Who Has You?

Prayer

What Went Wrong?

In July of 2021, Paul Castro and his 17-year-old son David were leaving a Houston Astros baseball game in their pick-up truck when a man by the name of Gerald Williams cut them off in his Buick

That led to a verbal altercation. Which led to Williams following them out of the parking lot and out of the downtown area. Castro tried to speed up to get away. As he made a U-turn at the East Freeway he heard several gunshots ring out, saw that the back window of his truck was shattered and realized that his son had been shot. David died as a result of those gunshots.

In spite of Williams’ attempt to sell his vehicle, the police found it in a field near his house. And they found him as well, and he was caught and arrested and was recently convicted.

It’s a terrible story, to consider what would drive someone to do something so heinous. To be so filled with anger over verbal altercation (which, apparently your actions started), that you felt compelled to chase that person down and shoot at them, thereby murdering one of them.

But that kind of anger - and the actions that come with it - are nothing new. That brings us to the next chapter in Genesis, as we make our way through the story of the Old Testament. Last week we saw sin entering the world through Adam and Eve and their disobedience to God, eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Things don’t improve - in fact, they get worse, as we’ll see in the story of two of their sons, Cain & Abel, Genesis 4:1-16...

So the story begins with Adam and Eve getting busy on the “be fruitful and increase in number” directive from God, with Eve giving birth to two sons, Cain and Abel. Abel grows up to be a shepherd and Cain a gardener. They make offerings to the Lord, with Cain bringing some of the produce from his garden and Abel bringing a part of his flock.

If you notice here, there’s a distinct difference between the offerings. Cain brings some of the fruits of the soil, but Abel - Abel brings the best of what he has. He offers to God the fat portions, where flavor is - and he brings not just the best cut of meat, but the best of the flock, the firstborn.

It’s a subtle little detail, but it reveals something about Cain immediately, the inclination of his heart. It’s not God first. Any of his produce will do. But not Abel, for him it is very much, God first. He honors God as God with his offering, the firstfruits and the best portions of those firstfruits.

Knowing this, it makes sense that God rejects Cain’s offering. God knows that Cain is not living rightly, he’s not putting God first. It is not an offering made from faith. His rejection of the offering communicates that to Cain, you aren’t worshipping me rightly, you are not honoring me in your heart as Lord.

But instead of responding to God’s rebuke in humility and confession, Cain moves further into sin - and we’re going to see this progression throughout this story.

Cain gets very angry, his face is downcast. He’s mad and he starts pouting. He moves into some serious self-pity here. He’s been wronged - and it’s anybody’s fault but his.

So again, God intervenes in an act of loving discipline, and confronts Cain directly. He asks Cain why he’s so angry, why he’s so downcast. “If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?”

Note what God is doing here, he’s inviting Cain to self-reflect, to consider his response to God’s rejection and think through what may be going on in him - where his thinking is. Where his heart is.

Then God issues a warning - and this is huge - “But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.” Don’t miss this - this is at the heart of this story, problem with sin, why it’s so dangerous, so destructive

Look at how God describes sin…it’s crouching at your door, it’s sitting right there, waiting, ready to pounce. And it pounces because it wants to have you, to get you, to master you. God is giving us a vivid description here of sin and how dangerous it is - looking for any and every opportunity to grab a hold of our hearts.

It speaks to the fact that there’s a battle here, a fight - either sin is going to master us or we will master it. Somebody is going to come out on top. I’m not sure Cain ever puts up much of a fight.

Instead of mastering over sin, it does indeed master Cain. It pounces, just as God warned it would. This anger, this hatred, this jealousy, this self-pity - all of that continues to stir in Cain’s heart. He lets it simmer, as he keeps convincing himself of how badly he’s been wronged, how God unfairly favors Abel, and what the heck makes Abel so special…Abel, that smarmy do-gooder.

Well he gets that smarmy do-gooder away, out in the field where no one can see what happens next. And then Cain suddenly turns on the oblivious Abel and attacks him, killing him. He murders his own brother. It’s rather sobering to think that here we are, only in the second generation of humanity and we are already killing one another.

Didn’t take long for sin to get us. That stirring of self-pity and jealous and anger and resentment led Cain to murder Abel, just like it led Gerald Williams, consumed by road rage, to shoot and kill David Garcia, an innocent 17-year-old boy.

When you see this dynamic it becomes perfectly obvious why Jesus teaches in his sermon on the mount, in Matthew 5:21-22, “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment.” Because murder always begins with anger, anger stirred and simmered over. You kill someone in your heart long before you might kill their person.

To top it all off, Cain’s conscience is so seared, so hardened, he lies about the whole thing. God asks Cain where his brother is. If there was remorse, at least remorse that was greater than his fear, he would have confessed what he’d done and pled for God’s mercy. But he doesn’t - he lies, answers God with an edge of bitterness and guilt-ridden contempt…Am I my brother’s keeper?

No wonder God lowers the boom, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.” Abel’s blood, soaked into the ground (very ground that Cain worked) cries out for justice. God acts in justice, cursing Cain, condemning him to be a restless wanderer on the earth (do you notice how sin moves us further and further from God’s rest?).

So telling that even here, Cain shows no signs of remorse. His only cries are cries of complaint because of how harsh the punishment is, fear that he will be killed. In spite of his hardened heart, God shows mercy to Cain, marking him so that it’s clear that anyone who looks to enact vengeance on Cain by killing him will suffer times as much.

Really a sad ending, a dead brother and another one, unrepentant, restlessly wandering the earth. It shows the absolute destructive power of sin, what happens when sin has us.

Here’s the challenge, our great dilemma - Sin Has Us. This is the common condition of humanity. We’ve already lost the battle.

This is what this story is demonstrating to us, the enslaving power of sin, how it masters us. Sin, in the same way it had Cain, it captured him, it has captured us, it has us. And this is the situation all of us find ourselves in. The Bible is absolutely clear on this, sin has us. Let me offer you a few examples:

John 8:34 - Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin.” Have you sinned? I certainly have (over and over and over again). Everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Sin has us.

Romans 7:21-24, So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; 23 but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. 24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?

Evil is right there with me. I want to do good, that’s my intention, but law of sin is at work in me, making me a prisoner. I’m enslaved, I need to be rescued! Who will rescue me? Sin has us.

You’ll find the same idea in, as we saw, Romans 6, and in Galatians 5:1, over and over again - we have been enslaved by sin. When we, like Cain, are obedient to sin, when we sin, we become slaves to it. It has us.

Absolutely critical that we come to terms with this reality, because this is why we absolutely need Jesus - he is our rescuer! We come to Jesus as those whom sin has, we are enslaved by it. Otherwise, would we even need Jesus? If we could just choose not to sin, do it in our own power, master sin instead of it mastering us, who needs Jesus? Reality is we’re enslaved, we need his power, his resurrection power to free us from mastery sin has over us.

I was watching a debate held at the Oxford Union, very British setting and style of debate, it has a friendly and at times, humorous tone to it. In this format a series of presenters come forward, four on each side of the topic, most of them students at Oxford, with some other scholars mixed in.

Debate topic was “This House Regrets the Rise of Hookup Culture.” So, half the presenters were arguing that hookup culture - culture of casual sex, friends with benefits, Tinder and all that, has gone wrong, its more harmful than helpful. The other half argued against that - no, it’s a good thing.

Here’s the thing that just amazed me about those who argued for it, who thought that hookup culture is a good thing - for them it all had to do with freedom, freedom of choice. Why not give people the freedom to choose what to do with their bodies - who to do it with, what they do, how often, etc. And do it without having to experience any of the guilt and shame that society would foist upon them.

All I kept thinking was…but we don’t have that type of freedom. You can’t just engage in any behavior you want and think it won’t have an impact on you. That you won’t have feelings of shame or jealousy or feeling used or regret. Or you won’t start to do deeper into behaviors that you’ll regret even more. When we’re obedient to sin, sin has you. Very reason the debate was being had was that many young people are beginning to discover the emptiness of the hookup culture. Though they may never express it in this language, what they are realizing is, sin has them.

And this has been the gradual and consistent discovery of my life as a follower of Jesus. The more I grow in Jesus, the more I’ve come to realize how deeply sin has had me. How much of a grip it has on my heart. That I’ve been far more enslaved than I ever would have realized when I first came to Christ. It’s as I’ve engaged the battle with sin - not on my own now, but hopefully and prayer always through the power of Jesus Christ - that I’m coming to realize how much of a fight it really is.

It’s only as I’ve sought to be more for others that I’ve come to learn more how selfish I am with my money and time, that I really like the security I believe money offers, that I want to serve others when it’s convenient to me, it fits my schedule, when I’m in the mood.

You quickly figure out how impatience you are when you try to live at a slower pace, not rush around - how quickly that sense of being irked rises when the driver in front of my is going too slow.

I’ve become much more conscious about how much I can let anger and resentment stir in me as I ponder things over in my mind, how much it fuels my sense of indignation and self-righteousness, if I’m not careful. If I’m not coming to Jesus with an acknowledge of how this sin has me - how much I need his power and his grace to fight the battle.

This is why engaging in spiritual disciplines is so essential, because it’s how we engage the battle. It’s how we work to open ourselves up to the power and grace of Jesus in us so that we can move out of all these sinful habits we’ve been enslaved to, and engage in new habits that are shaped in the character of Jesus. Taking off the old self, putting on the new.

Dallas Willard lays it out this way, speaking about one of the main objectives in becoming like Jesus: “That, as we have said, is the breaking of the power of patterns of wrongdoing and evil that governs our lives because of our long habituation to a world alienated from God. We must learn to recognize these habitual patterns for what they are and escape from their grasp.”

This is why reflecting on our attitudes and actions is so vital (remember the invitation from God to Cain to do just that). Church has a long tradition of this, prayer of examen - we examine ourselves. What we invite you to every Sunday during time of repentance. Challenge you to make this a daily habit, perhaps every evening as you go to bed, part of your prayers, to think and pray through your day. As Holy Spirit brings things to mind, confess (or be consoled).

Romans 6, consider ourselves (like Jesus) dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Choice of offering - ourselves, either to sin as instruments of wickedness (like Cain) or to God, every part of ourselves as instruments of righteousness (like Abel). Make this a daily prayer (out of Romans 6:10-14). Helpful reminder for me has been to carry a cross in my pocket.

Inspiration - Good news is that we don’t fight this battle on our own - in fact, that battle is already won. This is why we come to Jesus. Because he has already defeated sin. He has conquered it, by dying to it, letting it be nailed to the cross with him - and then rising again to new life, showing greatness of his power and glory.

There are constant connections between the Old & New Testament - they are quite literally interwoven. Stories of Old Testament will keep pointing us to Jesus, including this one, the story of a man, innocently killed, his blood spilled on the ground.

Because the gospel of Jesus is also the story of a man, innocently killed, his blood spilled on the ground. But there’s a great difference here, because his blood has a very different cry. As the writer of Hebrews says (12:23-24), You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

What was the word that Abel’s blood spoke, what it did cry out for? It cried out for justice, which God enacted against Cain.

But Jesus’ blood cries out, not for our condemnation, but for our acquittal. Though we too, like Cain, are guilty of shedding blood - we share in the guilt of Jesus’ blood, it is for our redemption, our salvation, our freedom from sin.

We have been set free. Sin no longer has us. Jesus has us. Through his blood, we have been bought. We belong to him. May it be our heart’s desire to have Jesus as well, offering ourselves to him more fully every day.