There was a pathway I was on for many years. It was a pathway with many bright lights and beautiful things. So much technology and media, so many songs, and movies and events, giant arenas and commercials and billions of dollars in industry.
I walked that path day by day, it was at times beautiful, at times vicious and vulgar. I was swept along by that path. I was controlled by it and consumed by it.
Every once in a while there would be a slight twinkle of something else. An old church building that I walked by. Some random mention of God or the Bible. A little card in my Halloween candy.
But, it was hard to notice. South Park, Beavis and butthead, Michael Jackson, Nickelodeon, Backstreet boys, Puff Daddy, Dave Chapelle, new age mysticism, SNL, weed, pills, Foo Fighter concert, Jay Leno, Korn music video, Star Wars, I built my life around these exciting things in media.
I mocked the old faith I was brought up in, the Catholic mass, the old dry religion, the old myths of the past.
I was on the pathway of destruction. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was.
Yet something inside me that was once so entertained with this whole world, began to feel increasingly empty. As I sat for hours playing videogames and watching videos, I felt sad. I longed for meaning. I longed for something more.
And step by step, my life began to fall apart. The debauchery made me feel gross. The drugs and drink made me feel trapped. The sin life was so very cold. And I felt dissatisfied and angry. Oddly angry. I felt I had been tricked. Deceived.
Little did I know, I was living out a scripture from the word of God, from Romans chapter 5.
It says this, “12 When Adam sinned, sin entered the world. Adam’s sin brought death, so death spread to everyone, for everyone sinned.”
I was walking in the pathway of Adam, the pathway of rebellion against God. And it was leading toward disaster. Not only that, the entire world system was built around the pathway of Adam. So it naturally drew me in.
I live in Chicago, and I’ve been making the drive back and forth from Chicago, IL to Gary, IN. Every day I drive past a beautiful church called Progressive Baptist church, a powerful and effective ministry from what I can tell. Seated in a key position, biblical and bold.
Yet towering next to it is the 137 million dollar facility called Guaranteed Rate field where the White Sox play.
That I think exemplifies our situation in the world. The church, the body of Jesus Christ has a powerful voice in the world, yet compared to the thundering lights and billion dollar entities among us, from baseball teams to billionaires to mega corporations, the voice of the church is one voice among many competing voices.
Why is that? It’s because of the pathway of Adam. The pathway of Adam is sin, it’s the default setting for planet Earth.
Any change that is affected to that pathway comes at great effort and cost to many. Have you ever seen the movie The Matrix? In that movie, it took great effort to bring one person out of the matrix and into the real world. Similarly, the entire system is set to keep people lost until they die. When anything other than that happens, it's a miracle of God, and it takes great effort to manifest.
It takes dozens of Christians praying, evangelizing, teaching, and discipling, just for one person to be born again, saved, and sanctified.
A person who desires to escape the pathway of Adam must be born again. They must leave behind their old life and embrace an entirely new life.
As it says in Romans 5:13-14: “Yes, people sinned even before the law was given. But it was not counted as sin because there was not yet any law to break. Still, everyone died—from the time of Adam to the time of Moses—even those who did not disobey an explicit commandment of God, as Adam did. Now Adam is a symbol, a representation of Christ, who was yet to come.”
There’s this great illustration of two pathways. It was making the rounds on social media I’d say about a year ago, you can see it above, but it always stuck with me. We get so swept up by this world. And it pulls us along. Little do we realize, we’re being manipulated and pushed down a pathway that is wrong.
As the scripture says, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death” (Proverb 14:12).
That is so true. We are so sure our way is right, but it isn’t. It seems so right. The lights are so bright. The structures so refined. The tower so high. Yet, it’s pathway leads to destruction.
I think we start to realize that, as we see demons in music videos, mockeries of Christ in the Olympics, bizarre displays at the Gotthard tunnel opening ceremony, demonic imagery in movies, and we start to realize, something is wrong here. Modernism isn't just shiny skyscrapers, advanced medical tech, and convenient consumerism, simmering just beneath the surface is a malevolence that is supernatural in nature.
A good friend of my dad, named Pauli, he had gotten deep into the death metal scene, and he was on a crew for a major musician. They were at a show in the sound booth, and he realized, they were worshipping Satan. And he turned to another guy there and said, "Hey, we can’t be worshipping Satan.” The guy replied, “Hey man, what’s wrong with worshipping Satan?”
At that moment he realized, he was on the wrong path. He began to seek after God. I randomly met him at a bible study, I knew him from my child hood, and he was there, uncertain, but asking questions, wanting to learn more about who God is. Later he got salvation, just before he died of cancer. God's timing is perfect.
I saw things in the world, demonic things, that led me toward God. Do you know how I first began to realize that God was real? I had seen demons. So I thought well, if there are demons, there must be angels, and if there are angels, then there must be a God.
They try to hide the spiritual from life, make you think everything is material. But it’s not true. We’ve all had experiences of the supernatural. We know it’s real. And we know there are powerful forces behind the events that are happening in our world. We can sense it, we know it’s true. And again, this points us to God.
Adam’s sin led us down this pathway. And we’re caught on this path. Just like the graphic, it’s hard to see it, to see the pathway, and to see the road out, but it’s there.
We slowly discover that there is a savior out there who can deliver us from this evil pathway that leads to disaster. His name is Jesus Christ. They try so hard to smear that name. They try so hard to make us think there is nothing there. Unfortunately many false teachers have brought the way of truth into disrepute (2 Peter 2:2). And much dry dead religion leads us to think, there is nothing there. Many hypocrites who claim Christ make us think there is nothing there. But beyond all of that there is a pure, loving, living Jesus willing to completely save us.
Adam's sin led to death. Yet what Jesus did for us is very different.
From Romans 5:15: “But there is a great difference between Adam’s sin and God’s gracious gift. For the sin of this one man, Adam, brought death to many. But even greater is God’s wonderful grace and his gift of forgiveness to many through this other man, Jesus Christ.”
So, we want to leave the pathway of Adam, and jump onto the new pathway of Christ.
But how can this be done? It’s impossible to simply hop over onto the new path. Why? Because my entire old self is dedicated to the road of Adam.
So God desires that I stop. And turn. Simply turn toward Him. And let Him do something huge in my heart.
God has an operation he wants to do on you. He wants you, in your sin, on the broken path of Adam, to stop, and turn, and cry out to Jesus, and ask Jesus to change you.
And then your old self dies, and a new self is born in Jesus Christ.
So how do you escape the pathway of Adam? Easy, you just have to die.
That’s how radical it is though. You surrender yourself to God, your old self dies, and a new self is born in Christ Jesus.
Verse 16 says, “And the result of God’s gracious gift is very different from the result of that one man’s sin. For Adam’s sin led to condemnation, but God’s free gift leads to our being made right with God, even though we are guilty of many sins.”
Despite the fact that we are guilty of so many sins, there is hope. Though we’ve actively participated in the pathway of Adam, total forgiveness is available to us. That’s really amazing and wonderful. We would assume that theres no way we can be saved. We’ve sinned so terribly on the pathway of Adam.
Yet God’s grace, his favor, his forgiveness brings us onto the new pathway of Christ.
Wow!
What’s really shocking is that this stuff is real. It’s not a mythology, it’s not a abstract theology, it’s actual, it’s here right now. These truths affect us every day. Either you know about it, or you walk around wondering why you’re miserable, why you feel yucky, why nothing is going right in your life. Or you know the word of God and through that knowledge you build a victorious life on the foundation of Christ. And when something happens you can point to the word and say "Oh yeah, God's word talks about this."
It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe it, it’s still true. We have to make the right choice and decide we’re going to base our lives around what the Bible says. It’s not good enough to keep it on the side, or tag it along with the rest, God has to be first, above anything else.
That’s repentance. That’s a change of pathway. We all need to make sure we're on that right road.
The scripture says, “17 For the sin of this one man, Adam, caused death to rule over many. But even greater is God’s wonderful grace and his gift of righteousness, for all who receive it will live in triumph over sin and death through this one man, Jesus Christ.”
We leave the road of death, the road of destruction and move to the road of life. And if you walk that road, you will live in triumph over sin through Jesus.
How is all this possible? This is a miracle. This is huge. But how could it happen? Was it because we really sat down and figured it out? And we jumped over to the new path? No.
It’s because God sent Jesus and Jesus triumphed over sin and death.
As it says in the word, (18-19) “Yes, Adam’s one sin brings condemnation for everyone, but Christ’s one act of righteousness brings a right relationship with God and new life for everyone. Because one person disobeyed God, many became sinners. But because one other person obeyed God, many will be made righteous.”
Adam disobeyed God. I wasn’t there. But it affected me. Because I’m a descendant of Adam and Eve. Their sin affected my life. I can’t change that. It’s a simple reality of human history, if my dad and grandpa made a lot of money I inherit lots of nice things. If my dad or granddad was poor and an alcoholic, I inherit nothing. Is it fair? I don’t know, it just is what it is. Same with Adam. Does it seem fair that I inherit Adam’s sin nature? It doesn’t. But it simply is what it is. Is it fair that I was born in the United States and someone else was born in some area of India or China where millions starve to death? It isn’t fair. But in the end it’s the reality. Similarly, if the population of the United States decides to honor God, then things will go well for the country and I'll be blessed. But, if the population of the USA begin to choose evil, then I'll face the consequences right along with them. It's a group responsibility. We're part of the human race, all the way back to Adam. So we face the results of their choices, whether good or bad. We turn up our noses at it because we're so radically individualistic in the west that we think the actions of our ancestors should have no affect on our lives for good or ill, but that isn't how reality works.
In any case, Jesus made the way for us to escape this broken reality. Jesus lived the holy life we couldn’t live. He setup a new pathway. He created this new road. And now we walk on it. If we want it. But we can also say no.
Here’s the thing too. We can say yes to God, be born again, join the new pathway, but twenty years from now maybe we start to say no to God. And eventually we slowly start to transfer ourselves back to the old road of destruction. I’ve seen it happen. We want to make sure we keep choosing Christ in the future. Through faith we will.
So to sum it all up Romans 5:20-21 says, “God’s law was given so that all people could see how sinful they were. But as people sinned more and more, God’s wonderful grace became more abundant. So just as sin ruled over all people and brought them to death, now God’s wonderful grace rules instead, giving us right standing with God and resulting in eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
We keep getting mention of “the law” in these scriptures from Romans 5. Many of you I’m sure were raised that way. Follow the ten commandments and try to be a good person and then you’ll go to heaven instead of hell.
But that is actually wrong. We’ve talked about wrong pathways. That’s just another wrong road that doesn’t lead to heaven. Trying to be a good person is not the answer. The entire purpose of the ten commandments was to draw us toward the cross, so we’d realize, I can’t follow these without Jesus inside my heart.
Admitting you’ve sinned against God is the answer. Admitting you can’t follow the law of yourself is the answer. And humbly accepting Jesus Christ as your savior is the answer. Because Jesus died for your sins. But you have to receive that sacrifice, and let Jesus change you into a new person. The old can’t inherit eternal life, only the new person can.
Let God change you into a new person. Invite Jesus into your heart today. Let go of trying to be good. Admit you can’t. Accept Jesus as your savior. Let Jesus reign in you, change you, and make you born again. Then, with Jesus as your savior, God as your Father, and the Holy Spirit in your heart, you will find new power within to obey the commands of God that once seemed impossible to follow.
And you’ll come onto the new road. This new road is not like the old. The old was very flashy, very bright, exciting, mysterious. Yet as it went on, increasingly gray and empty.
This new road with God is beautiful and mysterious yes, but it’s also challenging at times. It becomes more and more glorious as time goes, yet we also face all sort of trials and difficulties along the way.
And it will run contrary to the viewpoints of the world. It’s just so different to be part of God’s kingdom. We want to learn more and more how to walk on this new road because it is very different.
So to understand the new rules that we must live by, we must study God’s word carefully, and know His kingdom system, which is what Jesus taught in the parables. And we’re going to be getting into that more in the future.
We know how life worked on the path of Adam. It was all about pleasure, fun, excitement, money, power, parties, events, and getting more stuff. But it’s so different on the pathway of Christ.
The pathway of Christ is about love, service, humility, faith, prayer, fellowship with other believers, and ministering to the lost world around us.
So, what pathway will you choose? Many choose the pathway of Adam, and they go on into the gray tunnel, until they slowly die inside. Yet there is a great opportunity in that gray death, because out of it God can bring life. Oddly enough, in the deepest emptiness of the gray road of disaster, is paradoxically also the greatest opportunity for us to sense our need for Jesus Christ and a new pathway.
God will bring you throughout your life around again and again to the open door of Jesus. One day, you can choose to walk through it, or you may choose to reject it. Yet the offer is open, as long as you're breathing. Choose Christ today, because our time is running out on this finite Earth. Soon Jesus will return, and make a new heavens and new Earth.
Review of Main Points:
1. The pathway of this world seems right, yet it leads to disaster
2. The megaphone of the world is loud, yet the voice of God grows louder when we feel the emptiness of this life
3. Sometimes the best evidence for the reality of God is all the demonic activity in the world & our supernatural experiences
4. To escape the pathway of Adam we repent and die to our old selves
5. Adam’s sin brought condemnation to all, because all have sinned
6. The crucifixion of Jesus brings forgiveness to all who will receive it
7. Saying yes to Jesus starts today, but must continue into the future
8. The ten commandments remind us that we can’t be good without Jesus within us
9. Finding salvation means humbly admitting our sins, admitting we can’t do life with God, and inviting Jesus to be our savior
10. The new pathway of Christ is about love, service, humility, faith, prayer, fellowship with other believers, and ministering to the lost world around us.
