This is the written account of Adam’s family line.
When God created mankind, he made them in the likeness of God. He created them male and female and blessed them. And he named them “Mankind” when they were created.

When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Seth. After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters

Now if you will turn to Genesis 1:26
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.”

In my family on the Darling side there are 17 Grand Children, I am the oldest and for quite some time the Grand Children have been having children.  My wife and I have one child.  I have heard it for a couple of decades, when a new child is born we look for big jowls [show mine] and when we see them we all get giddy with glee, that baby is one of us !!!!!  Don’t all of us do that ???  What would happen at the family introduction if your child had Teletubby’s like ears for the first time.  Everyone would be speaking softly, behind backs about that but what if for generations everyone had Teletubby like ears and protrusions from their heads and your new baby had them too.  There would be celebration about that, THE DARLINGS LIVE ON !!! IT WORKED YET AGAIN !!!…  EVEN PAGANS WOULD CELEBRATE THIS TO THE GODS OF FERTILITY !!! THANK THE GODS WE ARE LOOKED UPON WITH FAVOR BY THEM,

My wife nicknamed my daughter Ronda because she is in so many ways like her daddy… Ron.  Recently Ronda and I took a small trip together and after a few days sent mom a picture of us having a good time.  It was a picture of the kitchen cabinets in the place we were renting…  most of the doors left open.  We didn’t set that up, we just noticed it and all 3 of us just laughed and laughed.  That and countless other natural things drive momma NUTTS at home, sometimes Ronda and I like to emphasis things to relish in this imaging thing and of course make momma a little uncomfortable 🙂  But know for sure there is lots of Leisha in Ronda too.  Like momma’s naturally sweet nature.  I love that about my offspring.  I have become sweeter but the natural sweetness my daughter has comes from her mother.

This is Identity Language, Fathering Language, Parenting Language.  It’s all over the bible and the more you learn to see it the more you will see it.   We do have things in us that came from our “Spiritual Father”.  God is trying to communicate to man here and to you and me specifically, he is our father, we naturally get things from him just like our children getting things from us.  We are being invited into a certain perspective of a relationship with the Creator…  as a Father where we also have things already in us like our father.  Father is used all over the bible and that kind of perspective, that kind of thinking is a huge part of our rightful inheritance as a child and its hugely important to know that, work that out in our minds eye until we begin to approach the creator from the universe from that angle.  If you study religions and world views in the world God as a Father is fairly unique and it is absolutely part of the world view that comes to us from the long legacy of Christianity.

I have a friend who went to the University of Miami.  His older brother went to the University of Colorado.  My friend went to visit his older brother in Colorado as a freshman.  A couple of days in he helped his brother gather up ALL THE LAUNDRY.  Sheets, towels, hand towels, underwear, socks, EVERYTHING that needed to be laundered and they took them to the Dry Cleaners.  My friend was astonished.  He mentioned to his brother this was going to cost a fortune.  His brother replied so ??? I put it on Dad’s Credit Card.  My friend asked we can do that ?????  His brother replied sure, I have been doing this for a couple of years and he never said don’t !!!  You see my friend didn’t even know the benefits he could use or access from his good Father until he knew (and yes he did continue to do that for 4 more years, how lucky huh ???)  His older brother had a certain perspective of his relationship to his father where he just tried it.  Let me say that differently to help you catch that most important point.  More often than not we are like that not knowing or not having “Faith” to operate from that understanding of our Spiritual Father, even when we know the verses that say so.   Your own perspective, your own internal view of your Identity to God will drive what you think you can and can’t do.  Let me say it differently again.  If your perspective of God is anything other than a good and loving Father…  you will operate and act on less.  You will act differently, you will do a lot more on your own when that is really not what God wants for you. In “Reality”  he wants you to do things in relation to him with him.  In the Christian Language the phrase orphan spirit or orphan thinking is what that is called when you operate on your own because of the results of that kind of lifestyle. And I would guess 100% of us deal with that problem in one way or another to some degree.  The book of Genesis lays out this Fathering/Identity view quite nicely here and the rest of the bible begins to re-interpret that in many different ways to drive home this point home about this imaging thing…  but imaging to a Father, it begins from the very start of this grand old book.

I am inviting you, we are inviting you just like the Bible invites into some new ways of thinking about your daily life and we believe you will begin to have some similar experiences we are having as a result.  These experiences are so overwhelming to us we cannot help but spread this kind of good news.  You see the kind of Freedom we are inviting you towards might be different than what you are used to.  We believe that Identity is a foundational pillar of this approach to life.  We believe the bible overwhelmingly states there are certain ways and viewpoints of life in the kingdom that are part and parcel to how to experience this kind free life, this more than abundant life that helps you drive through the troubles in life that Jesus also promises. We believe as a church we have ways and means to help you not only discover this kind of Identity but go deeper into it and experience a kind of life God Intended.

I love the first few chapters of the Book of Genesis, it really is my favorite part of the Bible.  It’s so chalked with important foundational things to the rest of the bible, foundational things to the rest of your life !

It’s really old, the stories being near 3500 hundred years old at least.  I find it fascinating that such an ancient peoples were able to tell something about being a powerful human so long ago. It helps me to believe more in the bible because how could they fathom these kinds of ideas so long ago that are so practical to modern 21st century life?   Fathering, God as a creator who just breathes and speaks things into existence that easily, so so many things are there to identify with and he wants to have a very personal relationship with you and me???  Yeah some of these kinds of ideas are a little bit of work to see.  We went to a verse about Humans, Adam to understand this imaging word used by God about himself….  A lot of really big COSMIC things happen in the 1st book of the bible and right in the middle of all of these big COSMIC things, other things in regards to us are happening to… in his image happens.  These ideas are restated yet again a couple of Verses later

Vs 27: So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them  male and female he created them.

Look how many times God used the word imaging and likeness in this translation.  4 times in these few versus.  When I use a word over and over like that with Ronda I am usually trying to impress something on her important and I am very sure you do the same especially to the ones you love…

Pause, let that sink in…

Identity is about Identification.  What do you identify with ?  Your emotional life is complex, it has a lot of moving parts and I would guess you like me attach some identify type idea to everyone one of those parts of your emotional life.  I also bet you like me don’t even recognize most of what you REALLY identify with in all these parts.  Do you wear Dallas Cowboy gear all the time ?  Do you dress like your musical group ?  Your favorite actor ?  The company you work for ?  Your hobbies ?  A certain political persuasion ?  These examples are silly and surface oriented but know I could go for hours listing the possible sources of Identification and they could get very deep and difficult.  And in that sentence is a key word… source.  What are all the things you use to bring yourself life, prop yourself up, make you feel ok about yourself, what are your sources of life.  This is another foundational truth we are going to discuss tonight “Source” and we are going to use Genesis as a backdrop to discuss that.

Genesis 2:26 The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.

For as long as I can remember and from what I have read in books that are older than me, for a long time Christians have been interpreting this as a rule or a commandment chapter.  Don’t do that tree of knowledge thing or you will sin.  Sin entered into the world by breaking that rule.  What if… I know this is a big ask but just for grins let’s think of this another way.  What if God was actually describing reality, not a rule.   What if he was actually saying, when you do X, y will happen and he wasn’t talking specifically about sin.  Sin is never used here in these chapters but we describe it that way.  There is something going on here because it’s clear by Genesis 4 and 5 they didn’t literally die.  Things changed dramatically but they didn’t die.  In fact Adam lived a loooong time, 800 years or so but he didn’t die, it might be ok to see something else going on here than taking it literally…  they didn’t literally die and just because sin is used in most modern commentaries, sermons, podcast, conversations etc doesn’t establish that Adam and Eve actually broke a rule and were punished for it.  I mean maybe they did go against reality if this reality focus is correct but maybe the real problem is they changed source and maybe sin results from that but if i am right and I think I am, sin is not the point here, source is.  And then there is this other quandary what did God mean by Death when they didn’t actually die???

3500 years later we have other words for all of this.  We also have the rest of the bible being written over the next 1500 hundred years and giving us more and more detail about what was being said in this ancient way.  I believe the story of the Trees is about choice.  I believe specifically it’s about a choice between the realities of the creator of the universe and choosing him as source and choosing anything else as source.    I believe he is saying this is how I made things to work, you have to choose me as source for your life to be complete, whole, safe, fulfilled and when you don’t in any area of your life, it’s simply going to be equal to some sort of internal, emotional death and yes sometimes even worse.  You play the part of choosing, I do most of the rest.  Choose me as source and always try to walk with me it will be like the cool of the day … and you have this small part to play.  Choose.

Check this out, you choose Jesus as Lord in your life to begin this whole Christian life.  Then you participate in a public ceremony called baptism to display your choice, to declare it to the earthly realms and the heavenly realms, the unseen world, “I choose, this way”.  See that choice connection ???

Listen to what the spiritual being in the tree said.

Vs 3: You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

“Eyes Opened”, “Be Like God”  “You will know everything”…  is there much to know outside of knowing about Life, Good and Evil ?   How powerful of a person would you be if you actually could know those things without God.

Do you see source there ?  What source ? Don’t you see self as source, I do.  We could take these first few chapters apart to the nth degree they are PACKED with ideas and yes realities about being human and the relationship we can have with the Creator of the Universe.  A being so powerful, God, he just breathes things into existence. He takes a part of his creation, dirt, makes us then simply “breathes” into us” to express life in us. Unfortunately we don’t have that kind of time.

My last comment before I go into some thinking points.  Maybe you are like me and probably many of us in this room, we had a tough relationship with our earthly Father.  As a result I became hardened, I acted out in anger too often as a result and most especially to my wife.  I died and I was dead for years.  That is another reason why I love Genesis so much.  I am able to experience aliveness now in profound ways because of these life changing ideas presented to me years ago.  As a result I am now a deep lover of my wife and I am no longer abusive, in fact, situations between us where the worst would come out before, that doesn’t happen almost as if I am incapable of how I used to be.   In fact the change has been so dramatic it took my wife a couple of years to even begin to trust the changes.  Maybe things like that have affected your life too.  But, my relationship, my identity to my Spiritual father has changed little by little my views of him too.  They are softening, I need external help for that, I just can’t get there on my own.  Even at near 60 years old I crave to know about me from outside of myself, I think we all do and I have seen it time and time again when I or others hear from God about ourselves, we change.  I have heard it said often the mere fact God speaks to us is enough alone to change the direction of our lives regardless of what was actually said.   Left to my own thinking my views only harden inside of me of my dad. It’s the Holy Spirit that guides me into new perspectives and especially Forgiveness.  The point is this, it takes a certain identification on your part to even try to face the creator of the universe.  If your identification is of a distant, uncaring or an angry God, you won’t even ask anything, at some point you just move on like I did with my father, I was only there taking care of him because he couldn’t do that for himself.  I gave up long ago waiting to hear anything from him.

I find it very interesting there is this reality of getting our identity, understanding things about us coming from outside of ourselves, outside of our families if need be if we will only turn towards Jesus the Son who guides us to the Father, who shows us the nature of the Father.  This Identity thing, it might work slow for you too but it will work.  Hopefully some new seeds were planted in the ground of you tonight, let it grow, let us help you water those seeds.  God promises that all over the bible.  I would like to promise you that but it’s God’s promise, its you seeing those promises from him fulfilled in your life not my promises fulfilled that will change you.

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Lets recap and look at a few key points before we go deeper into Table Discussions.

• You are a Human Being, you are not a God but there are things in you in his image.
• Built inside of you are things that are as real as your eye color, your skin color, things you cannot really change, you can just choose to accept and form your life around these things or remake your life the way you want to without these biblical things.  The ability to be Free in the best sense of the word is built into you.  The ability to recognize Jesus’s voice.  The ability to choose the Creator of the Universe as your source, to continually do that is built into you.  But there is this other set of voices that continue to speak too, Be like a God… You get to choose the voice.
• Maybe there is something to this breathing thing. Maybe when we “choose” another source we are breathing into ourselves rather than letting God our Father breathe into us ?
• It just might be a reality that EVERYTHING a person could ever know could either fall into the side of the Tree of Life or that other Tree… The Tree of Knowledge of good and evil and if that is the case how important would it be to know how to live life so that we don’t die ?
• Maybe there is a way to know, its more about that than what you know ?
• Listen to this statement and consider it in your life.  The branches of Good come from the very same trunk as the branches of evil do.  In that line of thinking is “Good” ever good enough ?
• Often Evil is easy to discern or see but good being bad ????
• Why is there a seperate tree for “Life” than the tree where the branches of Good are.  Shouldn’t life appear on the good branches ?
• How could good not bring about life and maybe only death ???
• In light of all of that the term “Speak Life” isn’t that just saying “good things” to other people or is there maybe something more ?
• You are as free to chose about anything in life as Adam and Eve were able to, I never saw lightning bolts from God before my bad choices have you ? be careful about those choices… you might die without any lightning bolt warnings.  I did.
• It seems that choice is a huge aspect of being a part of the Kingdom.  If that is the case what would one do with this idea that “God is in control”  Well I am certain he can be but what if he really doesn’t want to control, what if he really does want you to be free and chose.
• There might be spiritual beings in your life trying to get you to chose off of the Tree of Life.
• Maybe those spiritual beings would like you to worship them but if not that worship yourself, choose yourself as source ?
• As you look around your life how many people worship themselves vs some evil being.  I have met very few really evil people who worship pure evil.  I have met some pretty evil people who only worship themselves. I have met lots of people who are not evil but still worship themselves, I did that for a long time, several decades, that seems to me to be a very subtle form of evil.
• God started talking about Identity in the very first few chapters in the bible, about Identification to him as a Father who wanted to walk with his children in the cool of the day.  He later started talking about Freedom in indirect ways like with the children of israel leaving egypt, Jesus started talking about Freedom in very direct ways.  Identity is hugely important and maybe the specific identification as God as a good and loving Father with eternal, unlimited resources is most important.  That once you begin to see your life as my friend discovered with the Dry Cleaners, all sorts of new things might begin to change as well.
• Last point to think on, how is Love related to choice ?