Listen to Sunday’s message by Pastor Phil Olsen
God has designed us for more. However, it is possible to live our lives with less and never know there is more to be had. God designed us for more, but it is of critical importance that we understand in our pursuit for more we can end up with the mess of less, if in our quest for more we pursue the wrong things. This misguided pursuit was the reason for the fall.
We see in Genesis 3 Adam and Eve go after the more and get the mess of less because they listened to the serpent. We fight this same serpent today, and his goal is to misguide our desires. The first thing he always wants to convince us of is that we are missing out. Despite all that God has given us to enjoy in this life within His law, we become easily convinced its not enough, and that we’re missing out. Understand this: The pursuit of more begins with the understanding of something greater and mess of less begins with a complaint of not enough.
When you listen to what the enemy says long enough you’ll begin believe him. You’ll believe him when he says you’re missing out and from missing out we begin to believe that God is holding out. We think that if God was really loving then we wouldn’t be where we are or experiencing whatever pain we are. Its almost as if we blame God for the fall. If we’re honest, what we’re mad about is that God hasn’t saved us from ourselves. He made us powerful enough to screw up our lives and we followed suit. Yet in His mercy, He is still passionate to give us more. All we need to do is release our fear of less, that has only driven us to complain and covet.
From missing out, we begin to believe God’s holding out, and from holding out we move into checking out- checking out what we can’t have. What is Eve doing sitting at this tree staring at it when she has an ENTIRE WORLD to look at!?! The problem with checking out is it eliminates all other views in our life and destroys our vision for what God has for us - everything that is good in our life becomes corroded.
In our world we’ve made good evil and evil good, just as Isaiah says. We think what God wants for us is boring and what the world offers us is exciting. When we look at the tree of good and evil what does that represent? A simple way of phrasing it would be the tree of success and failure. If we look at what Adam and Eve had accomplished thus far we would see that everything had succeeded. In other words God had given them success all He was withholding was failure! God doesn’t want us to experience failure! Yet all the while we’re checking out we’re simply pining for failure! And if we continue checking out eventually we’ll take the bait and we’ll get taken out by our failure.
Instantly the more that God intends for us becomes the mess of less. Scripture says Adam and Eve realized they were naked and made coverings for themselves whereas before it says they were naked and felt no shame. They went from utter confidence in full exposure to utter fear and total shamefulness. Where there was once freedom to roam the garden they were holed up, hidden in a corner. Peace was replaced with anxiety, love was replaced with fear, the beauty of relationship was replaced by broken relationships, the more was replaced by the mess of less.
More by its very definition is something you don’t have, so in order to get it you must look to somebody. The question is, who? How you answer that will determine whether you get the more or the mess of less.
