The very word of God says, Genesis 126, God said, let us make man an hour image according to our lightness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky and the cattle and the earth and every creeping thing on the earth, and God created man in his own image. In the image of God, He created him male and female. He created them. Now just turn over to the chapter 2, the 18th verse. Might be good to just look at the 7th verse. Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being. Verse 18, then the Lord God said, it is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper suitable for him. Out of the ground, the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky and brought them to the man to see what he would call them, and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. And the man gave names to all the cattle and to the birds of the sky and to every beast of the field, but for Adam but not helper suitable for him. So the Lord God was the deep sleep to fall upon the man and he slept. When he took one of his ribs, closed up the flesh at that place, and the Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which he had taken from the man and brought her to the man. And the man said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. For this cause, a man shall become one flesh. And a man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Amen. And they God blessed this reading of his holy and infallible word, truly the grass withers in the flower phase, but not the word of God. The word of God stands forever. Amen. Be seated, please. It's a terrible thing to be alone, perhaps only all the more terrible if you're alone in a crowd. Friends of mine were on Miami Beach one time and they described walking by a ramshackle hotel which there was a porch and on that porch about ten feet deep and sixty feet long were a hundred rocking chairs. Every rocking chair seemed evenly spaced, perfect symmetry. Almost every rocking chair filmed with seemingly zombie-like people. All of them facing straight ahead. None of them rocking. None of them with books or magazines or newspapers with coffee or iced tea or anything else. No conversation taking place dead silence as they walked by a porch and all these people. In fact, he said there was no sense that the people sitting on the porch even watched them as they went by, that anybody's eye even, less they turned their head, everybody sitting straight ahead, he said no sense that any of these people were experiencing the relational life and that their relational God created for them to experience. It's a terrible thing to be alone. In fact, often, we seek and people find a fellowship in the matter of fact in substitutes. I think the first time I heard that description of that porch in Miami Beach, I thought that's just like the church. People come and they sit in all their rows and they stare at the head behind them and maybe they shook somebody's hand when the pastor made them before the service stood. But sometimes they come and they go and they're in a crowd but they're so very alone. We weren't made to be alone, we were made for community, people long for community. We can be sure that very often people don't come to church to meet God or to meet Jesus. They come for community. Community has often been found by people in other settings. Think of fraternities and sororities and clubs. Think of bars. One new Christian and an elderly gentleman said, I love being a Christian but there is one part of my old life I miss. I miss being able to go into the bar and being able to talk about my problems amongst people who didn't come to meet me. You said you'd be honest there and people would come to back and say, you're okay anyway. I haven't found anything like that yet since I've become a Christian. For a long time, Americans tuned in their TV sets every week to sitcoms that took place in one of those bars, didn't they? What was the song that was heard? Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name and they're always glad you came. You want to be where you can see troubles are all the same. You want to be where everybody knows your name. God built that desire in us. We long to live in community. We were not made to live alone. Take your sermon out line and we'll study together. Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2 and the first thing I want you to know is the Bible says clearly, we were made for relationship. You're sailing along in the creation narrative, aren't you? God made the trees. God made the sun moon and stars. Everything that's made, we hear what? God was good. It was good. It was good, good, good, good, good. It was beautiful. It was wonderful. It was fine. It was good. It was very good. Suddenly we come to Genesis chapter 2 verse 18 and there ought to be just a startling stop in the narrative, a screeching halt. It says what? What does it say? The word God said it is, it's not good. Something's not good. How could you be in paradise and something not be good? What happened? Did God make a mistake? Is there something he didn't think of? Why does the first human lack something? The answer is because he was made in the image of God. Go back to Genesis chapter 1 and we read the creation account. We know something even in the grammar used there. He says when God made light and darkness and he separated them, he said he did that. He made the fish in the fowl and the arggars and he made the flowers and he made the trees and he made the waters and he made the plants. And then when it comes to man, it says God said let us make man an hour image. Here we have the picture of God, the trinitarian God who's dwelt from before creation back into eternity, always in relational community, a community father, son and Holy Spirit, a community of love, a community of delight and communication that God seeks to replicate. And he makes man and he says let us simply put, it's not good for man. It's important to be alone because man is made in the image of an us and not a he, okay? It's a community. The essence of our humanity is the need to be relational. God is relational, we're in his image. He made us to be relational. Leadership matters more than anything else. We were made to live in community, it's an interesting note to note then and just this really simple truth is that we were made for relationship. We have to have relationship, it's at the essence of our being. It's worth our ardent investment is relationship. And so I'd ask you to even look at your life. How much of a priority is relationship to you? There's a lot of people who are living in this world whose desire is for their life, is it not? What's the garden life? Adam had it, Adam had power, didn't he? He was made to have what? Dominion over everything, there's a lot of people living in this world who want the garden life, power, beauty, food, pleasure, Adam had it all. But he was what? He was lonely, he was unhappy, something was wrong, how many people are living in such a way that they desire the garden life and so that they work all the time and they trade in relationships with their spouse and their children for the garden life. How many people move so often in their life in pursuit of pleasure and things and power and possessions, but they move so often that they fracture any long-term relationships that might develop? Isn't it fascinating to know that you can have all those things, you can have the garden life and still be what alone and empty? I talked to a businessman one time and he said, I'm going to make some, I'm going to work so hard, make so much money that by 45 I can retire. He might have said 40 actually and I can retire then and then he probably threw on something like so I can spend the rest of my life working for the Lord, you know, something to and he lived an obvious neglect of his family, an obvious neglect of his soul and I can remember saying to him, so at age 45 the big retirement party happens at the office, you've got so much money, you've done nothing but work up to that point in your life, you're getting your car, you drive home and you ring the doorbell and nobody's there to answer. Because your kids are all grown by then and you weren't there when you didn't and I want to tell you something, they'll hold it against you for the rest of your life and they won't bring your grandkids by to see you and you'll wonder why. And I don't think your wife will be there either I told them and if she is you'll wish she wasn't because she will be a bitter lady for you're neglect of that relationship or you can have the garden life but is it a good choice if it cost you what we saw, what we were so made to need and that is a relationship. As I speak I think to myself, you don't mind if I tell them I shoot you. As I speak I think to myself, you know, Ray Cortese speaking and saying that relationships are really vital and necessary, I don't know if the people are going to buy it from kind of like Ted Turner saying the essence of life is humility or Britney Spears talking about what we are made for was modesty. So all the more you ought to know that Ray Cortese isn't the messenger your creator in, your creator who lived in community from before all times as I made you for relationship. I heard of these paddle boats that left, you know, big steam paddle wheelers that left Memphis in an earlier time in our country and they were trekking to New Orleans and they began to, the two crews began to kind of spar with one another about who would get there first and suddenly what was just transporting cargo became rice and they began to jot each other and shovel coal and shovel more coal and get those boats going as fast as they could. Well I had enough coal to make it to New Orleans but didn't have enough coal to race and so one boat was falling hopelessly behind when one ingenious crew member decided to start throwing the cargo in the furnace and they found that it burned as well as the coal and the more cargo they threw in the faster they went and they surged ahead and they won the race but they destroyed the cargo. They lost sight of the whole purpose of the journey to understand, to understand the temptation for us to do that very thing. We can get all the way to the end and we can look back and say I was made for relationship and I missed it. So I ask you, what are you doing? What are you doing to make relationship a priority in your life? We have a widow's group in this church. We have a senior's group, feet and fast. We have life groups. We have other small groups. We have people that meet together for choir. We have people that pull off harvest ministries. There must be a hundred. There must be a hundred and fifty opportunities to join yourself with other people in community. What are you doing about it? You cannot be fully human or alive unless you make relationship a priority. Second, if we are made for relationship with who, well you could predict this, we are made for relationship with God, let me ask what picture you have of creation. How would you, if you were asked to draw a picture, just how God made the world? What's the image would you conjure up? Would you see God in a laboratory? Would you see Him out in a field with some sort of wand, let there be something from phantasia? What does the Bible say? Because you can make things in a very clinical sterile way. Think of how babies are made. You can make them in a laboratory, right? You can make them in a white coat and with a petri dish, not really the way they are normally made though. The way they are normally made is something we are not even comfortable talking about. It's something passionate and wild and full of life. How do you think of the way God made the world? Well turn in your Bibles. If you have a Bible turn there to Proverbs 8, if you don't, you just listen. You might think that Genesis 1 and 2 is the only place to talk about creation. Not really so. If you look at Proverbs 8, we will just start at the 27th verse. Listen to what it says. It says, when God established the heavens, when He established the heavens, I was there. Who could that refer to? In Proverbs 8, we have the personification of wisdom. Who is the wisdom of God? Who is the Word that spoke forth in creation? That's the eternal Son of God. When He established the heavens, I was there. When He ascribed a circle on the face of the deep, Proverbs 8, 27, when He made firm the skies above, when the springs of the deep became fixed, when He set for the sea its boundary so that the water should not transgress His command. When He marked out the foundations of the earth, I was beside Him as a master workman. And I was daily His light, rejoicing always before Him, rejoicing in the world, His earth, and having my delight in the sons of men. Now if you have a Bible like mine where it says rejoicing, there's a little mark by it. If you look over in the column, there's a little note and it says the word rejoicing can also be translated what? Froleking, playing. When He made the world, Jesus said, I was there, I was in the workshop, and we were having a wild good time, rejoicing, froleking, playing, dancing, the father and I from all eternity, father, son, and Holy Spirit, an intimacy in communion. That's how we made the world. It's passionate. Turn over to John chapter 1, you're more familiar with this. Describes creation too. The Gospel of John, the first chapter, you guys, you know the Baptist would already be there. You guys are like, you guys are like flow, so in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being by Him and apart from Him, nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, it says, now look down to verse 14, it says, and the word became flesh and He dwelt among us and we beheld His glory, glorious of the only begotten from the father, full of grace and truth, Jesus was with the father, Jesus made the world, Jesus came into the world. He revealed the glory of the father in every verse 18, no man has seen God at any time. The altar of God who is in the bosom of the father, He has explained it. When you use, we don't even use the term bosom much anymore. When you're in somebody's bosom, you're in pretty close. Babies are held that their mother's bosom, suckling infant, fathers might caress, a little toddler child into their bosom, husband and wife in the most intimate embrace, might be said to clutch one another, that type and that close. You see the intimate language used in God's word, to describe the relationship of father, son and Holy Spirit in the creation of the world. Creation flows out of this rapturous experience of love within the Trinity, it flows out from God's intimacy to us so that we were Genesis chapter 2, was at verse 7, it says God made us with his own hands, and then he leaned down and he blew into our nostrils. I don't want to go beyond the Bible, but he put his mouth to our faith and he blew into us life. It's intimate, it's personal, it's rich. When you get to the end of Genesis chapter 2, it talks about marriage in kind of a sensuous terms, bond of my bond, flesh of my flesh, one flesh, make it an unashamed, and all that marital relationship is just a faint picture of a much more intimate relationship that we're to share with the living God. Now I say all this to say, God made us to share all this with him. Is it interesting if you ask people, what's Christianity, what will they say? What does it to be a Christian? What does it to be? A Christian? What will they say? Well, that means you go to church, and that means that you throw a little money in the plate and you keep the rules and you throw up a prayer every now and then when you're in a tight spot and you try to be grateful, and that sound awfully sterile. What is a Christian? Somebody who the Father says, come into my bosom. Come into my embrace, come into my dance. Father, Son and Holy Spirit said, let us make man in our image. Let's invite them into our circle. Let's invite them into our love. Let's give these creatures, like we worship to love and relate and communicate like we do. Well, that's what we're made for. We're made for the arms of our God to sense His delight. So I'd ask you, do you know that? I am not a teacher in this respect, a teacher. We think of a Christian, a teacher, somebody who teaches ideas, concepts, Christianity, ideas or concepts. I'm not so much a teacher as I am a reporter. A reporter reports the news. The gospel is, it's news. This is news. The news that we're reading in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 is, you were created by a personal relational God to have fellowship with Him. That's news. My job is to teach you the truth about Genesis. The teaching facts about the Bible. My job is to announce news. There's news. The Creator God made you and He wants you in His dance. He wants personal intimacy. He wants to get in your face. He wants you in His embrace. He wants to love relationship with you. Isn't it sad? Pornography is inestapably sad. Yes, it's Todrick's evil. It's awful. But it's inestapably sad that hungry people would long after what? Pieces of paper. A piece of paper can't hold you. A piece of paper can't encourage you. A piece of paper can't stir your mind or your heart, a piece of paper. How many people go to church every week and they relate to God like a piece of paper? He's like an idea. He's like an image. He's like a thought. But he's not a person. The God of the Bible says, come, come to me. I made you for this. Oh God, though, art my God, the psalmist says, I shall seek thee earnestly my soul thirst for thee, my flesh, yearn. I thought the heart of it is to be relational with our creator. Secondly, we're made to be relational with each other. With each other, there's a radical implication, I quake when I say these words. There's a radical implication in Genesis chapter 2 that Adam is lonely and paradise because he had everything, didn't he? He had power and beauty and pleasure, he had everything and he even had what? God. And the Bible says he was empty, he had God. In church, we like to say, Jesus is all I need, it doesn't seem like the Bible says that. It seems like the humble God made himself in such a way that he meets their deepest need. But he chooses to meet some other needs they have through other people. Yes, God meets all our needs, but he chooses to meet some of them through relationship with other people. We need each other. You know what Genesis chapter 2 says, it's not good for man to be alone. So I will make him a helper and what's the next word? A suitable, it might say, the actual translation of the word is a helper contrasting to him, a helper who is the opposite of him, okay? And anybody who's tasted of marriage, understanding of not having a problem with that at all, you understand that completely. The point is that we need people who are not like us. People have very gender, class, temperament, race, to experience community like God intended us to experience. The problem is in the North American culture, the greatest God we have in North America is the commitment to the individual, to individuality. So in North America and today we love large churches, you know one of the reasons we love large churches is they allow us to remain alone, anonymous. We want community, but we're so afraid. And so we want to go to big churches and we want to go to classes, we don't want to go to groups. We don't want anybody asking us questions about ourselves or we want to have a bookstore and tapes and we want to learn, but we don't know if we want to turn our chairs around and face each other. We want to sit straight ahead. We want to listen to the preacher. We don't know if we want to face each other so to soul. But the Bible says we need that. We were made for that. We need each other desperately. We need each other. Hebrews chapter 3 says encourage one another day after day, last any one of you be honoured by the deceitfulness of sin. One of the reasons we need people who are not like us is they see us and we don't see what. Ourself. Life change happens in community. We're not going to grow. We're not going to mature. If we're not in community, you can't do the walk to heaven alone. You have to do it in a group. And one of the reasons you have to do it in a group is because we're blind to who we are. And we need other people. We're just the deceitfulness of sin. Hebrews said, the chuckle I heard somebody say we don't see ourselves. We don't have any clue who we are. Consider that when an audio tape of your voice is played, what do you like to what do people often say? That's not me. Look at how nasal that is. Look at how whiny that is. That sounds awful. And in your friends gather around and say that's exactly how you sound. It's even worse when pictures of us come out. And they say, what? I don't look like that. Look how fat they are. Look how nerdy they are. And all your friends get very quiet. Nobody wants to say that picture's dead on. We don't have any clue. We need others to tell the truth about ourselves. We need others to arouse in us this life of the spirit that God has placed in us. We need each other to walk through the dark nights of the soul together. Somebody sent me this poem. I have to admit, I treasure it. It's called at the winter feeder. His feather flame doused a dull by ice and cold. The cardinal hunched into the rough green feeder but ate no seed. The binoculars I saw festered and useless his beak broken at the root. Then two one blazing one gray rode the swirling weather into my vision and lighted at his side. Unhurried as if possessing the patience of God, they cracked sunflowers and fed him, beak to wounded beak choice meets. Each morning and afternoon, the winter long, that odd triumvirate, that trinity of need returned and ate their sacrament of broken seed. What is a church? It's a trinity of need. It's broken people who come to sustain each other through the dark winters of the soul. The church isn't a family, if it's not a community. We need God in relationship. We need each other. There is a third and this is what's most often concentrated in this passage so I really intend to give it a short mention, that is the marriage partner. It is the most mysterious and the most profound of all. Imagine the Bible says this, that woman was made out of man so that out of one flesh came two people so that in marriage, two people become one flesh. The Bible, often the word flesh in the Bible, refers to a people, all the flesh of the, and so two people become one person. What does the passage say about this mystery, this relationship that God made for us? Well, one, we have to say it's a relationship of equality. Male and female are made in his image, not just men made in the image of God. And that is one of the most radical things that the Bible says that the world still does not believe. How are women regarded today in Afghanistan? How are women regarded in Africa? How are women regarded in South America and Central America? How are women treated in North America? Simple as things. The Bible says male and female he made them in his image. It's a relationship of equality, it's a relationship that's complementary. Let me make you a helper, make Adam a helper, it's not good that he's alone. Do you think that the female being made a helper is a denigration that you don't understand the word because almost every other time, that very word is used in the Bible, it describes God's activity, God is the helper, and it says that God is helping, God is doing for us what we can't do for ourselves, and so he calls women to compliment their husbands, to do for them that they actually have temperaments, talents, and abilities that their husband doesn't have. Complementary, quality, third, it's a permanent relationship. The man is to leave his mother and father and what? Please, please, to be permanent, imagine that the two become one flesh, imagine taking one person and ripping them in two. It's unthinkable, isn't it? Pretty common, though, in our culture, it's permanent. It means that once bond with mother and father was greatest, now there's a change in allegiance to your spouse. It reminds me of one of my favorite stories, do you have a minute for a story? There was a woman who was so horribly burned that they had to find skin, to graft onto her face, and they couldn't actually use her own skin, and the only skin that they could find was her husband, and it actually had to be taken from his buttocks. This was very delicate, and they didn't want anyone else to know, and the doctor agreed, and so the surgery was done, it was done so masterfully that when it was all over, people actually complemented the woman on newfound beauty. She never looked better. She looked glorious and pleasant, and the whole skin came from, and nobody else knew, and one day she was overcom, she did, indeed, look so good, and she was overcom, and had been very painful for her husband to give that skin, and she was very emotional, and she said, I can't thank you, I don't know how to thank you, I can't thank you enough, and he said, honey, I believe me, I get all the gratitude I could ever want every time I see your mother kiss you on the cheek. You see how beautifully that illustrates my point. What do we say? It's a relationship of equality, it's a complementary relationship, it's a relationship of permanence, you leave your mother and your father, and you give your loyalty to your spouse, it's a relationship of fidelity, and it is a relationship of unity and intimacy, they were naked, and they were not ashamed. It is a relationship in which you are known, and still love, it's a beautiful thing. This week I got a compliment from somebody I work with, and a compliment from my wife, the same day on the very same thing. The compliment from the person I work with was given with a sincere heart, and with full eloquently put and passionately said, and on the Richter scale of my soul it was just a little blip. The same compliment from my wife was like wine. It was nurturing to the soul, why? Because she knows me, she knows me in all my ugliness and all my unworthiness, so when that person loves you anyway, it's precious. We were made for relationship, let's close with this, the last point, really your outline, cross it out, the last point should be, what's the problem, what do we lack? My relationship so hard, we can talk in glowing terms about relationships with God and with others and with our spouses, but they're so hard, they don't come easy, they seem unnatural. Why if we were made for community, do we run to be alone? It's because in the garden Adam and Eve, or the clothing of innocence, didn't they? Innocence, putting them in God, innocence between in their relationship with one another, but with the advent of sin and rebellion, Adam and Eve are not naked and unashamed anymore there was, they are shamed and they are in hiding and they are in covering and they are alone. And so what we need for relationships is we need safety, we need safety or we need innocence, we can't produce it. So we are on the one hand, no we don't want to be alone, we want community, but we're not about to venture out into relationships and to give ourselves and to expose ourselves and to sit face to face with people and share our souls because it's not safe, because we know there's something wrong with us and we know that other people will see what's wrong with us and they'll reject us and we can't take that. So where do we find safety? We need unconditional love, we need to go somewhere where we could say who we are and people would see who we are and they would love us anyway and where can you find that? I want to tell you something, you're not going to find that in church, you're not going to find that in marriage because other people can't give you because every relationship we have is conditional, it's only one place you can go for that. The Bible says that the Son of Man took on human flesh so that he might hang on a cross and when Jesus hung on that cross he hung on that cross what? Naked, remember they bartered for his clothes? He was shamed and he was humiliated publicly because he was burying your what? Your shame, your nakedness, your humiliation and the Bible says that we now stand before God if we are in Christ, covered with the finest linen, white, cloth, we don't have to be afraid. I love the story of the little girl at the drug rehab ministry, she'd been in the program and finally it was the night when the parents came and she stood up in front of the crowd knowing her own dad was there and tears came to her eyes and she said, Dad, I've got to tell you the truth for the last three years, I've been a prostitute and she was quivering and she was crying and out of the audience her father got up and he raced to her side and he embraced his daughter and he said, you're not a prostitute, not in my eyes. He said in my eyes, you're my little girl. Later on she was heard to say, I forgot how good it feels to be in your father's arms. The only way we'll ever have relationship with each other, with our spouses, the only way we'll have the courage to emerge is to find the safe place in our father's arms, the blooms of righteousness that cover our shame so that we know, yes my friends, yes my spouse, yes my church, to some degree everybody I know will reject me and treat me conditionally because their sinner is just like I am but there is one who accepts me, the one who truly knows me and I am safe and if I have their love and their embrace, I need not fear any other relationship. So brothers and sisters, turn your chairs towards one another, seek the living God, group up, pursue your wife or your husband because you were not made to be alone, you are made for