Real Life Part 1
Real Life • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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REAL LIFE
Part 1 – Gifts
I want to briefly introduce you to a new understanding of life. Through the years I have found that life is a short journey in this time and space to know God and His great love. Through my life I have discovered that the best life is not living my life but living the life of Christ. Anything short of this is not real life. Real life is Christ’s life. If you are not living Christ’s life you are living a substitute for the life that was given man in the garden and then restored in a garden, redeemed on a cross, and made available out of an empty tomb.
Genesis 2:5-10, “When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground—then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the LORD God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers.
First, notice that the land was not complete until God placed a man in it. Then life sprang up when man was in the presence of God. Second, note that there were lots of trees in this land but two God points out – the Tree of knowledge of good and evil; and the Tree of Life. This tree was a choice of continuing in the life God had given thus making the communion with God eternal. But the Tree of knowledge was an opposite choice for man to seek his own life through his flesh.
In the book of Genesis, we find three gifts God gave to man. The first was the gift of life. Not just ordinary life but the life from God, in God, in the likeness of God’s goodness. Then God gave him a garden. This was more than a lot of land. This was a special place where he could commune with God in this life God had given. In this life was everything he needed to include love, peace, joy, provision and safety from everything destructive, counterproductive and inhibiting to commune with God. And then God gave him the best gift of all. God gave him a woman. Not just any woman. This was a woman of God and from God. This was a precious and priceless gift. And just like the gift of life and the gift of the garden, he was to guard it, nurture it, protect it cherish it. And like the life and the garden, the woman was part of his communion with and purpose in God’s plan. All three of these gifts are tied together. Together, in God’s presence, man would receive the fourth gift from God, a family.
But then came sin. And when sin came into the life, the garden, and the man, Adam did not turn from it. No, instead, through his blame shifting, it revealed his selfish nature. At that point, just as with manhood today, man sought his own life, his own land, and lost sight of the value of the most precious gift given him, a woman. Now, this value holds true for a man, in God’s sight, not just relative to a wife but also a daughter, a sister, a mother, and a grandmother.
When a man sees his gift of life through the eyes of his selfishness, he loses sight of its value and the value of all God has given him. As a result, he loses perspective of the value of his work, his home, his family, his children and his God given covenants. He begins to live life void of its eternal value. When you live as if life is in your hands, and not in the hands of God, you are not living real life. This is why Christ demands absolute surrender and Lordship of every area of your life, every thought, every ambition, every emotion, every desire.
In Luke 17:33 Jesus says to His disciples, “Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.”
And in Matthew 8:36 He tells them, “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
What have you exchanged for real life? What kind of substitute life are you living and continuing to justify? Are you ready to live real life? Do you truly understand the cost? Christ came to restore us to Real Life that through Him you, you home and your family might know the fulness of joy in this real life in Christ Jesus.