In the Beginning: Crouching at the Door

Good morning everyone. My name is James Sutton, and I am the associate pastor here at Christ the King. That's one way to introduce myself. Another way to introduce myself is that I am a sinner saved by grace, just like all of you. Sometimes I feel weird announcing that I'm the associate pastor—it feels like "look at me"—but I'm not anything to look at. The Lord God has sent me here to preach his word, which is an incredibly humbling thing to do as a sinner saved by grace.

We're going to read this passage from Genesis chapter four. If you actually use Bibles anymore, you can turn there towards the beginning. We've had this tradition of reading the Scripture passage together. Part of why we do that is because we're all sinners saved by grace, and God's word is spoken through all of us together. I need to hear it just as much as you do.

But another reason we do this, and this has been a theme that I've been hammering lately, is because we're one in Jesus Christ. We talked about that, we sang about that—"They'll know we are Christians by our love." We've talked about our unity being restored in Christ Jesus. Well, Christ Jesus's completed work has unified us. That's an incredibly important thing to think about as we read this passage, particularly. I want you to keep that in mind.

Let's read Genesis chapter four together:

Now Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived and bore 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 of the firstborn of his flock and their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering but for Cain and his offering he had no regard, so Cain was very angry and 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. Its desire is 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 do 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 its strength. You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer 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 wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me."

Then the Lord said to him, "Not so. If anyone kills Cain vengeance shall be taken on 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 Nod, east of Eden. — Genesis 4:1-16

Let's pray together. Lord Jesus, we pray that you would speak to us through your word, that we would see you. And Holy Spirit, we pray that you would illuminate our hearts and our minds, that the word that you have given us would transform us and change us to make us more like our Lord. We pray these things in your name, Jesus. Amen.

Understanding This Passage

Well, in approaching this passage, I was reflecting on my history with it. When you've been around for a while as a Christian and you've read God's word over and over again, you can develop certain ways of thinking about passages. The way I've historically thought about this passage, and I think it's right, is that this is a passage that very starkly illustrates for us the divisive nature of sin directly after the fall.

You remember that in the previous passage, we have Adam and Eve in the garden. They sin. They're cast out of the garden. What is the effect of that sin? Genesis four gives us a very stark picture. We have a brother killing a brother.

Because of that, because I think of it almost as the point being to illustrate the divisive nature of sin against mankind and the horrible nature of it, it can almost seem mythological. We can almost distance ourselves from these people, Cain and Abel, as if they're just characters in a story. But these are real people. These are real people that are really struggling. And it can feel like, okay, here's the moral, let's move past our emotional connection with that to the point.

So to help us this morning, I came across a news story this week of a modern Cain and Abel. This actually happened last week when a man named Jeffrey Burnham killed his brother Brian. He killed him because Brian was a pharmacist and Jeffrey believed that Brian was essentially working for the government and distributing the vaccine, which was killing people. That's what Jeffrey believed, and he killed him.

Now I hesitated to use that illustration because I knew as soon as I did, everyone in this room would assume that I was making some sort of political statement, or that's where your mind immediately goes—because we care about this stuff, right? About vaccines and whether to get them or not, and masks and whether to wear them or not, and all sorts of things. I'm not trying to make a political statement. I want to say that very clearly. It would be just as easy to imagine a brother killing a brother because a brother refused to get vaccinated. I'm giving you this illustration simply to personalize this a little bit.

There is a real reality in which we live in a fallen world where brothers actually kill brothers. It's not some sort of mythological story that illustrates the divisive nature that exists within us. It is real. The impact of sin is real, and it is present in our world. Brothers are killing brothers, and they have since the fall until now—for a variety of different reasons, for a variety of different conflicts. And yet the bottom line is still the same: brothers are killing brothers, and that should horrify us.

We move in Genesis from a beautiful picture of creation, a heavenly reality—something that is meant to speak to our hearts about the fullness of all of God's creation—and then we fall, and we move right into a horror story. It's a horror story that in many ways we've been living to this day. I don't use that illustration as any kind of political statement. I just want you to understand that this is terrible, that it's horrible, and all of us are perhaps feeling it more than we have at any point in our lives because of the deep divisions that exist within our nation right now. Division and hatred and anger that leads to murder is horrible.

I hope also that this helps you to understand the context of this passage. I think Cain and Abel can almost take on mythological qualities. We can almost look at this and go, "Why kill Abel? What was the big deal?" And I hope that diving into some of the context of where this story takes place can help us to understand that.

Sermon Outline

So my outline for this morning—what I want to look at: I want to examine the different sacrifices of Cain and Abel, and we'll dive into the context of this murder, this horror story. I want to talk about how sin works because really in Genesis, we have the DNA of our whole faith. We're beginning to see the first glimpse that we get into the dynamics of sin, and those dynamics ring true all the way to the present. You can see it all throughout Scripture. So we're going to look at how sin works. We're going to look at God's response. And then we're going to conclude with the anti-Cain and the better Abel. For those of you who are not aware of how we do things, that's Jesus. That's how we get sermons. I'm going to talk about why we do that too.

Alright. First of all, the different sacrifices. I think to understand the difference between Cain and Abel's sacrifice, you have to look at the context again. Remember, Adam and Eve had just been kicked out of the garden, and they receive a promise. Eve receives a specific promise:

From her will be born someone who will crush the head of the serpent even as the serpent strikes his heel.

You have to imagine the excitement in the midst of the sorrow that Adam and Eve would experience when they received that word. And what would they naturally have thought? What would be your natural response if God shows up and actually speaks to you and says, "Hey, your child will crush the head of the serpent even as he strikes his heel"? The natural response would be to assume it's the next one.

I think we hear that because we know, right? We all know that the sermon ends with Jesus. We think, "Okay, Eve should have known that was going to be a long time coming." But in reality, her hope, her fantastic dream would have been that it would be her firstborn. And this passage begins by talking about her celebration at Cain being born. Did you notice that?

With the Lord's help, I have gotten a man, a son.

And Cain's name actually means "the spear carrier." It's almost like he's this picture of this warrior who's actually going to accomplish the promise of Genesis 3, right?

The picture is the hope is he's going to be the one, the chosen one, Neo. Right? He's going to be the one that actually saves humanity. That's the context that probably Cain grew up in. You imagine living under that expectation? That'd be incredible. Then you have Abel whose name simply means breath or son. Not something specifically very impressive about his name. It's simply that he's there. So Cain has this expectation like I'm the one, I'm the prophesized chosen one.

And then we get right into it—there's a worship service. What we have is Cain and Abel coming before God in worship. I spent a lot of time looking at different scholarship about the different kinds of sacrifices. Let's just review it.

So Cain, he's a farmer, right? He works the ground and so he comes with vegetables and fruit. He's the vegetarian sacrificer. He's bringing salad to God. Abel keeps flocks. So he's bringing meat. He's offering the firstborn—the blood sacrifice.

Historically, some people have teased these out and they've said, okay, well, the reason God's happy with Abel and not with Cain is because Abel brings the blood sacrifice. God likes blood sacrifices. You see that at the end of Genesis—it points towards Christ the blood sacrifice. And so clearly the problem is Cain didn't understand that. He should have understood that somehow. He brings vegetables. That doesn't please God because it doesn't point to Jesus.

I don't think that's true. I don't think that's true because Deuteronomy chapter four, verses two through four really outline all of the different kinds of sacrifices. One of the things that it talks about is the appropriateness of a grain sacrifice. God actually made ways for things that grow in the ground to actually point towards Christ and be an acceptable sacrifice for him. And if you don't think that those things point towards Christ, then why are we eating bread later today? Those things pointed to Christ too. And so I don't think that the problem with Cain's sacrifice versus Abel's sacrifice is that one's a blood sacrifice and one's an animal, that God likes meat. That's not the issue.

So what is the issue? Well, the second thing that a lot of commentators talk about is the notation about Abel's sacrifice. He brings the firstborn—the best of his flock. And there's no comment about Cain's. You could argue, well, how do you bring the best grain? It's all grain. I don't know. There is in some ways provision that could be made, and I do think that to some degree or another gets at the real difference between Cain and Abel's sacrifice. It would have communicated in some way to the original audience that Abel's sacrifice was a sacrifice of faith and humility and love, whereas Cain's sacrifice was almost an afterthought—a sacrifice perhaps of deserved favor.

And here's how I know that. The real way in which we can discern the difference between Cain and Abel's sacrifice isn't in Genesis at all. You have to read almost to the end of the Bible to get the real crux of the matter.

By faith Abel offered God a better sacrifice than Cain did. — Hebrews 11:4

The author of Hebrews spells it out for us. How they would have understood the difference between Cain and Abel's sacrifice. The author of Hebrews is a Jewish scholar who understood the book of Genesis, and this is what he says: By faith Abel offered God a better sacrifice than Cain did.

I'm not real sure of all the dynamics exactly, but Hebrews cuts straight to the heart of the matter. The issue between Cain and Abel, the difference between the sacrifices was one of the heart. It was an issue of faith versus works. There's a sense in which Abel is bringing this sacrifice by faith. Cain is bringing the sacrifice by works.

Here's what I think is going on. I think Cain, the chosen one, is coming before God with this posture of "here I am. Here I am, the chosen one. I'm bringing you a sacrifice. I have earned your favor and I'm ready to go kill the serpent." He's moving on hurriedly to the fulfillment of the promise, thinking that he had somehow achieved what was necessary in order to fulfill it.

Now I think sometimes that's how we approach God. I think often we approach God as Cain. And I don't think that the person in this room that is the most likely to do that is you all. I actually think it's me. I think it's very easy for pastors to show up on Sunday where we're supposed to offer a sacrifice of praise—as Hebrews says—and what we do is we show up and we think, "Well, I'm on the clock. I'm here to bless God's people. Here I am, Lord. Are you ready to receive my sacrifice of praise?"

Mine is really the good stuff. I'm going to bring you whatever I bring you, knowing that I'm your guy. I'll be honest with you—I'm confessing sin right now in front of you. Sometimes I do that as a pastor. While I think I'm probably the chief of sinners in this room with regard to that, I think all of us struggle with that sometimes. I think sometimes we come in on Sunday and we're like, "Yep, we're here. We're doing it, God. Look at us. We're the ones."

Cain came with a very deserving heart and a very hurrying heart. He was thinking that he deserved everything and he was ready to move on, to get back into the garden. "It's done. I'm gonna do it." I want you to see that Abel came exactly the opposite way. He came with a very undeserving attitude. He came with the sacrifice of the firstborn, offering it in response to God's grace. He wasn't coming thinking that he had anything to do with the fulfillment of the promise—that was Cain's job, right? That's how they were perhaps raised. My older brother's gonna do that.

He comes just basking in the promise of God that there will be salvation. "I'm not earning it. I'm not bringing anything to the table. I'm simply rejoicing and giving thanks that Lord, you will do it." And he's not coming in a hurry, not thinking that it has to be achieved by him. He's coming offering this sacrifice, trusting that God will provide.

That's how we are supposed to approach God in worship, brothers and sisters. We're supposed to come in response to his grace, not expecting that we deserve it, not trying to earn it, but simply coming and basking in the promises of our God that we don't deserve. None of us deserve to be in this room. I don't deserve to be up here speaking. We don't deserve to be here singing God's praise. We should be, by all rights, cast about in the world, hopeless and lost. And yet God, by his grace, has brought us here. That is what is meant to fuel our worship.

The Strategy of Sin

Cain's great sin wasn't his difference in sacrifice. God comes to him after that and warns him. He says, "Hey, listen Cain. Here is the problem. I see the jealousy that is boiling up within you—between how I have responded to Abel versus how I have responded to you. It is sin, and it is crouching at your door. It desires to own you, but you must master it."

He gives this warning. And essentially, in that warning rests the entire DNA, the entire strategy of sin. If we see Satan in the garden as our great enemy, it's sin that is the enemy here. And sin's strategy is threefold: crouch, pounce, and own.

Sin loves to make itself small. That's what it loves to do. Cain didn't see the big deal between his sacrifice and Abel's sacrifice. He saw this jealousy within him and he allowed it to exist there because it was just jealousy. "I'm just having these feelings of jealousy, these thoughts of anger, these thoughts of inadequacy." That's all it is, right? I was desiring to actually do something good—save humanity, right? As the spear bearer, the one who was gonna crush the serpent. That was my desire, and that was a good desire. And yet hidden within that is jealousy. He can't see it. God's warning him.

Isn't that how sin works in all of us? It loves to make itself small. You can't see it. It's hiding by your door, waiting for you to come. "It's down here. Come on down. It's safe. It's just me. I'm just a little old me. I'm just right here. I'm not gonna get you, right?" And then you come down the aisle and what happens? It pounces.

You know, we've been doing Halloween decorations so I went to Spirit Halloween. Some of you are judging me. It's fine. Spirit Halloween has all these jump scare kind of things. You step on this pad and this little tiny spider comes out—and it's big. It comes out and grabs you. That's sin. That's what sin does. It's appropriate for Halloween horror movies. This is a horror movie. Sin is the subject of horror movies. It makes itself small in your life. An addiction starts with, "Well, I'm just gonna do it this one time." And then it pounces and it destroys your entire life.

The way in which we combat sin as believers is we invite people to tell us what they see. Because here's the thing: when you're standing outside of someone else's door, you see the sin crouching. They can't see it, but you do. God sees it. Cain can't see it. He warns him. He says, "Hey, there's sin crouching at your door. Be careful." That's what we do as believers for each other.

But here's my suspicion: I don't think we do it that often. Because we live in a world where judgment is just absolutely the last thing anybody wants. Right? We quote to one another, "judge not lest ye be judged." And because we think that Jesus was saying essentially, we should go around and tell people to not judge us. That is not what Jesus was saying in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter five.

What he was talking about is two people who have stuff stuck in their eyes, right? One of them has something really big and he's pretending like he can get the small thing out. And then the other person with the small thing isn't doing anything. But Jesus is saying the guy with the log should get the log out of his own eye first, and then they should work together to get the speck out of the other guy's eye.

The bottom line is we all have sin crouching at our door. We need each other to see it. The Holy Spirit speaks to us about it and we need to invite that judgment. I'm on a big kick right now where I'm telling everybody, "I invite your judgment." I dare you to go about your life like that. Start telling people, "I invite your judgment."

I was at a gas station, I bought a Diet Coke and a Reese's peanut butter cups at 9AM and I was checking out and the gas station clerk says, "Man, I—" well, I said, "This is the breakfast of champions." And he said, "Brother, I'm not judging you." And I said, "I invite your judgment. Nobody should be eating Reese's Peanut Cups and Diet Cokes at nine in the morning." I should have felt that moment and I repented after I ate the Reese's cups. I saved the diet coke for later.

But here's the thing: I'm standing up here and I'm telling all of you, "I invite your judgment" because we need it. Because sin crouches and then it pounces. I don't want sin to destroy my life. That's what ultimately it will do. It destroys Cain's life, it totally destroys other people's lives.

I was getting a haircut and my haircut person was telling me about a friend who had recently died of a drug overdose. Sin pounces and it takes everything. And the last thing is that it owns you. When it pounces it destroys your life and then it owns you.

How Sin Transforms Cain

I want you to see how Cain's intentions are totally transformed. Right? Here he was named the spear bearer, the one who is going to kill the serpent, but his name and its meaning totally transformed in the context of his story as sin owns him. He becomes Satan's effectively.

Notice this: Instead of redeeming God's image as he thought he would, he marks it further both in himself and by spilling the blood of his brother. Instead of being the savior of his brother, he becomes his murderer. Instead of an offering to God, scholars point out that Cain's killing of Abel might be actually a picture of an offering to Satan.

And in the aftermath of sin's complete mastery is shown in how Cain has become exactly like Satan. God comes to him and he lies to God even mocking him. Notice this—"Where is your brother?" "I don't know." Lie. And then he mocks him, right? Because he's been spurned by God as the one who was supposed to save mankind, the one who was supposed to be his brother's keeper. He mocks God and he says, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Clearly not. Right?

Do you see the lie and the mock? He's exactly like Satan. Sin has mastered him.

And so that's the danger, brothers and sisters, of that little sin that's crouching at your door: it wants to pounce, it wants to destroy your life, and it wants to own you. God's warning to Cain is you must master it. But he doesn't. He doesn't.

God's Response: Justice and Grace

Let's look at God's response now. God's response is surprisingly gentle given the horror of this story. You notice he comes with questions. He knows where Abel is. He's trying to very gently and softly invite Cain to do what? Repent. To repent.

Repentance typically comes not from a situation of being caught but out of a conviction of the heart. God's giving him a chance to not be caught but to own his sin and to express his sorrow by asking that question. Do you see how gentle and kind that is? That's how God comes to Cain. He gives him the opportunity to repent. But there is no repentance. He lies and he mocks and then God responds with justice but also with grace. Let's unpack those two things: justice and grace.

First of all, justice. God talks about hearing Abel's blood crying from the ground. I think that is an incredibly simultaneously scary and encouraging thing. Think about that for just a minute. God's approach, his connection to injustice is that blood cries out to him. He cannot not hear it. It's not like he's disappeared and "I just, you know, kinda don't care, Cain." It's "Your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground."

I want you to think for just a moment what it must be like to be God, because lots of brothers have killed lots of brothers since Cain and Abel. And lots of people have been killed unjustly since Cain and Abel. A lot of people. And all of that blood cries out to God in this great objection to the injustice of it. And God, who is just, can hardly bear it.

I think oftentimes we approach injustices that we experience as though they're just ours, as though we're the only ones that carry them or feel them. If that's you this morning, if you have experienced some sort of injustice—some sort of really deep injustice—and you carry that hurt with you day in and day out and you feel like you're the only one that sees it or feels it, I want to say to you this morning that you are not. In fact, you have a God, a heavenly father, who loves you so much that I would argue he feels the injustice that you've experienced more deeply than even you do. You may feel like nobody else gets it, nobody else understands, nobody else cares. And the truth is, nobody does care compared to the way that your heavenly father cares.

The Severity and Grace in God's Response

His response to Cain is very severe. I want you to see that Cain is exiled further from the garden. He's exiled to wander. It's a picture of going further away from the garden. He was supposed to bring us closer—that was his expectation—but in truth, he's actually going further away. The land is no longer going to bear fruit. He loses his livelihood, his ability to provide for himself. And perhaps worse, no one can kill him. He has to live in that existence perpetually.

You know what this is a picture of? It is a picture of hell. In the same way that excommunication is a picture of hell, it is a very symbolic gesture of: you are moving further away from the life that I intended for you. That is the exile of Cain, and that is an incredibly stiff punishment. Why does God do that? It's because he cares about justice.

But I also want you to notice the grace of God in this passage. Everything we know about Old Testament law says blood for blood. Cain should have died. The original readers of this passage would have looked at this and said, "Why didn't God kill him?" And as horrible as his exile was, as much as it was a picture of hell and suffering, I want you to see that he was allowed to live. God was being patient with him, extending his opportunity to repent.

Even in his harsh judgment with Cain—which prefigures the ultimate judgment that would come for his sin—he's given time. The Bible says:

God is not slow; he's patient with you, longing for you to come to him in repentance.

God is so gracious. But how can he be gracious to Cain? The answer, of course, is the Sunday school answer. Hebrews spells it out for us. What's the answer? Jesus.

The blood of Christ speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. — Hebrews 12

In essence, justice cries out blood for blood, and God answered by giving his own blood. That is how Cain has extended this grace, this common grace of time to repent. We don't ever see him repent, so we have no reason to believe that he did, but he had the opportunity to. He had the chance to put his trust not in himself but in the coming Savior. Every single one of us has that chance.

The Anti-Cain and the Greater Abel

I want to close by talking about the anti-Cain and the greater Abel. I want you to understand: we are all Cain in some sense, and we are all Abel in some sense. We have all done injustice, and we have all experienced injustice in a variety of different ways. The lesson here is you read yourself into the story—you're either Cain or Abel. In reality, we're both.

But both Cain and Abel and us all point to a greater reality. All of this story, the entire book of Genesis, points to Jesus Christ. I told you at the beginning that this ends with Jesus, and you all were like, "Yeah, yeah. We've been here before; we know that's how it ends." Here's why. Luke chapter 24: Jesus meets with his disciples and interprets the entire Bible, and he says:

It all points to me. It all points to me.

And they were amazed. All these guys who had been studying the Bible their whole life suddenly had their eyes opened.

I was at Saint David's School this week. I got invited back to speak in chapel, and they asked me to speak on the Holy Spirit because they're going through the Apostles' Creed. And one of the things that I want to press on you this morning is this: so many times people come to me as a pastor and they say, "Pastor, if Jesus wanted me to believe in him, he'd just show up. Right? He'd just show up and tell me. I don't get it."

Why did he just come for this very short thirty-three year period to just a select group of people and then go up into heaven and expect all of us to believe in him? Well, the reason is he sent the Holy Spirit. Here's the truth, right? Jesus actually went up to heaven so that the Spirit could come. So that in him, once we have the Holy Spirit, when we look at his word and in fact, when we look at the world around us, all we see is Jesus. Do you understand? With the Holy Spirit, all we see is Jesus.

And so when we come to a story of Cain and Abel, what we see is ultimately the need for the ultimate fulfillment that Christ will bring. And we see this beautiful poetry that God has been crafting through thousands of years, through all these different individual stories. It's not like God was trying different things and then finally he's like, all right, fine. I'll come myself. Right? From the very beginning, he's crafting this beautiful narrative, this beautiful poetry that all points to Christ, which brings us back to the beginning of this story, which is worship. Right? We worship an incredible God, an incredible savior.

Jesus Throughout the Story

I just want to highlight a couple of things. I know I'm going to go quick. Jesus was a son of Eve. He fulfilled the prophecy. He was a brother. He was our brother and we killed him. He was a priest. He offered sacrifices. You know that Cain and Abel were priests—they're offering sacrifices for humanity at the beginning of the story. Jesus is a high priest who comes offering a better sacrifice.

He's the master of sin. As Cain was warned to master sin, none of us have been able to do that, but Jesus did. He's the keeper of his brothers. He's our keeper. He saves us. His blood speaks a greater word. It offers us salvation and hope, and for those who have experienced injustice, it reveals how deeply God cares—that the only price that could actually pay for the injustices we've experienced is his own blood.

And he receives and gives a greater promise and a greater mark than the mark of Cain. His is the mark of salvation. Do you see how Jesus is all over this story? Woven in everywhere. He is the answer to all of the problems of it. And he is the poetic, beautiful image that it's all pointing to.

Unity in Christ

At the beginning of the sermon, I alluded to some of the deep divisions that we experience as a nation. You feel that? Some of it's COVID, some of it's race, some of it's politics, some of it is, who knows? We have someone who has navigated all of that successfully. Do you feel the weight of trying to navigate that? Have you tried to navigate all of those differences? Have you gone somewhere and sat down and asked somebody, "Tell me all your thoughts about COVID and masks and race and politics?" That's an incredibly weighty conversation.

And I'm not saying by saying that Jesus has navigated all of this for us that we don't have work to do. Do you understand? I'm not saying that we don't have work to do, but I am saying that our unity has been achieved in Christ and the work that we do is from a platform of his completed work. It's something we get to participate in because he invites us into it.

Call to Come to Christ

And I want to conclude by saying this: How do we come back together as a people, as a nation? There's only one savior and only one way—Jesus Christ. The blood that speaks a greater message.

Have you been wronged? Do you demand blood? Here's Jesus. Here's Jesus. He offers you his. Are you a sinner with no hope in the wake of your sinful deeds? You think you don't deserve to be here? Here's Jesus. He offers you his blood. That's how greatly he values you.

Come to Christ this morning. No matter where you're coming from, come to him, see him in everything, and rejoice in the grace that has been given to you by your loving Father through him.

Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we live in a Cain and Abel world, Lord. Deeply divided, full of sin, full of oppression, full of hurt, full of regret, sorrow over our own contributions to it. Lord, come and fill our hearts. Lord, let us see you more clearly, more fully, more completely, and draw us to worship you. As we see the stark contrast between the world and what you offer, Lord, fill our hearts with great joy at how you have given us above and beyond what we deserve. Lord, fuel our worship. We pray in Christ's name. Amen.