violation of all that God had created and all He had intended things to be, that we are grieved by that. And it profoundly impacts us. I talked about the beauty and the majesty and the perfection of the garden. Talked a lot about what it meant to be image bearers, that for us as humans, our primary identity as humans is that we are image bearers, made in the image of God. That we have been handcrafted, uniquely handcrafted, as embodied souls with gender and purpose. That our home was to be in the garden, abiding with God. that we had a special honor as these human image-bearers, vice-regents, crowned with glory and honor, that we'd been given particular capacities that were so far superior to anything else known in creation, that we had incredible rational minds and emotions and language and will and all these things that God had given us, that we were created in holiness with a moral imprint of God stamped on us and we lived according to that moral imprint perfectly. And because of that, we could live in the presence of God, abiding with Him. We had a heart to worship and to love this God. We were delighted. We experienced pleasure in the garden that we cannot even fully comprehend. And God delighted in us experiencing that pleasure. Everything from the things we tasted and saw and touched and heard, that we're the only creatures with this capacity to recognize beauty and to marvel and to be drawn into it. And God was pleased that it pleased us. Really, this put on display the countenance of God for us. He wanted us to know Him, to live in the fullness and the freedom of the garden. abiding with him. Last week we looked at companionship and we went through really Genesis 2 or the end of Genesis 2 talking about the formation of this special relationship between Adam and his wife. That they were companions first. That marriage is about companionship. That they were oriented to each other fully, freely, purely to care for each other. they were living out the moral perfection of perfect love, and that perfect love had an object. Adam's perfect love had the object of his wife, and Eve's perfect object of her love was Adam, and in that there was perfect, wonderful agreement and orientation, to the point that it would be referred to as a one-flesh union. They were so oriented to one another, so fitting to one another, And then we talked about just all the blessings of their relationship, even to include the sexual part of their relationship. And God had said it was all good. Well, it's in light of that that we see the temptation of Eve, and it should be striking to us. When we think about the circumstances of our life, and no matter what it is that we think about, to most clearly define where we would say we are. And it might be a time of suffering or confusion. It might be a time of just struggling with certain sins. It might be a time where we're lonely or we are uncertain about who we are. It could be just the context of our marriage. It could be the context of our family or what it means to be in a workplace working alongside people. Whatever the context is that we think about, We cannot clearly understand the context unless we have a clear vision of what the garden was and what we had been created to be. And now a sense of the brokenness that we experience living in this sin, curse, broken world. And if we can have clarity of those two things, it helps us navigate the complexity of the situation we find ourselves in. And so With that backdrop, I told you when we started this was a marriage series, although there's really very little that we've talked about so far that is specific to marriage, and the things we talk about today and next Sunday will not be specific to marriage either, but I will emphasize certain aspects of them towards marriage, since that is the most familiar context that I find myself in in counseling. We're gonna cover sin, I told you the concept was sin cursed, right? Today we're going to cover sin, next week we're going to cover curse. And both of them have a profound impact on our relationships, especially in marriage. Today, chapter 3, verses 1-6, sinful companions, verse 7, shameful companions, and verses 8-13, guilty companions. First of all, sinful companions. Verses one through six. Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the beasts of the field that the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, did God actually say you shall not eat of any tree in the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the tree in the garden. But God said, you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it lest you die. But the serpent said to the woman, You shall not surely die. But God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes shall be open and you shall be like God, knowing good and evil. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes, that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took the fruit of its fruit and ate. And she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. I really only have time to summarize. this passage. There's so much here. But one thing I want to start out with is just that Satan is crafty. You see that from the text. More crafty than any other beast of the field. But he's not creative. He still is crafty. He's the great deceiver. But he's not creative. We find out, really, if we think deeply about the temptations and the way he comes to us, that he's crafty, but he's not creative. What we see him doing here is coming to Eve. And he really begins a conversation that turns Eve, for the first time, her attention to this one tree in the midst of the garden that God had said, you shall not eat from. And that became her focus through the questioning. And as she looked at this tree, She began to see God with a dark face on and began asking questions of herself, like, why would God withhold this one from me? Wouldn't I be much better off if I had this tree along with all the other trees? What is it about this one that if I had, hey, God knows that it's going to be good for me and he does not want me to experience that goodness. And so she, for the first time, had to begin asking the question. Is God good? If God was truly good, wouldn't he have given me this tree? Why? Why is he withholding it from me? That was enough. That dark face put on God and beginning to cause her to doubt God's goodness. Satan had her the same way that he has us every time we enter into that situation. He comes to us and says, if you had this, wouldn't you be more blessed? Wouldn't your life be better? Wouldn't you be more satisfied, content? Would you have more peace? Why would God withhold this thing from you? And we begin questioning. Yeah, that's right. What if I had that thing? What if my life worked out this certain way that I really want it to work out? What if I had this occupation, this lifestyle, this family? What if I got all those things? I'd be so much more blessed, life would be so much more meaningful. And it casts a dark face on God, because we start asking, why would God withhold this thing from me that is so good? And so Satan is crafty, and he comes at us with a different temptation, presenting things to us in different ways, knowing our hearts, knowing the things that we long for coming to us. But he's not creative. He only really has one strategy. Cast the dark face on God, cause us to believe that God's not good, and then incentivize us to move towards this thing that God has prohibited or hasn't in his providence or timing given to us yet. And this is the temptation we see here. He is crafty, but he's not creative. Adam and Eve sinned as companions. We see that Adam was to work and keep the garden. Adam had some responsibility. This working and keeping, this working in the garden and keeping, protecting the garden, meant that he should have been on lookout. He should have been aware that Eve was being tempted, that Satan had shown up. Adam had just named every animal in the garden. God had brought every animal to Adam to name. He was aware of what should be there, what was normally there, He should have been aware that something else showed up that he hadn't named. He'd been given the responsibility, he'd been given the knowledge to be on alert, to care for Eve, to care for the garden in this temptation. Adam failed. Eve was craftily turned from God to this thing that he had restricted them from having, and she took. And so both, Adam and Eve, in the garden, sinned. They sinned as companions. They were companions in sin. And now as sin has entered into the world through Adam, all have sinned. Not just physical traits are passed down from generation to generation, not just the way we conduct our lives and our physical traits, But the very nature of who we are as humans from this point on is passed down generation upon generation. The consequences of this sin that they, Adam and Eve, committed so corrupted them, so corrupted them and their natures that they could not pass on anything other than a corrupt nature. And so as Adam sinned, All of his lineage from that point on also sinned by nature and by choice. Satan had corrupted the whole thing. Genesis 2, 16 and 17 is where we see God giving Adam the direction. And the Lord God commanded the man saying, you may surely eat of every tree in the garden. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat. From the day that you eat, you shall surely die." And that's exactly what happened. They began to die physically, but instantaneously died spiritually. A physical death for sure, but a spiritual death was present. They were now born. Their lineage was now born. in this trespassing, in sin. Ephesians 2 talks about the corruption that actually comes in. They are companions in death now, spiritual death. They are companions in alliance with Satan, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit now at work in the sons of disobedience. They have a companionship in this allegiance to Satan, following him willingly. companions as creatures with creaturely instincts, living out the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, pursuing pleasure, pursuing our passions. It's animalistic. This is not the way humans should function. Humans should function with a moral imprint to honor God, delighting in the pleasures given, Those pleasures leading us to worship, living in the context, abiding with God. But as this sin nature took hold, we lost some of that. And now we are more like the animals and the creatures of this world, following the passions of our flesh. How do animals regulate themselves? Through the passions of their flesh. I am hungry, I will find something to eat. I am tired, I will find a place to sleep. with no regard for anything else other than the passions that they find themselves connected to. And that is how we're described now. Passions of our flesh. Carrying out the desires of the body and the mind. We have a fundamental orientation. In the garden, our orientation was completely, purely, fully outward. Loving God with all my heart, mind, soul, and strength. Loving my neighbor as myself. And when sin entered in, that thing just rolled over. And now my entire orientation is to me. Me. To serve me. To love me. My self first. My pleasures first. We are companions of judgment, condemnation, and wrath. And we're by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind. Adam and Eve both found themselves in this condition. An alliance to Satan. Companions living for the passions of their flesh. Children of wrath. Sin corrupts companionship. Sin corrupts companionship. As we think about our marriages, as we think about our family relationships, sin corrupts those. What is it that we are battling? Well, we're battling our own sin, and we're battling the sins of others. That's the context that we live in. This series was entitled Image-Bearing Allies. Towards the end of the message, I'm going to talk more about what it means to be allies. But our companionship has been broken. It's not what it was intended to be. But we can remain allies. Allies in grace. Allies in care. Allies caring for one another. realizing the fundamental battle that I have is the fundamental battle you have, and I am oriented now, by God's grace, to try to understand how can I be an ally to assist you in this fundamental battle you have dealing with your own sin and the consequences of that sin. We can become allies. Second point. We see we have become sinners, We're identified that way, that becomes our nature. The second thing we become in companionship is shameful. Shameful companions. Genesis 3, 7. Then the eyes of both were opened and they knew they were naked and they sewed big leaves together and made themselves loincloths. Their eyes were open. Well, what were their eyes open to? Well, all of a sudden they had a knowledge of good and evil. For the first time they had a sense of not only righteousness, but unrighteousness. not only living perfectly and abiding with God, but being in a relationship where my sin is separating me from God, and my sin is separating me from you. And now, this thing that once existed in perfect harmony, this relationship with you and with God, is now broken. My eyes were opened. There was a promise of this in the commandment. And now I have this new knowledge. I have a conscience that has become activated. And I see and feel for the first time unrighteousness. And shame is how I fundamentally feel about myself. I know that I'm unrighteous. I can feel it. I can sense it. My conscience tells me it. And I see you looking at me in my unrighteousness, in my failure, in my brokenness. And I'm asking for the very first time in my existence, do you still love me? And am I safe? You can see that I'm unrighteous. You can see I didn't measure up. I didn't perform well. And do you still love me? And am I still safe in your presence? Shame is a subjective feeling about ourselves. knowing our unrighteousness, knowing our sin. The Bible talks a lot about shame. I actually preached six or eight messages on shame, so I don't have time to really work through it enough, but the messages are online if you ever want to listen to them or get more information about shame. It's interesting that the first way that humans are identified outside of the garden is that they had a knowledge of good and evil, and they covered themselves. I think this tells us that shame is one of the primary human experiences outside the garden, and it impacts every part of our life. The Bible really pictures shame in three different ways. One way is a naked shame, a naked or exposed. We have a sense of fear, especially a fear of public speaking is still one of our greatest fears, that if I would stand in front of you, and all your eyes would look at me, and what if I said something wrong, or what if I did something that didn't measure up to your expectations, I'd feel this exposure, and I cannot bear it. There's a naked shame that keeps me wanting to cover, to kind of, out of your view, so you can't see. If I stumble and fall, or if I say something wrong, I'd much rather do it with one person out in Halden and here with everybody seeing it because of the shame. I feel this naked shame. I'm exposed, my unrighteousness exposed. I see you looking at me and I feel vulnerable, feel unsafe. I fear ridicule, mocking, scorn, and further exposure, especially in a larger audience. The second way that Bible talks about shame is an outcast shame. to be rejected. There's so much power for a community of people to take somebody and cast them out. We can watch little kids on the playground form these little groups. And if two little guys get together and they figure out how to form a community, all of a sudden they have the power on the playground to either include you or exclude you. And they have tapped into this shame. They know that if they include you, You're going to be part of the group. They're going to feel more powerful. You're going to feel more powerful. Everybody's going to be included. But if they exclude you, they have tremendous power over you, because we fear rejection. We fear being cast out. We fear not measuring up, performing. You see my unrighteousness, and I fear you will reject me. I want to be included, and I fear being excluded. And you have that power over me. whether you're going to include me or cast me out. The third way we see shame identified is through being unclean or defiled. Unrighteousness permeates my being. Something has happened to me and I feel dirty to my core. I feel spotted. I feel blemished. I feel dirty. I have a desperate need to feel washed, to be cleansed. Sexual sin often brings about this feeling of defilement. I feel dirty and unacceptable. I fear you will see my blemishes and be repulsed by them. So we have a naked shame, an outcast shame, and a dirty or defiled shame drives our relationship. drives our relationships. We'll get to that in a minute. So what are some of the impacts and how does this look in our relationships? It creates insecurity. If I am living in the context of shame and I am in your presence and I fear you judging me, looking at me, possibly exposing me or rejecting me, then I'm going to be very insecure. I'm going to have a fear of being exposed or rejected. I have a sense I cannot fail. I can't let you see my weakness. I can't not perform up to your expectations. I must be respected. I must be thought highly of. I can't be seen as weak or inadequate. I'm easily embarrassed. And if you embarrass me, I'm probably going to punish you through my behavior, because I'm insecure, because I feel the shame as you're looking at me. I expect you to validate me. I really need you to validate me, to put your stamp of approval on me. And we see this driving our culture right now. No matter what lifestyle, no matter what people are experiencing, they are desperate for validation. You cannot say that I'm wrong, you must validate me. This is driven by this shame. We put performance pressure on people to meet our expectations. Our kids often are the recipients of this. That if you're performing well, I feel validated as a parent, so I'm going to emphasize your performance to make me feel acceptable with my peers. And so we put a lot of pressure on our kids, on our spouses. I see husbands a lot putting a lot of pressure on their wives to be their covering in a sense, to validate them, to put on a good face for the community. And they pressure their wives oftentimes to be doing certain things or rising to a certain performance level to make them feel acceptable by their community. We can be defensive. I must be right. I must save face. I'm going to argue with you. I'm not going to listen to you. I'm going to listen for defense. So as you are coming to me and talking to me, I'm going to be listening very carefully so I can defend myself because I can't be the weak one here. I will feel attacked. I feel like you are just criticizing me. I will often attack those people that do criticize me. Proverbs 9 says, if you correct a scoffer, you will get abuse. I don't receive that correction. I'm not able to do that because shame causes me to want to defend myself, want to cover myself, and I will often attack you if you correct me. I will not listen to what is being said, but focus on the details. and getting all the facts correct, I will deflect. I will listen for things that are wrong in your argument, and I will attack you there instead of receiving what you're trying to say. I will justify myself, rationalize myself. I will blame shift or minimize. I will be critical. I will have contempt for others. Luke 18 talks about the Pharisee who trusts in his own righteousness and is treating others with contempt. Shame drives me to cover myself and feel adequate in my own righteousness. And when I do that, I often treat others with contempt. They're not measuring up. They're not working as hard as I am. They need to get their act together. Can't you see how hard I've worked? Self-righteous, conceited, judgmental. Oftentimes we're gossips. We're busybodies. or just involved in drama. We're looking around, and we're kind of drawn to the drama. Why? Because I can expose it, and I can look at it, and it makes me feel better about my drama. If I can involve myself in your drama, then I don't have to focus about my drama. And so I like to expose things like that and kind of move towards them. Others' problems make me feel better about my situation. It's just an overview. One example I'll give you though, what I see regularly with a husband and wife, it shows up just in the way we argue. And if we can think about shame as me wanting to cover myself, right? To present myself to you looking better than I actually am, but to cover myself. I also have a desire for me to look better than you. So I'm going to have a tendency to want to uncover you. So we have a disagreement, and we move towards a disagreement. And my motive in the disagreement is to cover myself. So I will say things like, oh, you misunderstood me. I'm not that bad. Really, that wasn't my motive. I'll try to cover myself, or I'll try to make excuses. And the whole while I'm doing that, I'm going to be pulling your fig leaves off of you, trying to expose you. Look, you're unrighteous. You're the one. You did it. And I'm going to be pulling the fig leaves off of you, and I'm going to be putting them on me. And this is all driven by shame. that I feel like I need to cover myself. I can't stand before you naked as a sinner in my brokenness and my weakness, trusting in my identity and the work of Christ in my life only. I have to cover myself. And in so doing, I'm going to try to expose you. Okay, let's move on. The third thing we see in this passage is just that we are guilty companions, Genesis 3, 8 through 13. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and a man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees in the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, Where are you? And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked and hid myself. He said, Who told you that you are naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat? Well, God comes back onto the scene. It's perfect. I mean, this is heartbreaking, right? God was abiding with them and they with God. It was the best possible situation to abide in the presence of God. And yet God comes back onto the scene. And what do we find them doing? We find them hiding. They're aware that they broke God's law, that there was a transgression of God's law. They have the commandment that tells them, they have a conscience that tells them, and they sense a guilt. And a guilt is a very helpful sensation that God has given us. When we break God's moral law, we should feel guilty. And God wants us to feel guilty. It's like a pain in my leg. If I was to injure my leg and I feel this pain, the pain tells me there's something wrong with my leg and I should probably get it checked out or at least figure out what's going on. Guilt is the same thing for our soul. As I transgress God's moral law, He's built us in such a way that I feel this guilt and it tells me there's a soul issue. Something's wrong within me. I have transgressed His law. It's a beautiful gift of God. But they definitely felt that. Because as God comes back on the scene, They couldn't just stand there in his presence. They hid themselves. They turned from God. They had a sense of guilt, and they tried through their own labor and their own hands and their own ingenuity to hide themselves from God so that they wouldn't be in the presence of his judgment. And then we see one of the most comedic, funny scenes in the whole Bible to me. When God says to Adam, where are you? Did God not know where he was? Of course he knew where he was. And he outed Adam. He made Adam actually out himself. Where are you, Adam? And Adam had to say from behind the bush, I'm over here, God. And it's just funny to me that God would have interacted with him that way. We see him not coming immediately in his wrath, not coming immediately in judgment, but coming to them, outing them, exposing their sin, And then we do see, we'll see next week, the consequences of that, and God's working with them. But we do see a sense, when we are guilty, we tend to want to hide ourselves. We have a fear of judgment, a fear of pending doom, something drastically wrong is going to happen in the future. I feel condemned by that guilt, and that is God's blessing to us. But it does turn us from God, causes us to hide from Him. Verse 12 and 13, then the man said, the woman whom you gave me with me, she gave me fruit of the tree and ate. We see him immediately blame shifting his wife, not taking responsibility. He was first hiding himself from God's judgment. Now he's trying to move God's judgment onto another, which is our fundamental instinct oftentimes in our marriages. Then the Lord said to the woman, what is it that you have done? And she did the same thing. She was hiding. That didn't cover her well enough. Now she's blame shifting to the serpent. And the woman said, the serpent deceived me and I ate. Our instinct is to hide from God when we feel guilt, to blame shift, to move the sin and the consequences of sin onto another. And because we have a guilty conscience. And this is the context of our relationships now, outside of the garden. That we are bound up in sin, that we are driven by shame, and that we feel the guilt of our transgressions. No wonder, no wonder our marriages are difficult, relationships are difficult, family relationships, work relationships are difficult, because this is the context that we find ourselves. Lastly, They're gospel companions. There's a gospel companionship that God offers to us through the work of his son. Jesus removes our sin. The promises of the gospel is that Jesus will take our sin. He will become sin for us. He will take that sin, the nature of my sin, and all of the sin that I will ever accumulate in my life, he will take that sin. He who knew no sin, We'll take my sin so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. The gospel offers us a freedom from the sin and the nature of sin. Jesus removes our shame. The gospel is the only thing that truly addresses this key component of our being as humans in shame. Christ was uncovered. He was exposed on the cross. He was publicly humiliated, ridiculed, mocked. And in that, and in his death, and in that exposure, what do we receive? If we put our faith in Christ, we receive a covering. We receive a righteous covering. A perfect covering. A covering that has no spots, no wrinkles, no blemishes. A spot that allows us to come and stand in the presence of the Father and be fully accepted and fully loved. Because we have this covering from Christ. His covering. We don't need to fear being cast out. Because Christ was cast out on our behalf. He was rejected by the Father. Father, why have you forsaken me? He says on the cross. Rejected. God turned from him. He experienced abandonment, rejection, being cast out. Why? So that we could be included, accepted, approved of by God. We who are united in Christ have measured up and performed perfectly in every possible way because we are in Christ. We have his record of righteousness. Never to be cast out. defiled, never to be defiled or unclean again because the blood of Christ has washed us. We've been washed by the very blood of Christ, that from the inside out we have been clean. We have this perfect, righteous standing before God because of the work of Jesus. Now, if we can, as a couple or even as friends, be reminded of the work of Christ in our lives, then I can be an ally with Christ in your life. Then I'm not going to seek to cast you out or reject you or to expose you. I'm going to seek to cover you. I'm going to seek to walk with you, to help you, to bear your burden. We can become allies, even in the light of our sin and our shame and our guilt. Jesus also removes our guilt. Our guilt was put on Christ and He paid for it eternally. All of our guilt was satisfied. When we think of justification, all of my guilt, all of the consequences for my sin were put on Christ and He paid the penalty fully. perfectly so that I could receive a sentence of acquittal. You've been acquitted. You've been set free. The charges have been settled. Your guilt has been removed because it was put on Christ. And now we can become companions, not in the sin, not in the shame and not in the guilt we were born into, but we can become allies in the gospel and in grace. Forgiven by Jesus, we are now called to be allies, to help one another. To help one another in light of the context in which we struggle, in light of the burdens, in light of the brokenness of our lives, that we can remind each other of our covering. We can work to not expose one another, but extend mercy, covering to you. I can say things like, you know, it was my fault. I take some responsibility when you did that thing. I put you in that situation. You didn't have to be there. That was my decision a while ago that led to this thing. It's not only you. I'm not just exposing you and outing you as the sinner. I can say, no, I'm with you. I'm an ally in this. I can seek to cover you and expose myself. We can remind ourselves of our justification that we indeed have been forgiven, that we carry this record of righteousness. We can be free to really work with sin because we don't need to hide it from each other. We can come to each other and have conversations about things that we want you to understand the struggles you're having, the way it's impacting us. And I don't feel condemned. I don't feel like you're just trying to expose me. I feel like you're an ally with me to help me deal with the realities of the struggles I currently have. And we can labor together in that alliance to care for one another. We can end up as enemies in our marriages, in our relationships, because we are that big of sinners, and we carry that much shame, and we're easy targets. But by God's grace, we can also become allies, where we're bearing one another's burdens, and we're entering each other's lives in the context of the struggle and the reality that we have, And we can truly become allies as we understand the gospel and our identity in Christ, that we no longer have to live with the identity of the image bearers that broke and destroyed and corrupted God's plan in the garden, but allies in the gospel and the work of Christ caring for one another. May we not let our sin and our shame and our guilt divide us. May we do the work of Christ and his redemptive work in us, the forgiving work in us. May he help us to be allies, caring for each other in our relationships, especially our most closest one with our closest neighbor, our spouse.