 one of the sweetest things I heard this morning. It was, I don't know if you might have missed it, but it was sweet, touched my heart. Big Anthony talked about the phone call that came from the NFL and after he gets done crying, he says to Dede, which I'm sure, I've never met her, but I bet she's not 6'6 and 300 pounds. And he says to her, we just got picked. We, which is really sweet because they are one. About that one, notice I'd like to draw your attention back to the script here. Genesis chapter two. Hey, I gotta tell you something about the word and the importance of the word. I have had some amazing opportunities for, since the last time I saw you, I've been all over the country preaching to pastors, yesterday, what did they say? Thursday, I preached to a room full of all black Pentecostal preachers, pastors from Delaware. I was in Delaware and preaching to them, same message I've been privileged to deliver all over the country. You guys have got to get back to the whole council of God. You've got to get the whole Bible. And I get this room, and I want you to picture this, a room full of black Pentecostal preachers listening. And I told them, what am I to tell you right now? I've had a few doors open because of my voice. I've gotten some voice gigs. My voice belongs to somebody as big as Anthony Munoz. It occurred to me while I was talking. I'm the size he was as a freshman in high school. And there's people who hear my voice and don't see me. There's a mental picture that is apparently much bigger and blacker. And I'm a perpetual disappointment when they meet the person behind the voice. But I got a phone call from a production company here in California that was producing an exhibit for the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC, which by the way is a worthy visit. They really do honor the scripture and the way that the scriptures shaped Western civilization and America in particular. It's an amazing thing to visit. So they put together a virtual Israel tour. You put the VR, virtual reality goggles on, and you go to Israel. And there's a music score in the background and there's a voice going, the sea of Galilee. That's me. I got that, yay. And they said, what do you need to get for doing this? I said, well, give me tickets. So I could visit the museum. So they sent me tickets and I went to the museum. And I saw many things. I didn't learn a lot, but I was profoundly affected by all that I saw. And they've got some amazing exhibits, including a gigantic replica all carved out of oak, of a Gutenberg printing press. I'm an amazing replica. Even the giant screw that moves the press is all carved out of oak. It was quite a visit to the Museum of the Bible, but it was at the basement level of the museum where I must say I had a life changing experience. At the basement level, they had, I don't know if it's still there, and I expect it probably is, they had an exhibit about something I knew nothing of. And I say this as a man married to a creole. I know enough about the conflict of white and black in America and the history. As a father, I don't think you guys remember, my youngest son was adopted. We had him fresh out of the oven. He's a little black man. Oh, he was. Now he's bigger than me. He's 16 years old. And now, you know, at 6'2 and 280, with size 14 feet, you know, I have, he's homeschooled and I've done, you know, I've aimed to do a very thorough job in teaching him history, including the history of America, but I did not know about the slave Bible. Did you guys know about the slave Bible? It was actually produced in England. The, such a thing as the slave Bible, and you might ask, what is the slave Bible? They had the slave Bible on display in the museum. The slave Bible is heavily redacted. It's a heavily redacted, reduced version of the scripture. Now try to just for a moment, think about what a wicked deed, what an offense against God to presume that you want some people to know some of the Bible, you don't want them to know all of the Bible. That you want them to know those things, like for example, they wanted the slaves, you know, slaves obey your masters, but they certainly have no exodus in the slave Bible. They didn't want African-Americans, slaves, you know, anything about God, hearing the cries of his people and sending them a deliverer. There's no exodus. There's a whole lot missing. Now wouldn't you agree with me that that is outrageous? That somebody would presume someone somewhere said we need to get some of the Bible, but not all of the Bible to this demographic, to these slaves. Why, everywhere I've made this presentation, I've seen men just getting angry at the end. Rightfully, pastors getting outraged. And I had a room full of black pastors who as you know, my black brothers are hyper responsive and when you're preaching, there's always some sound coming back to you all the time. And they're in agreement with me. Do you know that none of them in that room, but one or two even knew of the existence of the slave Bible. I just went on about how outrageous to presume, to remove, to presume, to take out of the scripture. And they're with me, they're in agreement. That's the version of a slave Bible do you have. And what portion of God's word have you not presented? Have you not honored enough to present it and make it known to the people of God? For every, practically, every pastor in America, practically has their own version of a redacted Bible. Either they're dodging Romans chapter one or some other text. So you can imagine. But the cool thing about these guys in Delaware, they went right to ho, ho, ho, ho. It was one of those kind of, you know, when you go, oh, oh, he's got you, he got you. It was a lot of fun. They actually liked being stung. I'm not gonna respond to that, but thank the Lord for pastors. Oh, like Pastor David Rosales just takes the scripture as it comes, skipping none. There's no editing of God's word. Divine revelation is going to be made known from one end of the book to the other. One of the, as far as I'm concerned, one of the most offensive things happening in modern Christianity is the outright rejection of the first 11 chapters of Genesis. It is without the first 11 chapters of Genesis, you have no need for a savior to come. There is no original sin. There's no explanation for even what we are. There is so much missing without it, and yet it is avoided, it is now traded like it is some collection of old Hebrew fables. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of even professing Christians now in America, you check the numbers of Pew Research or all of them who survey the professing evangelical church, they reveal with their surveys that Christianity isn't even Christian anymore in America. The vast majority of what calls itself Christian is universalist and doesn't even know it because the name of the church never changed. The vast majority of those who profess to be Christians in America believe that Jesus Christ sinned at some point in his lifetime. They don't even have a sound biblical Christology. There's so much of the scripture that they just do not know. Do you know that according to the American Bible Society, in just a two-year period, they do this big survey, the state of the Bible survey is like an annual thing for the American Bible Society, and the numbers that they said have been trending down for quite some time, they've been trending down as people have moved away from the Bible, have moved away from interaction with the Bible, but the headline when they announced this was numbers that have been trending down just dropped off the cliff. And in 2022, their survey revealed that 26 million Americans had rather abruptly ended their interaction with the Bible. Same survey they've been doing for decades, revealed that people have just ceased their interaction with the Bible. These are the days in which we live. There's never been a greater need for us to know and to declare and to teach our children God's word. Let's look at what is here in Genesis chapter two. I'm only gonna, we don't have time to do the exposition of the whole thing. You have a pastor that does that. Let me just focus on a couple of verses. Number one verse is Genesis two, seven. Genesis two, seven, and the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul. One verse gives to us the explanation of what it is that we are. You and I are a complex combination of spirit and matter. Two worlds come together, two realms, two substances. It is the very dust of the ground matter and it is the very breath of God, spirit. And we are then a combination of two realms. We are what C.S. Lewis described as amphibious. We are amphibious in the sense that we are at home in both of those realms, spirit and matter. Nothing else is. The angels are spirit, the animals are material. You and I are part of both of those realms and the plan of God of redemption involves all of us. The spirit part and the material part is why our savior died in rose again. So we will rise, there is a resurrection. So spirit, the very breath of God comes together with matter, the dust of the ground and man becomes a living soul. The trichotomy that you and I are, our consciousness, does exist right between those two sides of our being and according to New Testament teaching, like Romans chapter eight, we will determine to either be kindly minded or spiritually minded. We're connected to both of these realms. That's not the only thing that explains what we are. I remind you that the man that God created, he created in his own image as it is written in chapter one, verse 27. Well, you can start with verse 26. And God said, let us, that is, within the council of the Godhead, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the triune God created the universe that reflects his triunity, but the universe itself is time, space and matter. Creates a life form that is a trichotomy, spirit, soul and body. God, within the council of the Godhead said, let us make man in our image, let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God created he him, male and female created he them. So you've got to understand, created in the image of God, created in the likeness of God, made to be God's child. And everything that God is, he imparted this likeness of that to Adam, the first man. So then you go to later part of chapter two, verse 18, the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a help, meet for him, a help comparable to him. God then engages Adam in a project. We don't know how long that project took, but in the process of the project of naming and identifying all of the animals and various life forms of earth, God is doing two things. One, he is, I believe, showing the man his uniqueness that there's nothing else like him. And secondly, I believe he's heightening the man's anticipation while he introduces him to the concept of family, even within the animal kingdom, that life would happen, that life would be reproduced. The whole concept of family, within the Lord God puts the man into a deep sleep and that's what we read in verse 21. But brethren, let me stop at this point and ask you, why does God just not sort of repeat, why does he not just do what he did in the seventh verse? He formed man of the dust and the ground, breathing the man, the breath of life and man became a living soul. Why did he not do that to make her? The answer is because she was already there. She already existed, but she is the other half of who he was. The other whole half of who he was created to be. So the Lord God caused that man to fall into a deep sleep and he slept and he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh instead. They were out in the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman and brought her unto the man. I believe as I've said to you before, gentlemen, that man came out of that deep sleep altered. That he went to sleep one way, he woke up another way, he woke up different, he woke up altered, changed. That the man came up out of that deep sleep going, ah, what'd you do to me? Well, I want to build things and conquer and stuff. And I feel, I feel, what is it? What is it I feel? Ah, that's it. I don't feel much at all. Where did my feelings all go? Seemed like I'm sure his observation was the only one that seems to work really well as anger. I think God made a presentation to him of everything that used to be part of a whole. The Adam didn't just wake up going, wait a minute. Am I missing a bone? He didn't wake up going, did I just, did I lose weight? He woke up knowing, I am sure of it, knowing that he was no longer the same. It was Pastor Chuck used to say that he's not all there. He woke up knowing he's not all there. God made a presentation to him and the two of them. Do you understand? They are, they are made in the image of God but in a very real sense they reflect two halves of that image of the one God, God our Father. Put one man into a deep sleep and tore that man in two in such a way as to create two people, two brothers, genders, two sexes so that those two could come together and become one and complete each other and in a very real sense restore the image of God that had been by God torn into two. Now obviously Genesis chapter three tells us of the fall, tells us that Adam who was a spirit, soul and body, he and she experienced the inversion they found. They joined a rebellion in God's universe and as a result of that rebellion believing the lies of the serpent, our mother Eve took action. Genesis chapter three reveals to us that our Father Adam is the one that God holds responsible. In fact when Adam went when the scriptures are plain and laying out to us that it was the woman that was deceived, the apostle Paul testifies and first of the chapter two that the woman was deceived but the man was not deceived and if the man was not deceived and yet according to what God says he hearkened under the voice of his wife. Genesis three, 16 to Adam he said because thou hast hearkened under the voice of thy wife and has eaten of the tree where I commanded thee saying thou shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground for thy sake and sorrow. Thou shall eat the earth of the field. Thou shall eat all of the days of thy life and sorrow. God declares to Adam that sorrow would be the consequence. It was gonna be the result of the design of God for Adam. Now in a different world, a world under the curse sorrow would be the result. Listen to me on this, please men, hear me on this. God used the word sorrow twice. In Genesis three, 16 until our mother Eve it is written unto the woman he said I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception and in sorrow I shall bring forth the children and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee. I'm gonna be clear on this. I hope that this is not God saying I will punish the woman more than the man. I don't believe that. I believe that God with a broken heart lays out to his beloved creation the consequence of their action, the consequence that in this new arrangement she will hurt more deeply. As a matter of fact, there are two things that make a woman different from a man. I maintain, number one, they feel things much more deeply. They are much more emotional. If you don't know that, you're stupid. Number one, they feel things much more deeply. And number two, they are physically weaker. You and I are physically stronger. That reality, those two things alone, much more deeply feeling and physically weaker is a recipe for the suffering and the oppression that has been a reality ever since sin came into the picture. Now back to why did Adam eat that fruit he was not deceived, yet he harkened on the voice of his wife. There is only one explanation. He chose her over God. He loved the created thing more than the creator. He loved the gift from God more than the giver. Love went wrong. There's such a thing as wrong love and it happened first in Eden. And you and I, reproductions of Adam are all prone to the same thing, man. You know that about us. And we're all prone to loving, to choosing, creation over the creator. The gifts of God over the very giver of the gifts. We inherited that flaw from the first of us. But this reality is something I just wanna get you to consider, please consider. In the English translation, and it does legitimately translate to Hebrew, God uses the word sorrow to both Adam and Eve, but to Eve, unto the woman. He used the word sorrow twice. I have a year ago, my then 80 year old mother went to be with the Lord. And up until her departure to be with the Lord, I never had the freedom to say some of what I will say to you now, there's a new freedom that she's with the Lord. I am the grown up little boy that witnessed her suffering. She had five children. I was the only male. She was thrown away by our father, our father who beat her bloody regularly. I was the eyewitness to my father choking a life out of my naked mother. Whatever kind of cruelty and meanness that hard liquor produced in the bedroom where they were naked caused her to attempt to escape. Now six years old when I saw my father catch her at the door in these rented places we lived in. Some of the things were improvised. They didn't have an actual door. The plastic shower curtain separating their space from the living room where I was. She made it only to the shower curtain and he caught her there, wrapped her face in it and was killing my mother. And I screamed. Six year old boy I screamed and my scream interrupted his rabid behavior just long enough for her to fall and crawl away. He beat her bloody regularly and then worse than that. He broke her heart. He cheated on her. He ran around with other women. I remember seeing a poor broken woman sweeping and lamenting out loud. And it was a prayer. She was talking as if someone else was there just going on about what he's doing to her. Used to worry about my mother and worried about her her whole life long. I worried about my mother all the way until last May, a year ago, last May. And she entered the presence of the Lord and lifetime of worry came to an end. See, my mother's father, he did the same thing to her. He beat her. She was 16 years old, hospitalized for two weeks by her own drunk father. She never went back home. She fled that scene and ended up with my father who picked up where her father left off. I'm a witness to the sorrow. I'm a witness to the consequence of sin coming into God's creation, God's design. And in the world that you and I live in, brothers, we all got it bad. I'm telling you, the women have it worse. And they have it worse because of us. I want you to think about this today, please. Just think about this. My sisters, they all suffered more than me from our father throwing us away in the poverty. I mean the poverty where we did not have food. We were worried. We scavenged. Sometimes we begged. My mother, her name was Claudette. It's a beautiful sounding French name. It was actually in the hospital in her last few days where we sat together and it became abundantly clear that she was leaving. And we then focused on heaven. We focused on what we'll be waiting for her there, what it'll be like. It was a sweet conversation with my mom. My 80-year-old mother out of nowhere, she goes, I'm gonna get a new name. I'm gonna get a new name. And I went, oh, you know, you've been paying attention to Bible study. You're gonna get a new name. And I went, hey mom, what does Claudette mean? And she goes, I don't know. You've had the name 80 years. You never looked it up. Never had any curiosity, Claudette. Let's look it up. I looked it up and broke my heart instantly. Claudette, it's not a good name, pretty sounding French name, but it means lame. It means crippled. And I'm telling you, I tell somebody to you that my mother had been crippled her whole life, crippled by her father's cruelty, crippled by my father's cruelty and every other man. She never really owned anything. She never really attained. She worked cleaning hotels and nursing homes. She never aimed any higher, never believed that she had anything else to offer. When I was a boy, she thought, and this is even after having five children, she put her body out. She put her body out in a little rural town where it got her attention, but it was all the wrong kind. My mother was the one like that lady that was described in Luke chapter seven as a woman in the town who was known to be a sinner. And her mini skirts and her high heel boots got her the attention of some of the male citizens of that little town who gang raped my mother. What it did to me, when she explained her bruises and she explained the trauma, and my mother telling me, I'm an elementary school kid, and she telling me what compels a rapist is not the sexual drive. It's the taking what somebody doesn't want to give. It's the dominance of my mother. Telling this to this kid how she shamed them by just becoming compliant, took all the fun out of it for them. That, brothers, put a worm in my brain and it made me want to kill people. I just wanted her to tell me who they were. I'm pretty sure I'm going to school with their kids. Just tell me which of them. Just tell me. I'm just a little kid. My mom, I'll kill them all. You tell me who they are, I'll kill them. She wouldn't tell me. Took that all the way to the grave. I didn't ask her at the end. I don't want to know. Probably they died of old age by now. But what it did to me, it wasn't a hurt. It just, it made me weird and bitter and crazy. And I was on a trajectory under the influence of all of those things that we experienced. Now, testify one more thing to you. My dad, he was a selfish man. He loved himself. He abandoned his family. He had this weird philosophy. I don't know where he got it, but he had this philosophy that he's a hard-working man and the government takes so much out of him in taxes. It's only right that the government should support us with a welfare check and he didn't have to do anything. That was his way of getting money back. That's a weird perspective, isn't it? But he had it, he had that attitude and it justified his being able to just leave us. But right at the end of his life, and he didn't know it was the end of his life, he was 34 years old. He showed up at my school to be for a ride. And the only time I was nine, the only time he ever made any effort to say anything to me that mattered. He expressed his remorse for how he lived and he made an attempt to tell me to live for the Lord, made an attempt. I don't know what was going on with him if it was just a moment of remorse that passed. All I know is the message he delivered was when he lived for the Lord. He was stumbling over all his words. He didn't know how to say it, but he made his best effort. Punctuation was added to his message by his death six months later and I hadn't seen him in between. So these were his final words to me. And he died, he went to work and he didn't come home. In a blasting accident, he went out. But my mother's pain went on, it just went on. And I was a witness to her sorrow. And I have been as a pastor for now, almost four decades, I witness that in the world that we live in, they have it worse. So if I have accomplished nothing else this morning, I wanna just say to you, my brothers, I know your pain is real and many of you had that kind of story. Many of you had that kind of dad. You had that kind of tragedy, poverty, disadvantage. And your pain is real, the pain in your heart, the things that are not there, the things that are followed, so post-it's saying it's supposed to do, maybe they didn't happen. And it hurts, but I would like to open your eyes to the reality that the other whole half of the population, the girls, they hurt way worse and much more deeply. And one observation I have made is I've studied the four Gospels and I've continued to just meditate on the life of the king. As he goes out of his way to make his first announcement, he's Messiah to a Samaritan lady. He makes sure that his first, I witnessed his resurrection as a woman. He goes about being a hero to these women. It was a woman, not a man who washed his feet with tears and wiped them with their hairs over her head. I wish there had been a man wiping with his beard. But it wasn't a man who was so overcome, so grateful for sins forgiven that they loved much. He goes about just encountering women, broken hearted widow whose only son is dead and the Lord ruins the funeral and raises the guy. Woman with a perpetual period and hemorrhaging that won't stop, he heals her. Have you considered what I hear or what our rescuer of women is this king that you and I have sworn our allegiance to? Has he not called us to do likewise and to be like him? I throw it out to you today as men. My final word to you is God has called us, as followers of Christ, to like him, be willing to lay our lives down, to be others centered and come to the rescue of those broken hearts. And I say to you today, my brothers, your pain, embrace it as part of the story. It's part of what God allowed. It's part of the chiseling that has made you. The pain of the women in your world, that's another thing altogether, let there not be a single man among us that whines as a victim about what he's been through. And about his boo-boos. I say to you as a man, to man, I say to you, brothers, you and I are different. And God uses pain in our lives. And he is able to use pain for our good. He is able to cause all things to work together for the good of those who love him. Do you actually believe that? All things, does it all really mean all? I think it does. But you and I need to come to the rescue of the weak, those who feel things much more deeply and those who are physically weaker than us. And we start with our wife. We start with that woman that was crazy enough to swear her allegiance to us. We're gonna start with that one and if you got a daughter, my dear brother, please hear what the apostle Peter, the married apostle, tells you and I, first Peter, chapter three. Check this one out. We need to give honor unto the literally translated, the feminine one. We need to give honor unto the woman as unto the weaker vessel. Honor, not patronization, but honor. God has called us to something. So if I've done nothing else but provoke your mind to a whole new study and meditate on all four gospels and just go through the word and look at what we're given for an example in Jesus Christ our King. And I urge you as men to be real men and real men are heroes. Real men, they'll lay their lives down and they'll lay their pride down and they'll give honor. Can you receive what I just said to you? I speak as your brother. Can you actually receive that? You and I need to come to the rescue.