Searching for Eden

Searching for Eden
Understanding and navigating our culture’s cries for life

Distorted Spirituality: Covering over disappointment & pain
The story of Abram, Sarai, & Hagar

What is disappointment & pain?
• Disappointment – the real or perceived shattering of an expectation, desire, or dream (often God-created desires or dreams)
• Shame – the deep-seated belief that something is fundamentally wrong with me (different than conviction or even guilt)

How do we tend to deal with disappointment & pain?
• Denial (or selective forgetting)
• Minimizing
• Blaming others
• Blaming yourself
• Rationalizing
• Intellectualizing
• Distracting
• Becoming hostile

“Abram’s wife Sarai had not borne him children. She owned an Egyptian slave named Hagar. Sarai said to Abram, ‘Since the LORD has prevented me from bearing children, go to my slave; perhaps I can have children by her.’ And Abram agreed to what Sarai said. So Abram’s wife Sarai took Hagar, her Egyptian slave, and gave her to her husband Abram as a wife for him. This happened after Abram had lived in the land of Canaan 10 years. He slept with Hagar, and she became pregnant. When she realized she was pregnant, she looked down on her mistress.

Then Sarai said to Abram, ‘You are responsible for my suffering! I put my slave in your arms, and ever since she saw that she was pregnant, she has looked down on me. May the LORD judge between me and you.’ Abram replied to Sarai, ‘Here, your slave is in your hands; do whatever you want with her.’ Then Sarai mistreated her so much that she ran away from her.”
-Genesis 16:1-6

What did you see? How did these characters deal with disappointment & pain?

? Abram denied and avoided
? Sarai blamed & abused
? Hagar grew bitter & fled

How can we break the cycle of shamefully covering up disappointment & pain?
Allow ourselves to “be found” by God
o “The Angel of the LORD found her by a spring of water in the wilderness…”
o God finds us in many ways:
? While reading his Word & praying
? Through circumstances
? In the company of loving friends
? Other

Admit the failure of our cover up strategy
o “He said, ‘Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?’ She replied, ‘I’m running away from my mistress Sarai.’”
o Where has your cover-up strategy gotten you?

Face our disappointment & pain
o “Then the Angel of the LORD said to her, ‘You must go back to your mistress and submit to her mistreatment.’”
o At some point we must stare down our disappointment and pain…

Soak in God’s promises
o “The Angel of the LORD also said to her, ‘I will greatly multiply your offspring, and they will be too many to count.’”
o God hears you & cares for you!

Embrace God in a deeper way than we ever have before
o “So she named the LORD who spoke to her: The God Who Sees, for she said, ‘Have I really seen here the One who sees me?’ That is why she named the spring, ‘A Well of the Living One Who Sees Me.’”

Become redeemers in our world
o How did God use her in the “chosen family” that had hurt her so much?
o As we face our pain, God frees us & dares to use us to redeem hurting people all around us…

THIS IS THE GOOD NEWS FOR ALL HUMANITY!!!
Are you experiencing it in an ever deepening way?

Searching for Eden
Understanding and navigating our culture’s cries for life

Distorted Spirituality: Compartmentalized Living
The story of Jacob

Compartmentalized Living = a way of life in which we intentionally or unintentionally create compartments/areas where we attempt to make life work on our own apart from the true God.

What might compartmentalized living look like?
***We usually build compartments around the areas where our greatest fears or hurts lie
• Fear of failure
• Fear of rejection
• Identity & value confusion
• Relational pain
• Emotional pain & confusion
• Others…

Where does compartmentalized living come from?
We falsely believe that God is weak…so we must help Him
– Where do you struggle to trust God’s power? How does this struggle manifest itself for you?

We falsely believe that God is incompetent…so we can’t trust Him.
“Our commitment to Jesus can stand on no other foundation than a recognition that he is the one who knows the truth about our lives and our universe. It is not possible to trust Jesus, or anyone else, in matters where we do not believe him to be competent…

“Here is a profoundly significant fact: In our culture, among Christians and non-Christians alike, Jesus Christ is automatically disassociated from brilliance or intellectual capacity. Not one in a thousand will spontaneously think of him in conjunction with words such as well-informed, brilliant, or smart…Would you be able to trust your life to such a person?”
-Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy

Where do you struggle to trust God’s competence?

We falsely believe that God is irrelevant…so we are on our own in His absence.
Irrelevant = disconnected from the matter at hand…

How do we move beyond compartmentalized living?
Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. He reached a certain place and spent the night there because the sun had set. He took one of the stones from the place, put it there at his head, and lay down in that place. And he dreamed: A stairway was set on the ground with its top reaching heaven, and God's angels were going up and down on it. The Lord was standing there beside him, saying, "I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your offspring the land that you are now sleeping on. Your offspring will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out toward the west, the east, the north, and the south.

All the peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. Look, I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go. I will bring you back to this land, for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you." When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he said, "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it." He was afraid and said, "What an awesome place this is! This is none other than the house of God. This is the gate of heaven." Early in the morning Jacob took the stone that was near his head and set it up as a marker. He poured oil on top of it and named the place Bethel, though previously the city was named Luz.

Then Jacob made a vow: "If God will be with me and watch over me on this journey, if He provides me with food to eat and clothing to wear, and if I return safely to my father's house, then the Lord will be my God. This stone that I have set up as a marker will be God's house, and I will give to You a tenth of all that You give me."

-Genesis 28:10-22

How do we move beyond compartmentalized living?
We allow ourselves to be shepherded by God & others in the pursuit of seeing God & life clearly
– When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he said, "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it." He was afraid and said, "What an awesome place this is! This is none other than the house of God. This is the gate of heaven."
– -Gen. 28:16-17

We set up markers to remind us of reality
-Early in the morning Jacob took the stone that was near his head and set it up as a marker. He poured oil on top of it and named the place Bethel, though previously the city was named Luz.
-Gen. 28:18-19

We dare to live in line with reality
-Then Jacob made a vow: "If God will be with me and watch over me on this journey, if He provides me with food to eat and clothing to wear, and if I return safely to my father's house, then the Lord will be my God. This stone that I have set up as a marker will be God's house, and I will give to You a tenth of all that You give me."
-Gen. 28:20-22
We recognize that change is slow
Jacob had many re-lapses

So will we…but there is grace!!!

New Teaching Series
Searching for Eden
Understanding and navigating our culture’s cries for life
• Gender Wars: What does it mean to be male and female?
• Sexuality outside the garden
• Consumerism
• Amusing ourselves to death
• The Overload Syndrome
• Going Global

Dissonance
Why is life so fuzzy & elusive?
Genesis 2:15-25

Dissonance – “Lack of agreement, consistency, or harmony; conflict.”

The Genesis
“The LORD God formed the man out of the dust from the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being. The LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there He placed the man He had formed…The LORD God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden to work it and watch over it…Then the LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper who is like him…So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to come over the man, and he slept. God took one of his ribs and closed the flesh at that place. Then the LORD God made the rib He had taken from the man into a woman and brought her to the man…This is why a man leaves his father and mother and bonds with his wife, and they become one flesh. Both the man and his wife were naked, yet felt no shame.”
-Genesis 2:15-25

The Design
• Come to life
• A garden
• Work & Care
• Dependence on God
• Interdependence with others like us
• Nakedness…vulnerability…known & valued for who we are
• NO SHAME!!!

The Distortion
• Fear death
• A battlefield
• Work is a dirty word
• Independence is valued
• Others are a threat to us
• Must disguise or cover the real us…no one would celebrate the real me…
• SHAME!!!

God created dissonance to be…
• The language connecting heaven and earth.
“He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end.”
-Ecclesiastes 3:11

“When God wants to carry a point with His children, He plans His argument into the instincts.”
-Ralph Emerson

“Our deepest instinct is heaven. Heaven is the ache in our bones, the splinter in our heart. Like the whisper of faraway waves we hear crashing in the whorls of a conch shell, the music of heaven echoes, faint, elusive, haunting, beneath and within our daily routines.”
-Mark Buchanan

“For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body. For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it. In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words;”
-Romans 8:22-26

“Groaning is the lexicon and grammar of our dislocation. Groaning is our default language, our mother tongue.”
-Mark Buchanan

Some ways you might feel the dissonance…
• Fear of failure & inability to take risks
• Frustration with futility at work
• Shame over the real you
• Disgust with chaos in life
• Shallow relationships
• Confusion about your identity & calling
• Others?

I feel the dissonance when…

God created dissonance to…
• Lead us back to Himself.
“These all died in faith without having received the promises, but they saw them from a distance, greeted them, and confessed that they were foreigners and temporary residents on the earth. Now those who say such things make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been remembering that land they came from, they would have had opportunity to return. But they now aspire to a better land – a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them.”
-Hebrews 11:13-16

I feel the dissonance when…

Next Week
Gender Wars: What does it mean to be male and female?