NORTH LIVERMORE — At the North Livermore Baptist Church May 19 service, the congregation was welcomed by Pastor Bonnie Higgins at 9:30 a.m. to begin the service. The Invocation/Lord’s Prayer were recited. The hymns that were sung were “Faith is the Victory”, “I Need the Ever,” and the service ended with “Go Now in Peace”. Linda Lyman is the organist, Janet Diaz is the pianist, and Lew Lyman leads the music for the congregation each week.
The sermon, titled “Our Rescue Story” and scriptures from Genesis 3:1-23. We are always looking forward to something in our lives. We want something better for ourselves and to do that we must look back to see how far we have come. We must understand our past to figure out how we got to where we are today.
Our pasts are made up of smaller stories of our life. Each story builds from another story we have lived through. For us to understand the Bible, we must go back to the beginning to see how we got to where we are now.
In Genesis, chapter 3, we see where Satan makes his debut in the story as a snake aka serpent, but we know he was in the story way before then. In other words, the creation story is not the beginning of the story. Satan was in the story way before the creation of this world. Satan was the villain in the Garden of Eden and is still the villain of our story in our life.
Our relationship with God depends on our trust of Him. We know that the angels can see God, so their relationship is built on sight, as our is built on trust of the unseen, having faith. Satan knows that and that is why he comes after us to put doubt in our lives against God. And this doubt all began with Adam and Eve, and unfortunately, the doubt continues today.
Satan was able to put doubt in Eve’s mind and both her and Adam disobeyed God to eat of the fruit. The significance of that moment, brought this world sin for the first time. Since that time, sin has ruled in many people’s lives on this earth. From this one incident, other things have followed. Shame – Adam and Eve hid from God because they realized they were naked; this was not known to them before.
Blame enters this world – Adam blames Eve and Eve blamed the snake. There are times when people will blame others and feel ashamed by the sin they are into. Also, the tree of good and evil that they ate from, brings on judgement in today’s society. If the fruit had not been eaten then, we would not have known the difference. We try to do God’s job here by judging others.
The first sacrifice happened during this time, God made garments of skin from animals to cover up Adam and Eve. As this happened, it makes it clear that the shedding of blood was the atonement for sin. After this happened, God sent them out of the garden to work the land outside of the perfect garden.
We know that Satan didn’t go away, but still here today. Throughout the Bible we see stories that we can relate to – Cain and Able, Noah’s Ark, Job, Daniel, and others in the Old Testament. The New Testament brings us hope and renewal through Jesus Christ and his birth, life, death, and resurrection. His blood was what this world needed to conquer sin and death.
Our story has always been a rescue story. God knew we needed rescuing from sin from Adam and Eve. Our life is the greatest rescue mission of all time and we owe the thanks to God.
Announcements listed in the bulletin are that the congregation will be collecting canned fruit for the Food Pantry in May. Bible Study: Tuesday at 1 p.m.
You can email the church at nlbcmaine@gmail.com. Pastor Bonnie’s office hours are Tuesday’s from 9 a.m. to noon.
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