Check Your Vision

Check your Vision

Coulee Community Church

January 8th, 2017

Scripture: Genesis 3:6-7

Opening Illustration

A few months after we moved here, they started to tear up Dewey Street right out here in front of the church. First they tore it down to the foundation. Then they came through and updated some of the sewer and water lines. I remember one morning when Tammie was visiting in Kenosha, I woke up to take a shower, and there was no water. I tried a few different faucets and nothing. I looked out the front window and saw them digging in the middle of the street, and fresh water pipe on the curb and figured they were changing out the mains.

A few hours later, I heard the gurgling start in the pipes and went and turned on the kitchen faucet. Muddy, black goo came flying out the faucet, and then it shut off- the filter had clogged almost immediately. I took apart the faucet and cleaned the filter, and turned the water back on. The water was thick with sludge, sand, and just smelled awful. I spent the next several hours emptying the hot water heater, flushing it out, and running water through our system until everything was clear.

Fortunately, I had set up my coffee the night before…otherwise I’d have been very cranky. "Hypo-caffeine-imia"

It’s amazing how much it shakes you when something you take for granted as reliable goes bad. Under normal conditions, we can talk into the bathroom or kitchen in the middle of the night and get a nice clean cold drink of water and never have to look at it. But for days after this event, I always ran the water for a few moments, ran it into a clear glass to examine it, and then if it was clear, I’d drink it.

When something is as reliable as our water, or our electric power, we forget it’s even there, or what it takes to deliver these modern conveniences to our homes.

Adam and Eve ran into a similar problem in the Garden of Eden- their source had always been God. God was reliable, He was constant, and HE was always good to them. In fact, God was the source- period. There was nothing else.

But then an enemy came into the picture, and enemy that was bent on polluting God’s goodness in their lives.

Today, we are going to look at what happened in the beginning as told to us in scripture. Specifically, we will look at the seminal moment when Lucifer, also known as satan, tempts our ancestor Eve, and her immediate reaction to it.

Genesis 3:6-7

6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

Prayer

Proposition- There are 100 different ways to faithfully preach from this scripture. I’m going to focus in on one single truth that we find here because it’s the basis for the rest of the truth we find in scripture.

This basic truth is something we all need to understand about our very nature-

Human beings, as originally created, were not created to be autonomous.

We are not like this cell phone

We were never designed to run on our own power. It’s not like we have a rechargeable battery that holds us from Sunday morning service to Sunday morning service.

Our design is to be constantly plugged into a power source to operate the way our creator intended. Anything powering us other than the power we were designed for is destructive and harmful to ourselves and to others.

ILL- If you have ever been to Europe, you have a great example of this. If you take your phone charger and plug it into a European outlet and then plug your phone into that, you’ll fry your phone. American power grids are designed to deliver 110 volts at most outlets, the exceptions being things like electric dryers or high capacity freezers- and they have special outlets so you can’t accidently plug in your microwave to it and x-ray your whole house.

European power grids deliver 220 volts- twice as much as their American counterparts. Plug your phone into that, and it immediately will fry either the charger or the phone, and you have a potentially expensive problem on your hands.

You and I are the same way- spiritual speaking we have an enemy whose primary goal is to make sure we plug into the wrong power source.