Sermon: "Creation and Fall"

First in the 'Extreme Makeover: Home Edition' series,
Delivered April 3, 2005 by Bill Pitts, Director of Student Ministries.
Other sermons in this series - 1 / 2

Theme: A home was perfect when they bought it - now it needs some major work done. I was 'perfect' when I was born - man, have things changed. God's creation was perfect by design - but we decided it wasn't good enough. Do these stories relate?

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Today as Andy said we are starting this two week series called "Extreme Makeover Home Edition" and if you have seen the show (IMDB) before outside of this clip you know it's a pretty touching look at a family in need, who receive a pretty extreme update to their family home and in some ways their lives. I love this show. I try not to miss it. It blows me away week after week with the compassion and love that is shown to these families. I remember when it first came on it was kind of like normal families. There was one about a youth pastor one week. You don't get much more normal than us youth pastors. (laughter) A little too much laughter there.

I was actually replaying last night, and they just didn't have the money or space they needed. And as I watched them redo this home, and all this stuff they had in store for them I remembering thinking. "maybe I will send in some pictures of my house and maybe they will pick me next." But then the story started to change. It went from people who, yeah, they could use a little more space or they needed some work finishing something, but it's people whose lives are changed because of the makeover they are receiving. The one we saw here, both parents died and there are 11 people living in this small home. There is one where a lady who adopted three children. I think they all had HIV and she had just been diagnosed with cancer and wanted a place for them to call their own once she was gone. There was one about a family who had their child taken away from them, their little boy because he had all these bruises and broken bones repeatedly, and come to find out it was a disease that he had that was making his bones brittle. And they came in and built a home with soft walls and soft floors to take care of him. Things like that when I am watching now I think I would never try to get them to remodel my home for the show because it's embarrassing that there are other people out there that I wouldn't think to put myself above who have such greater needs. So, anyway I love it. ABC doesn't pay me, but they should as much as I talk about it.

In the last few months you have learned about my movie choices, now you hear about my TV habits. I think it is time for me to share a little bit more about who I am beyond my entertainment choices. Some of you know me already and know parts of who I am, but I would like to take a little risk today and share with you some of what has made me who I am and what God has done in me.

I was born in 1968. Most of you in here are saying, "Whoa, he is old." A few of you are trying to remember what grade you were in, in school and if you are old enough to be my mom or dad. Some of you are thinking that is about the same time that you were born. Probably just a couple of you here are thinking that you've got luggage older than I am. Anyway, whatever the year 1968 makes you think of that's the beginning of my story. I was born William Lester Pitts Jr. from a Charleston, South Carolina Air Force Base, to a 17-year-old mom and 24-year-old dad. I was a perfect baby. My wife doesn't see it yet, but losing my hair and lying around the house all day is my attempt to regain that perfection that I had then.

Life was pretty much normal for me the first couple of years. My mom and dad loved me. My grandparents doted on me. Life was pretty good, and then something went wrong. My earliest memory is when I was almost 3-years-old, I was pulling my 1-year-old little brother in my little red wagon, door to door, in the trailer park we lived in, begging for food for him so he would stop crying from being hungry. I found out when I was older that when my dad would leave for work my mom would leave as well, leaving me to take care of my baby brother. Wandering around a South Georgia trailer park with a 1-year-old, day-to- day, is something I wish I could forget. It took my dad a few months to find out what my mom was hiding from him; the fact that she wanted nothing to do with us or him anymore.

A reluctant neighbor had finally spoken up and my dad sent me and my brother to live with my grandparents while he went through a divorce with my mom. Less than a year later he married the neighbor who had told him what had been going on. For the next twelve years I lived with my dad and my step mom, my older step sister and my younger brother and we all thought things would be better, and for a while they were. But when I was 8-years-old I was sexually abused by my twelve-year-old step sister. I became pretty antagonistic towards my step mom and step sister, and that along with other things led to my dad's relationship with my step mom going sour, and finally we moved out when I was sixteen. When I think about growing up, the only thing I remember that was much joy was the weekends and summers that I spent at my grandparents house in the North Georgia mountains, being on my high school soccer team, and my junior year in high school when it was just my dad, my brother and me.

When I was about 10, I remember my grandfather pulling me aside, and he sat me on his lap, and he was telling me that I should commit my life to God and become a preacher. I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. The rest of my extended family was convinced that I would be a lawyer because, believe it or not, I loved to argue, but my grandfather would always try to get me to read the Bible with him, and he would always give me his latest Billy Graham books. He wanted me to be ready. The love and prayers of my grandparents and my dad kept me out of trouble until God got a hold of me. I started following Christ in 1986 in my youth group summer camp and made a commitment to God to do youth ministry and follow him at the same time. That's part of my story. That's part of who I am, and a lot of you share parts of that story as well; a divorce, abuse, loving grandparents, following Christ. Our lives tell a story. They make up who we are.

This week and next week we are talking about stories. Our stories, God's story, how our story is part of God's story. It's a good story. It's a hard story. Some of it is not fun to talk about. It's not pretty. It's painful. But part of the goodness of the story is knowing that the pain isn't ours alone. I know that I am not the only one who has ever been abused. I know that I am not the only one who has ever been abandoned, and knowing that makes it a little easier to deal with. And while knowing that there are others in here that can understand the pain that I grew up with helps me honestly feel a little less freakish when I talk about it. What is amazing to me, is that the God who created me and created you, the God who loves me and loves you, he was abused, he was abandoned. He was considered a freak. He came to earth and experienced all of that so that I could see my story as part of his story, so that you can see your story as part of this story.

So today we are going to look at the first two parts of that story and a good place to start I think would be the beginning. So if you have your Bibles please turn to Genesis, the first book in the Bible and we will see what God says to us about our story. We are going to start with Genesis 1:1. We are going to skip around a little bit, but let's start there. Genesis 1:1 says: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." It goes on to say that he made light. "He separated the light from the dark. He separated the water from the sky. He made land. He made the land grow with plants and trees. He made the seasons. He made the sun and the moon. He made the stars. He made fish, birds and animals and then he made people." Creation. The creation story. A plan, the beginning, an introduction to the Creator. Somewhere in the beginning of every story we see these elements. We watched the clip from the show. Every week they start with a plan, that's why we would watch that.

They introduce us to the story that we have been invited into the family's story. We get to look into their lives to see why we should pay attention, to see why this is an important story. You know if it was just about building a house in seven days that might be interesting once or twice to the contractors, but to keep people's attention week after week they have to have a story that resonates with who God made us to be, so they create the show by starting with a family. It's a show about the house, but there would be no house without the family. And the first thing I see when I read through the creation story in Genesis, is all that we talk about, our story. When we talk to each other we tell our story. It's not really our story that we are talking about completely. It's Gods'. He is the storyteller. It's his story. He is the creator of the story. He controls the story. We are the house in his story. When we realize that our life is like the house, of course our life is important, the house is important, but there would be no house without the family. There would be no us without God.

Some of you in here have recently started your journey with Christ. Some of you are still trying to figure out if Christ is even someone worth following. And you are listening to this and you are saying how could this be his story? How could my life be his story if I just met him? But I think this account of creation goes throughout time. I think God says to us through this, " You may have just met me, but I have known you since before time began. I created you. I created everything. I have a plan for you. In these words you see, I have a plan for everything."

You know some people when they hear that, they don't like to think about it because they feel like that could mean we are trapped into being or living a certain way, but very quickly we see that that thought is not true. We jump ahead to Chapter 3 in Genesis. We see that even in his story we make our own choices. I am going to pick up in Genesis, chapter 3, verse 8 where Adam and Eve living in this perfect creation have made their choice.

"Toward evening they heard the Lord God walking about in the garden, so they hid themselves among the trees. The Lord God called to Adam, "Where are you?" He replied, "I heard you, so I hid. I was afraid because I was naked." "Who told you that you were naked?" the Lord God asked. "Have you eaten the fruit I commanded you not to eat?" "Yes," Adam admitted, "but it was the woman you gave me who brought me the fruit, and I ate it." Then the Lord God asked the woman, "How could you do such a thing?" "The serpent tricked me," she replied. "That's why I ate it." So the Lord God said to the serpent, " Because you have done this, you will be punished. You are singled out from all the domestic and wild animals of the whole earth to be cursed. You will grovel in the dust as long as you live, crawling along on your belly. From now on, you and the woman will be enemies, and your offspring and her offspring will be enemies. He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel."

Then he said to the woman, " You will bear children with intense pain and suffering. And though your desire will be for your husband, he will be your master." And to Adam he said, " Because you listened to your wife and ate the fruit I told you not to eat, I have placed a curse on the ground. All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it. It will grow thorns and thistles for you, though you will eat of its grains. All your life you will sweat to produce food, until your dying day. Then you will return to the ground from which you came. For you were made from dust, and to dust you will return." Then Adam named his wife Eve, because she would be the mother of all people everywhere. And the Lord God made clothing from animalskins for Adam and his wife."

We think because there is a plan that we have to follow it. This shows us this isn't true. Verses 11 and 12 spell it out for us. "Have you eaten the fruit I commanded you not to eat?" Yes, Adam admitted, but... That's what our attitude toward sin always is. We have a "yes, but" mentality. Yes, I was speeding, but I was going to be late. Yes, we are getting divorce, but she doesn't meet my needs. Yes, I take some liberties on my taxes, but the government rips us off. Yes, I spend too much time at work, but my kids understand. Yes, I voted for Ralph Nader in the last election, but it was just for fun. Yes, Bill may get fired Monday, but he made someone laugh about politics. The "yes, but" mentality was Adam's attempt to rationalize his sin. It's been man's attempt to rationalize it ever since. God's plan for the story was for Adam and Eve to obey. They chose not to. In God's story they chose the direction they were going to take and so do we. And while that would seem to give us this great freedom to have our choice, it brings us to the second part of the story. Every story has a beginning, its creation and every story that resonates with us has a fall, the crisis, the destruction, evil and sin.

Extreme Home Makeover has the destruction of a house. The home was built. When it was built it was right for the purpose it was designed for, but something happened along the way. It's no longer complete. It's missing something. So it gets destroyed.

Genesis 1:31 should give us hope when God created us. He goes from using the words it was good to the words it was excellent. He was talking about man. His original design in us was excellent, perfect, but then came the fall. We are given the opportunity to live how we want to live and here's the crux of the message; as long as we live how we want to live, we will screw it up. Sin is self-centeredness. Cheating on taxes, gossip, in most cases a divorce, overeating, affairs, looking at pornography, stealing. What sin isn't about self-centeredness? What sin is not about us saying, "I know it's wrong, but I don't care, because that's what I want." We want life to be about us. Adam and Eve had everything, and when they decided to live for themselves, the fall happened. When we choose ourselves over God, sin happens. The fall means we are no longer the perfect design we were created to be. We may not feel the effects immediately, but things have been set in motion that means the end is coming. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they did not immediately die as Genesis 2:17 suggests. God said to them in that verse, "But from the tree of knowledge from good and evil, you shall not eat. For in that day that you eat from it, you will surely die." They didn't die then. But they set in motion the consequence of their fall. They set in motion the consequence of sin. Each of us, when we decide that the story is all about us, sets in motion the consequence of our sin.

So often I think our problem is this. We look at what our circumstances are and decide that they justify our actions. We think God may have created everything, but he surely didn't mean for this to happen. So I will fix it. I will fix the situation, and I will make it better. I will institute my own plan. It's right back to being self-centered. We've got to look beyond what we think is best for us to see that God's plan is still there. He is still in control if we will let him be. I know God didn't intend for my mom to abandon me. He didn't intend for her to not love me, but those things, her actions, they don't change what he wants for me.

Our circumstances don't change what he wants from us. For a long time I thought because of her actions I was entitled to live a certain way, and so it warped my view. I was abandoned by someone who was supposed to love me, so the pattern became I would abandon others. Every girl I dated in high school, once things started going well in the relationship, I stopped calling them. I stopped talking to them. That's what I knew. I didn't know there was a different plan. I suffered through my dad's divorces. So, in my warped view of things, when things get tough in my marriage, the first thing I think of is divorce. That must be the way because that is what I experienced. But, if I stop to look, it's not God's plan. He says in Matthew, he says "there are no longer two, but one. Let no one separate them, for God has joined them together." He has a plan that is not dependent on my circumstances. It is not dependent on what has been done to me. It is dependent on my willingness to follow him.

My warped view doesn't excuse my behavior. I am still accountable. Each of us are still accountable for what we do. We don't have the freedom to live how we want to live just because something hasn't gone the way it could have gone or how we think it should have gone. We think because we have the ability to lead life the way we think it should be, that equals freedom. But, when we take the time to look at the results of our plans, I think we will see that God's perfect plan is what leads to freedom, not ours, because our plans too often lead to frustration, to pain, and the Bible says ultimately to death. I think we have this American view that if we have to do something somebody else is telling us to, then we aren't free. But God is saying, "I love you so much I created a perfect plan for you. If you will follow it, follow me, you will experience the best I have to offer." Adam and Eve had all the very best the world had to offer I think. They had no disease, no war, no clothes and their choice gave them pain and sweaty work.

The crazy thing is this, we have been given freedom to live how we want to live, but it's God's story. We can choose to go our own direction. Every step we take is a choice of going my own way or going God's way. Our will be done or God's will be done, but if we go our own direction we take ourselves out of the plan that God designed. We take ourselves further from the perfect creation that he has for us, and I say has present tense because even though it was ruined in the garden, even though it was ruined when we go our own way, God still has a plan in place; one gives us an opportunity to come back in to a right relationship with him and share once again in his perfect plan.

We looked earlier at how Adam and Eve screwed up in the garden, they broke the relationship they had with God, yet something else stands out to me in that passage. After all the things that God says to them about man having to scratch out a living and sweating to produce food and women having painful childbirth, we see the heart of God in Verse 21 where is says, "And the Lord God made clothing from animal skins for Adam and his wife." God had just finished telling them the consequences of their sin and then he follows it up by showing them how he loves them and let's them know that he is still going to take care of them. He gives us a clue in his sacrifice of the animals for clothing that sacrifice is what he will use to bring us back in to a right and perfect relationship with him. He shows that even though we turn from him he stills desires to take care of us, but that's a story for next week. You don't want to miss that.

Here is what I want you to think about this week. I said back in the beginning that its God's story and we are like the house in the TV show. The house is important, but the story is the key. In the part of God's story that you are living out, what kind of renovation does he need to do in you? It's hard thinking about that. How many times have we heard about someone who wanted to have a renovation done on their house, a bathroom remodeled or something and when they took the tub out the floor was rotten and they had so much more work than they had bargained for? We have little things in our life that we probably know that God needs to work on them, how we speak to our wife, our kids or parents, but if we open the major renovations when all we thought we needed were minor ones or we open to him saying "it's not just how you speak to them, it's the honor you have for me that is reflected in them." If we are willing to let him work on the minor things only, it means we are still trying to control the story. We are still trying to control the finished product. Think about that little thing this week and decide if you are willing to let him do whatever it takes to change that in me, whether it's minor or major. Think about that. Pray about that, and let's take a step towards his will being ours as we attempt to live out the story.

Let's pray. Father God, thank you that you love us enough not to give up on us, to not leave us as we are, but desire to see us made into your image and that you love us so much that you wrap us up in you and you say, "I know, I know what you are going through, but I can also see where I am taking you." Let us be open in worship this morning to where you are going to take us. Amen.

© 2005, Bill Pitts
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org