Pastor Esteban Garcia preaches through Genesis 4:1-16 about seeking the right kind of acceptance with God.
Bloomington Bible Church Sermons
Acceptance with God
Chapter four, so you've been a part of our church for a little bit, you'll know that we started our series in Titus last week, but we're taking a break already and doing something a little bit different. Really glad that we can open God's word together. And first also I want to say some announcements, college lunch is happening this Sunday after church. So typically college lunch is what it is, is for the college students, you know, it's the beginning of the school semester and it's an exciting time and we want to be able to pour into you and know you. And so what we do is typically after church we'll go to lunch to someone's house. It'll be at the creases there in the children's ministry, but if you're a college student, young adult, come and enjoy lunch, enjoy fellowship. We'll have a time of prayer this afternoon. We would really love to see if you have questions. Don't hesitate to let me know. So Genesis chapter four, why are we on Genesis chapter four? Well, I've just been thinking about this for a little while. You know, sometimes I don't know if this is, you're thinking and you're just like, maybe it's just a pastor thing, but you're reading and it's like, oh man, that would be a good sermon. That's something that I want to preach on. And we have taught on Genesis four, about two years ago, Pastor Joel preached on it. But here's the phrase that just kept on sticking with me. If you would turn to verse seven there, God says to Cain, if you do well, will you not be accepted? If you do well, will you not be accepted? In that phrase, just keep some ringing with me. And I think it's really important for us as a church because we all have a longing to be accepted in one way or another, right? We all want our friends to approve of us. We all want to be able to belong. And so we have this desire to be accepted by others. And our passage this morning has a lot to say. It has a lot to say about how we relate to one another. But most importantly, it tells us how we can be accepted by God, which is our greatest need. So let's read our passage. Let's read, we're gonna read verses one through 16. We'll pray and then we will see what God has for us this morning. This is God's word. Now Adam, new Eve, his wife. And she conceived and more Cain, saying, I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord. And again, she bore his brother, Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep. And Cain, a worker of the ground. In the course of time, Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground. And Abel also brought up the first born of his flock and of their fat portions. Let's see here. And the Lord had regard for Abel in his offering. But for Cain in his offering, he had no regard. So Cain was very angry in his face fell. The Lord said to Cain, why are you angry? And why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. It's the sire's contrary to you. But you must rule over it. Cain spoke to Abel, his brother. And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother, Abel, and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, where is Abel, your brother? He said, I did not know. Am I my brother's keeper? And the Lord said, what have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it shall no longer yield to you at strength. You shall be a fugitive and a wonder on the earth. Cain said to the Lord, my punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground. And from your face, I shall be hidden. I shall be a fugitive and a wonder on the earth. And whoever finds me will kill me. Then the Lord said to him, not so. If anyone kills Cain, Benjins shall be taken of him sevenfold. And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest any who found him should attack him. Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of non-East of Eden. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your word. Thank you that it opens our eyes to see ourselves clearly, to see you and understand you the way that you relate to us. Father, would you help us take this passage seriously, Lord? Would you help us to look to you and to treasure you in your acceptance as our highest good? Father, would you help us to think rightly about how we think about others? How we think about the church? And so, Father, would you bless this time? Would you help it be fruitful? I pray for these things in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, verse one through five. We have the scene, right? Adam, Eve, his wife, and they had two children, Cain and Abel. And then they both, Abel and Cain, both brought sacrifices from their work. So Cain brought the first troops from the ground, and offering them the food of the ground. And Abel brought up the first one of his flock in the fat portion. So both brothers came, brought a sacrifice and offering to the Lord. It's an act of worship before God. And God accepted one, but not the other. Right, God had regard, verse four. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering, he had no regard. Note there too, it's really important. The Bible mentions that God had regard for the person, right? Person and then the offering. God had regard for Abel and his offering, but had no regard for Cain and his offering. Okay, this is important. God was pleased with Abel, and therefore he accepted his offering. He was not pleased with Cain, and therefore he rejected a sacrifice. So one brother was accepted, one was rejected. And the question that you all need to be asking when you read a passage like this is why? Why did God accept one offering? Why did God accept one brother and not the other? No, right here, it doesn't tell us explicitly why. You know, if you're just reading here in this passage, you can try to make some assumptions, but it doesn't actually tell us why. So we will come back to this. It's really important, but the question before us is, why did God accept one and reject the other? What is the difference between the brothers and their sacrifices? So while the text doesn't give us the answer right away, the Bible does show us something that we can see, and it shows us that there's a longing in the human heart to be accepted, right? When Cain was not accepted, what did he do? Verse five, "But for Cain and his offering, he had no regard." So Cain was very angry and his face fell. His brother was accepted, he was not, he became angry and depressed. And we also know this by experience too though, right? That decided to belong, to be a part of something that lives in all of us. We want to be accepted for who we are. And oftentimes we will go to great lengths to get that acceptance. So I was thinking about that, it reminded me of a psychology experiment. So basically what it is, is you get a group of people right in the room and you ask them a very simple question. So Eliza, you want to throw up the image in the screen, a simple question. So you have a line on the left, right? And then you ask the question to a group of about eight participants, okay? Which line is the same size as the one on the left? A, B, or C? So it's like a pretty clear, right? So then everyone would have to raise your hand. So let's just practice it right here. So let's say if you think A is the same size as the left one, raise your hand. Obviously no one would vote for A. If you think B, raise your hand. Great, so you have some hands. C, some hands there too. All right, well, some of you didn't quite follow the instructions. The point is, in the experiments, the ash can form the experiment. The point is in the group of eight, seven of them were actors, okay? Seven of them were actors. And they voted for the wrong thing every time. Some of you listen to instructions, great. Thank you for those who voted for B. You're excellent, okay? I told a few of you to vote for B and I think you just forgot. The point is, you're supposed to vote for B. A lot of you're supposed to vote for B. And then it's like, oh, did I hear the instructions wrong? Am I like seeing something else? And the point is that the person who's not the actor ends up falling in line with what everybody else says, right? It's clear from the picture that C is the correct answer. But when everybody else raises their hand and says B, they're like, me too, right? Because we don't want to be the ones that stand out. We don't want to be the ones that are left out. We want to fit in. And there's many experiments like this, right? Like, they'll ask people questions that are very clear and obvious, like, what's two plus two? And they'll say four and four and four. But eventually people keep saying five and six and five. And there's like, five. You know, they change their answer because they don't want to be the ones that are left out. It's the ash can form the experiment. What teaches us that we want to fit in. We want to conform. We're willing to compromise to get that, too. And I'm sure we all have personal experiences, right? Of things that we've done in our lives. Because we want to fit in. We want to be accepted. Yeah, I don't know what it is for you. I was trying to think of examples in my life. And unfortunately, there were too many. One of the ones that just sticks out to me, though, as I was maybe 10, 11 years old. I was in school. I really wanted to fit in and be accepted by this group of guys that thought they were the coolest guys. And they came to me and they said, "Hey, we will dare you to eat this." To this day, I don't even know what it was. It was like an onion. But it's not really an onion. It's like, "We dare you eat this." And I was just like, "Whatever. If this is going to be the thing that gains me acceptance, I will eat it." It was the nastiest thing I think. To this day, I have eaten yet, all right? It was awful. I wanted to throw up, but I didn't. I ate it and I did it and I put on a strong face because I wanted to fit in. We all want to be accepted. Sons want to be accepted by their fathers. We want to have a group of friends that we can belong to. We want to fit in at work. Even in the church, right? Even in the church we want to be accepted. So this desire, this longing lives in our church. And if we don't understand it properly, it can lead us astray. You have to be careful that you don't idolize this desire. And how do you know if this desire has come to the point of an idol? Well, you're willing to sin and compromise in the work to get it. Kane, what did he do when he didn't get the acceptance that he thought he was going to get when he brought the offer before God and God rejected him? What did he do? More sin, right? Anger. Despair. Eventually we'll see a lot more than just that, too. One of the points is acceptance by man is not worth sitting over. And there's actually something greater at play, though. And our hearts are longing for acceptance. Points us to something deeper in our souls. We have a deeper need for acceptance without our friends or coworkers. You need God to accept you. You need God to accept you. Just think about it. Man's opinion is going to change. Your friends are going to come. They're going to go. Eventually, man is going to die and their opinion will go with them. But it's God's judgment and opinion of you that stands forever. What God thinks of you is of eternal consequence. Can we all know this? Everyone knows that in every civilization, in every country, every culture knows this, knows that we need to be accepted by God. And so we've been trying as people to earn his favor from the beginning of time, to earn divine favor one way or another to be accepted by God. All you have to do is look at the world religions, right? Every religion is trying to find favor with their divine being of choice. For example, in Islam, if you practice the five pillars, that will gain you favor with Allah. In Hinduism, you must eliminate all evil from within you. It to be pure and worthy to be accepted and merge with your God, Brahman. You have all kinds of pagan religions all over the world where you have to sacrifice to ancestors, right, and be approved of by them. Do enough for them that they will accept you and not haunt you in your family. And even with those that claim in our society that there is no such thing as a God. Even they have a set of practices and beliefs that they think will earn them favor their right to be a good person. There's certain things that you have to do in order to be accepted in society, right? I think oftentimes too, the anxiety and the depression that we see from the world is because we're trying to mask the fact that we actually don't feel like we have acceptance by God and we see our sin and we know that we're not worthy and that one day we will die and that is terrifying. But we want to run away from him instead of dealing with the actual problem. The fact that God needs to accept us if we have any hope. We know we have fallen short. We know we need God's favor. So many of us hope that we just do enough good things, right? We hope that if we just bring enough sacrifices like Cain did, if we just bring sacrifices, God will eventually see that and accept us. And we see in our passages that's not right. It's not quite it. God rejects Cain's in this sacrifice. So the question you have to ask, the question you have to know is does God have regard for you? Does God have regard for you? And ultimately it doesn't really matter that much whether you think God should have good regard for you. It's whether God himself has said that he is pleased by you or not that matters. Stream this morning, you don't have to turn there, but 2 Corinthians 10, verse 18 says, "For it is not the one who commends himself who is approved, but the one whom the Lord commends." Okay, in a sense, it doesn't matter what you think of yourself. Has God commended you? Has God approved of you? That is the question for all of us and our souls. Okay, again, it is good to have friends, right? It is good to be accepted in some sense. But if you make that your biggest aim, it will always disappoint you. You decide for means of approval should point you to a greater need in your soul, and that's for God to approve of you. There really should be nothing scarier than for you to think that your sacrifices were enough throughout life and get to the point where you're face to face with God, and he looks at your efforts with contempt. So what do you have to do to be accepted by God? Let's read verse 6 and 7. So the Lord said to Cain, "Why are you angry? And why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted?" And if you do not do well, sin is crashing at the door. It's the Cyrus contrary to you, but you must rule over it. So what does the passage tell us? How can we be accepted? You have to do well. If you do well, will you not be accepted? What does that mean? You have to do well. You have to act right. You have to be righteous. Again, you have to be the type of person that God approves of first before God will look at your sacrifices with a pleasing heart. Again, God looks at the sacrifices of the wicked like filthy rags. Doesn't matter how much you try to do before God. If your heart is not right, if you are not righteous, God will reject your sacrifice. Now let me take a quick aside here. This is not at all the main point of the passage. I just want to point this out to you because I'm your pastor. I want you to think about this. This is not the main point of the passage. In fact, the point of the passage is not really about the sacrifice, but the person's heart. God had regard for Abel and Cain. But it does bid the question for us to consider. Are you brothers and sisters, are you giving of your first fruits to the Lord? Are you saving your best for Him? Or are you setting the best hours of your day, the best of your fruit, the best of your efforts for yourself and just giving God the leftovers? Do you set aside some of your most alert time to meditate on Him? Or do you just quickly read at night thinking, "I just have to do something," and I'm just, "You fall asleep midway through your chapter." Are you giving Him of your best efforts to serve Him? To serve His people, to see Him known in your circles of influence? Or is God really an afterthought? Sometimes when you come to the end of the day, you think, "I didn't even think about God once." Are you giving God your first fruits? Are you giving cheerfully God's work commands you to do from the efforts of your work with faith knowing that it is hard to give, all right? I feel that every month it's like, "I need to tithe." And this money really could be helpful in other things. But have faith that God will provide for your needs and do it with faith and with joy. Or do you live in fear that God just won't provide for your needs? The point is we serve a God who's worthy of your very best, far more than your very best. Even your best efforts can't compare to what he's worthy of. So let's return, Church, to putting Him in the right place of importance in our lives. All right, that was a quick aside. Let's keep going. Let's examine verse 7. And this verse, by the way, it's tricky, all right? Verse 7 is tricky. There's differences in interpretation and translation because Hebrews just sometimes doesn't give us all the context clues, but we'll do the best that we can. Verse 7 says, "If you do well, will you not be accepted?" And if you do not do well, okay, so what happens if we don't do well? Let's talk about sin. What are some of the things that we learn about sin? One, sin is crouching at the door. Sin is always looming. Sin is crouching at the door. It's desirous contrary to you. It's desirous contrary to you. Some translations have it. It's desirous for you. In other words, it sounds like it wants to dominate, you control you. But you must rule over it. But you must rule over it. So let's examine each thing. Sin is crouching at the door. Sin is always looming, Church. It is ready to pounce at any opportunity it can get. So that means you have to be ready to fight. You have to be on guard. You can't just pretend that everything is going to be fine and not see it as a danger. You can't ignore it. You know, one of the biggest critiques that I often hear about our church is, you guys just talk about sin way too much. And we do need to guard our hearts, right? We should guard our hearts that the Christian life isn't just so focused on sin that we lose sight of our Savior. That is true. But at the same time, if we're going to be a healthy church, we have to be aware of the danger of sin. We have to be willing to talk about it. It's always looming. It's crouching at the door. It wants to, it's desirous for you. So we need to be able to talk about it, to teach against it, to warn you of it. And like the worst thing you can do as a Christian is just to pretend that your sin does not live there, to ignore it, to not see it as a big deal. Okay, you wouldn't do that with things like cancer, right? You wouldn't do that if there was a snake in your living room and your children were playing right next to you, you wouldn't ignore the danger. You would attack it head on. So that's why we talk about it. That's why we have things like prayer of confession on Sunday mornings. Sin is crouching at the door, ready to control you. Secondly, it's desirous contrary to you. All right, it wants to control you. It wants, it's desirous to take over you. Sin does not play games. It's sin uses people, it never brings you any good. Sin by nature is deceiving. It always promises, promises, promises, but it never delivers. It doesn't care about you. And because it's so deceiving, we need one another, right? We need others to know our sin, to be able to help us, to know that we're walking the right path. So when you have people that ask you intentional questions and want to get to know you, they care about your soul. So be thankful, be very thankful for that. The last thing we see about sin here is that you must rule over it. You must rule over it. Again, there's ways that you can interpret it too. But what is true is that the Christian life is a daily waging of war against sin. Okay, on this side of eternity, you will always wrestle with sin. You will never get to a point where sin is gone forever. You will always wrestle with it. And your responsibility, Church, is to kill it and not play with it any longer. If you don't take heed of God's warning like Cain does here in our next section, let Cain be a lesson to you. Okay, God gives Cain this warning in Numbers 8. Does God regard it? No, Cain spoke to his able with his brother. And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother, able and killed him. And that led to mystery for Cain. So just like Cain's disobedience, Cain, this regarding God's warnings, led to his mystery. So it will be with you. Unless you repent, unless you see your sin and turn from it. So whatever that sin is for you, whatever sin is that you're holding on to your life and you're wanting to keep close and not wanting to let go, your call is turned to your Savior. Turn away from it. It's ready, always looming once you attack. It is not good for you. It never will promise. It will never deliver what it promises. So take action and stop. Stop your drunkenness. Stop your immorality. Turn away from all selfish pursuits. Repent of your pride and greed. But this morning we're talking about acceptance, right? And if you idolize acceptance, sin is crouching at the door, right? Sin will just be getting more sin. So when you're not accepted, what does that usually lead to? Things like jealousy amongst one another. Bitterness, fear, insecurity, hatred. All these things come out of service. So when you think you need to be accepted and you're not getting what you want, and all these things got hate, they're going to make you miserable. So your call is to rule over it. And don't let this live in the church, all right? It'll happen. We're all sinners. But be on guard. It's easy to start harboring bitterness. It's easy to start feeling slighted. Oh, I didn't get invited to this. Oh, this person said this about me. Maybe they're thinking this. And you feel like you're not being accepted. And the next thing you know, your bitter harboring bitterness, you're competing against one another. You're always feeling slighted. And yes, you may be treated poorly sometimes. In the church outside of the church, it'll happen. You will be treated poorly. You will be misjudged. The question is how will you respond to that? How will you respond when it happens? Let your response show that you're not going to let sin have the minion over you. You must rule over your sin. And there's grave consequences, right? If we don't take God's warning seriously, so let's look at the three consequences from our passage. Verse eight, "Consequence of sin is death." Okay, if Cain spoke to Abel, his brother, and when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother, Abel, and killed him. A direct result of our sin is death. Our own death, the death of others, right? Sin of Adam led to the death of all men. Next, look at verse 11. And now God says, "You are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand." Abel's blood on the ground called for cursing upon Cain. Our sin brings curse to us. We are cursed because of our sin. Cain was cursed because of his wickedness. And lastly, look at verse 14 and 16. Cain understands it, and he says, "Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden." Verse 16, "Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord. Separation from God." Third consequence of sin. Separation from God. We see all those things here in our passage. Death, cursing, separation from God. So this matters greatly. The question of whether God will accept you as a matter of life and death. The question of whether God will accept your family members who are unbelievers is a matter of life and death. You care about their souls enough to ask them that question. Because the fact is that if God accepts you, eternal life is yours forevermore. But if God rejects you, you will die in your sins and suffer for all eternity. I hope I can imprint upon you just how much this matters. If you don't heed God's warning, instead of lead to not just your mystery, but the mystery of those around you. Okay, now I could stop here. I could stop here and just tell you all that. What you need to do is just do better. Okay, if you want to be accepted, you must do well. So just do better. And if you're humble enough, you would recognize. Yeah, I mean, that is true. I do need to do better better, right? I see it in myself. But I'm not going to stop there because there's not much hope in ending it there. Why? Well, because we've all tried to do better, right? If you're like me, there's come points where you say, "Oh, today is the day that everything is going to change today. I'm going to start being righteous today. I'm going to start living for the Lord today. I am going to put away that sin, right? And what happens? We fail. So if I told you and I just left you to go and do better on your own strength, you would continue to fail and you wouldn't actually do any better. The truth is you cannot do well by yourself. You cannot make yourself acceptable to God. Have you come to that realization? Have you gotten to that point that when you read God's law and you see what it requires of you and then you feel completely unable to keep it, to keep all of its commands? It has not ever driven you to your knees to pray and ask God and say, "God, I cannot do this on my own. I need you to help me. I need you to save me because I cannot do it in my own strength, no matter how hard I try." The truth is you need something greater, something outside yourself, someone greater, right? I think we're finally ready for our answer. How can we be acceptable to God? Why did God accept Abel but not Cain? Our passage doesn't tell us explicitly, but God's word does. "Turn with me to Hebrews, chapter 11." Hebrews, chapter 11, verse 4. And it reads, "By faith," okay, we have our answer from the first two words there. "By faith, Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous. God commending him by accepting his gifts, and through his faith, though he died, he still speaks. The difference between Abel and Cain was faith. It was faith that made Abel pleasing to God and therefore be, God accept his sacrifice." Okay, it was faith. We see in our passage here, faith through which he was commended as righteous. His faith was counted as his righteousness. Does that ring a bell to you? When you hear that, when you hear his faith was counted as righteousness, right? You think of Abraham, you think of Romans. You think, man, the Bible is just so coherent and true. It's just amazing. This is a theme through our scripture. It is by faith only that you can be accepted, right? And if that wasn't clear, look at verse six in Hebrews 11. Verse six, just two verses down. It says, "And without faith, it is impossible to please him. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists, and that he rewards those who seek him. Without faith, it is impossible to please God. If you want to draw near to God and be accepted, you must have faith. And faith in who, who would have faith in, faith in God, right? Faith, for us, we know the full picture. Faith only had a glimpse of what the faith was going to look like. We have the full picture now with Christ's faith in the one who could actually be pleasing to the Father. We must trust that we have all fallen short of what God calls us to do. But there was one man who perfectly obeyed and who was perfectly righteous. There was one who obeyed even to the point of shedding his own blood. That is Jesus, right? The one of whom the Father said, "This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased." So church, the only way for you to be acceptable to God. The only way for God to regard your sacrifices as pleasing to himself is if you believe that Jesus purchased that acceptance by his blood. The only way for you to be accepted and be pleasing to God is if you stand in the place of the one who did. If you stand in Jesus' place, if by faith you trust that he died on the cross for you, his merits, his achievements are yours and your sin is done away with him on the cross. You can and you will be accepted if you trust that there is no other hope for you, but through Jesus Christ alone. Jesus did away with all of the consequences too, right? Death, the death that we see from sin. Jesus died on the cross to pay the penalty that you deserve to pay. Your death, Jesus died. The curse, curse, Jesus became a curse on that cross for you. Separation, the Father turned his face away from the sign so that you would not have to be separated from God ever again. So it is by faith in Jesus that you receive what your soul needs, to be saved, to be accepted, and then once you're accepted into God's family, you actually receive the strength and the help that you need to overcome your sin, right? You can't actually rule over your sin now. Not perfectly, of course, but truly you can actually obey, you can actually do what God calls you to do, not in your own strength, but because God has given you that strength through the Holy Spirit. So we all have a choice to make. All of us will come to points in our lives when we have to choose. Am I going to choose God's favor or man's favor today? We have to choose. Do I want to be pleasing to God or do I want to be pleasing to society? And sometimes that's a daily decision for some of us. Some of us work in places live with people in which we have to make that decision every single day. Well, the truth is that trusting in Jesus is not going to make you popular in school. Doing what God calls you to do will mean that oftentimes you will be rejected. If you have faith, that won't spare you from being left out. That won't spare you from being treated unjustly. But it does address your most important need. You have forgiveness. You have acceptance with God. Many of you have suffered, are currently suffering in great rejection at the hands of loved ones. And it hurts. So come to Jesus. He will never cast you out. He will never disappoint. God, through Jesus, by faith, welcomes you into his family. So to conclude this morning, I can't promise you that your friends will accept you. I can't promise that you're going to be successful at work. I can't promise that you're going to have the best Christian community ever. No, I do believe, by the way, that if you're looking for a Christian community that will love you and will help you in your sin and care for you, I do think you can find that here. Obviously, we're not perfect. We're going to sin against you. But our aim is to help you and to point you to God's word, to treasure your Savior. But it won't be perfect anywhere. So I can't promise you the acceptance of man, but I can give you something better, okay? Just because it's in here. God is the one who promises. God's promised that he will accept those who believe in him with faith. So don't work for that which is feeble. We'll go away and just cannot satisfy instead. Rest in that which is sure and we'll satisfy you completely. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for even the echoes of your salvation in Genesis 4. From the beginning of creation, the first few chapters, the first sons that were born, Lord, we already see your plan of salvation. We already see faith at play. And we see the call or to return to you, to give you of our firstfruits, to believe in you, to rest in your grace, to believe in your promises. Father, thank you for Jesus. Thank you for Jesus being the complete satisfaction of what are sins needed, their atonement needed, was needed. Thank you for the fact that he was completely pleasing to you, Father. And so we pray that as we trust in him, Lord, that you would give us the strength to conquer our sin and ultimately to rest in the fact that you have accepted us because of what Jesus has done on our behalf. Thank you. We don't deserve this. We deserve far worse. We deserve the complete opposite. We pray all these things, Lord, in Jesus' name. Amen.