Thank you, and I'm super excited about this word. I studied, though I read the story of Cain and Abel a hundred times, maybe since I've been saved, and it's never made any sense to me. It's just a bizarre kind of a story. But how many of you know that if you just keep seeking revelation, the day's going to come where the Lord's going to show you what you need to know about that, and it's actually going to have something to do with what you're dealing with right then in your life?
So I got this revelation on Genesis 4. Turn to Genesis 4, starting in verse 1, and stand for the reading of the word, if you would.
Father, we thank You and we praise You. I'm so blessed this morning to have a church that seeks truth, that wants to live according to Your truth, that is hungry for it, and they're applying it to their lives the best that they can, just like all of us are. They get better and better at focusing on Your truth, and it shows in their lives. I thank You, Lord. I ask You to manifest the reality and the importance of this message in Genesis 4. Help us to apply it to our lives. In Jesus' name, amen.
Now Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain and said, "I have acquired a man from the Lord." The word there for "man," by the way, is not "Adam," which is used for a typical male; it's just "ish." "Ish" means sort of like a gentleman. I have acquired someone of valor and dignity in masculine strength. That's what "ish" means. I have acquired a young gentleman from the Lord. And then she bore again, this time his brother Abel.
Now Abel was a keeper of the sheep, but Cain was the tiller of the ground. In the process of time, it came to pass that Cain brought an offering of the fruit of the ground to the Lord. Abel also brought the firstborn of his flock and of their fat. The Lord respected Abel and his offering, but He did not respect Cain and his offering. Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell.
So the Lord said to Cain, "Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin lies at the door, and its desire is for you, but you should rule over it."
Now Cain talked with Abel, his brother, and it came to pass when they were in the field that Cain rose up against Abel, his brother, and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, "Where is Abel, your brother?" He said, "I don't know. Am I my brother's keeper?" And He said, "What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground. So now you are cursed from the earth, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand."
May God add His blessing to the reading of the word. You may be seated. That's as far as I want to go because I want to concentrate on this.
So we hear this in Christendom a lot: we hear that God doesn't judge your actions; He judges the intent of your heart. So when do intentions matter? Genesis chapter 4, verses 4-5: Abel also brought of the first flock of their fat. The Lord respected Abel's offering, but He did not respect Cain's offering. Now we don't know what was wrong with Cain's offering, and we don't even know if there was anything wrong with Cain's offering. It might have been Cain's attitude that was the problem.
Abel had an attitude of gratitude. When you bring an offering to the Lord, do you do it out of compulsion? Do you resent it, or do you bring it because you're grateful for what God has done in your life? Abel's attitude was one of gratitude, and Cain's attitude was characterized by resentment. We know that Cain had problems with resentment and bitterness because it shows as we go through the text. His disappointment quickly deteriorated into resentment of his brother.
This is one of the most profound lessons in the entire Bible. What got me digging back into this story again is I heard Dr. Jordan Peterson say—he is one of the great psychologists on the earth; history will put him with Freud and Jung and all of the great psychologists. He's maybe the greatest of all of those. He said something about this story here. He said there is no story in the Bible that is as relevant today as it was when it was written, and there is no story that is the basis of all known psychology like the story of Cain and Abel. In his estimation, this was the most important text in the entire Old Testament.
Wow! What do I get out of it? Nothing. Well, he's seeing something I'm not seeing. Then I began to dig, and I began to kind of ask the Lord to show me this revelation—what moved Dr. Peterson so much? This is kind of what the Lord began to show me.
It's one of the profound lessons about life. Basically, there are two categories of people. I've thought about my life and my encounters in the phases I've gone through, and I absolutely see what the Lord is trying to show us in this text. There are those that are grateful; their nature is that they're grateful, they're just, and they're humble. If He finds somebody who's grateful, they'll also find somebody who's humble. They're usually pretty happy; they forgive easily. Bad things happen to them, but they don't carry a grudge. These people are overcomers; they've overcome tremendous obstacles in their life.
If I could just meet a guy for a few minutes and make a decision about which category he fits in, I would look for signs of gratitude. Is he grateful? The other category is those that are resentful. They often suffer from narcissism; they're in love with themselves, and it's all about them—definitely not about others. They're bitter, they're offended, they're not grateful, and they're dangerous in any kind of relationship. Their life is characterized by failure, and their resentment increases and increases.
You can divide these people into these two camps pretty easily. Now remember, today I want to talk about the fundamental condition of our hearts and how we can react to the bad things that happen to us. Life is not about what happens to you; it's ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you react to it. When you are grateful and have a grateful heart, God loves you. He's died for you, He's forgiven you, He's washed you in His blood, and put you in relationship with Him.
No matter what bad things happen to us, we can still have a grateful heart. When we show an attitude of gratitude, we can be trusted and enter into relationships with others. This is an unequivocal fact. On the other hand, when we are resentful and think we have it all figured out, we are characterized by the current passion of the left to destroy the United States and start all over.
We should not worry about what happened five generations ago. We should believe there is one race, and that is human. There is one group of people that are peculiar, and that is God's people who have surrendered to God and are living their life for Him. We should not be prejudiced against any ethnic group. The way to solve this problem in society is to lead people to Jesus.
The question becomes: do we envy or do we emulate? In Genesis 4:5, Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell. Instead of getting angry at God, he got angry at Abel, the one who was doing it correctly. Successful people do not envy; they emulate. They learn from people who are successful and celebrate success.
We can learn from this example and apply it to our own lives. We should learn from those who are successful and celebrate their success. We should not be resentful or envious, but instead be grateful and emulate those who are successful. This is the best way to live our lives and be successful.
I remember a guy who was a successful man, and he taught me a lot about how to be successful in ministry, and I'm grateful for that.
You know, industry took time to call me and say, "Man, we're really, really proud of what you've done there." I couldn't figure out if he was saying, "Good luck trying to get some of my customers because you're probably not going to get them," amen? But no, he was really happy for me. I've never gotten over that. Here's a guy that is just a captain of the industry, and I have found that successful people love to encourage success. They love to see other people be successful.
This is why you must make friends. You know, Jordan Peterson, in his book "12 Rules for Life," one of them is you must make friends with people that believe in you. You must get in a relationship with people that want you to be successful, that speak success over you.
I had a feed yard manager from Richard Winters. He was a feed yard manager at a large Randall County feed yard, one of the biggest feed yards in the whole country. He stopped in my office and came in and said, "Man, this is awesome! I hope you guys do very well. If your feed mill ever breaks down, just call me. I'm down the road; we'll start making flake for you."
Successful people don't envy; they emulate. If you're successful—really successful—at something, then they study how you do it, and they want to be like you. They don't get jealous because you're successful. Come on, somebody! This is a fundamental trait of people who live with a grateful attitude about life; they don't become resentful.
What happened to Cain was he began to resent the one person that he could have learned something from. What if Cain had gone to Abel and said, "Boy, I thought your offering was pretty cool. What did you do? What do I need to do next time?" See, that's how successful people think.
I remember a guy I wrote about in his book on Christian leadership, John Maxwell. He said when he got ready to write the book, he didn't want to just go to church tops, but he went to a lot of pastors and things. He wanted to go to business people—anybody who was a Christian and successful. The way he would get to see them, since they were busy, was he would call them and say, "I'll give you a hundred dollars for 30 minutes. If you'll talk to me for 30 minutes, I'll give you a hundred dollars."
Why would you do that? Because I want to know what you know. Now there's somebody who's using his head. He would go and then he would interview them. He would take notes, he'd ask them questions about their attitude about life, about the things—how did they get where they got the ideas that they had—all these things. Then he would try to pay them at the end, but nobody would take his money because successful people want to breed success; they want you to be successful.
Hang around with successful people; learn from them. In ministry, I had a spiritual mentor who wore a five-thousand-dollar suit everywhere he went, and I'm going like, "I don't even own a tie!" But he was a successful man, and he taught me a lot about how to be successful in ministry, and I'm grateful for that.
I can tell you, words are opposite; it's night and day. But I knew he had something he could teach me about ministry that was universal, whether you're in a cowboy church or whether you're in one of the biggest mega churches in the world. He understood some things about church that I didn't understand, and I wanted to learn from him. That was the only reason he acquiesced to become my spiritual mentor: my attitude was one of gratefulness and a commitment to be teachable and humble and learn from him. I wasn't jealous because of his success, amen, and I certainly wasn't jealous because of his five-thousand-dollar suit.
Anyway, we need to move on. His suits were famous; his daughter bought his suits for him. She ordered them, and he had a closet full of them. He would have worn a JCPenney suit that cost a hundred bucks; that wouldn't have made any difference. But she dressed him well, didn't she, Carol? Anyway, that's another story.
But you don't see, but people came. Abel emulated; he didn't envy. Cain envied, and it turned into resentment. Goodness and happiness—this is what you learn from this passage.
I got a Hebrew Bible at home, and I have to tell you, when you're studying the Old Testament, it's really helpful sometimes to look in the Hebrew Bible and check the interpretation. In fact, you might not know this, so I'll share this with those that are serious biblical students. The Masoretic text—if you go back in your Bible and find out where the Hebrew translation of the Old Testament came from, it'll say the Masoretic text.
Now, the Masoretic text was a group of individuals who took over for the scribes several hundred years after Christ had been crucified. The problem is that Christianity was starting to really take off, and the Jews did not want to write an Old Testament text that validated Jesus Christ because it was starting to become a competitive issue. They eliminated a lot of scriptures; they eliminated some scriptures that absolutely speak directly to Christ.
The Masoretic text has a bias against Jesus and against His ministry. Now, the original, back in the year before Christ was even born, there was a group of rabbis—there were 70 of them—and they sat down and wrote the Septuagint. They translated the Hebrew to the Greek, which was the universal language. They wrote the Septuagint—70 rabbis came together, and they translated word for word.
A Septuagint interpretation of the Old Testament is much more accurate than a Masoretic text. I just wanted to throw that out for you guys who have been trying to discredit the ministry of Jesus since the beginning of time. If you believe that, say amen!
When He actually fulfilled all these words, I thought that was pretty interesting. So I have a Hebrew Bible that's based on the Septuagint interpretation, and here's what it says: it says, "If you do well, will you not be accepted?" The Hebrew text says, "Surely, if you do right, there is uplift."
Now, this is the most powerful principle in the entire Bible. Surely, if you do well, there is uplift. This one sentence, more than any other, describes the secret to happiness. How many of you want to be happy? Raise your hand if you want to be happy. I'm about to give you the key: do well; do what's right.
This is an important thing. Now, what happens in our society today is we want to be happy, so we do what's fun. Like we go to Oklahoma City and rent a big motel room with a balcony where we can watch the baseball game for free and not have to pay the tickets to get in—stuff like that, you know?
Adam just edited all this out, so I might as well just... It's fun; there's nothing wrong with having fun. Most of the time, though, we want to go do fun to make us happy. Fun gives us pleasure for a little while, but it's unsustainable. You may say, "I want to watch TV; I want to have some fun; I want to watch TV." But that doesn't make you any happier. In fact, it's disappointing a lot of times when you invest in fun, and it doesn't deliver true happiness.
See, doing good is not fun, but it creates happiness. Going and visiting the sick is not easy, amen? But when you go visit the sick—by the way, pray for my mom. She's been in the hospital for three or four days. She has dehydrated; I guess it runs in the family, amen? And she has a MRSA infection. She couldn't talk. My brothers have taken care of her. I went up there after a funeral. I did a funeral on Sunday, and Friday I shot right into Amarillo. She saw me, but she couldn't—the last time I was there, she didn't recognize me or Carol. But this time, I think she recognized me, but she couldn't talk.
So I laid hands on her, and we prayed for her, and we stood on the scripture, and we just spoke Isaiah 53:5 over her: "By Your stripes, she is healed." There's no age limit, is there? Did it say, "Well, you get to 85, you're on your own"? It doesn't say that; there's no age limit.
I told my brother, "You're walking a miracle. Do you believe in Jesus?" "Yeah, I believe." "Okay, well, let's get..."
Visiting the sick for me is hard because I hate hospitals, and I guess I inherited that from her, amen? But here's the thing, though: when you do something good, it's not going to be easy; it's going to be hard. But what it does is it begins to lead to a pervasive happiness. There's uplift; it leads to just a happiness in your heart. You don't know why you're happy; you're just happy.
Surely, if you do what is right, there is uplift—not necessarily what's fun. There's nothing wrong with fun, but we have to do what is right in order to foster happiness in our hearts.
In the same scripture, the second half says, "And if you do not do well, sin lies at the door, and its desire is for you." The Hebrew Bible says, "If you do not do what is right, sin crouches at the door, and its urge is toward you."
Well, here's another moral truth: the less you engage in good behavior—doing right—the more bad behavior becomes tempting and becomes inevitable. We're creatures of habit, and learning to do good things leads to doing more good things. Learning not to do things and to do bad things leads inevitably to doing more bad things.
Here's a statement from the great Greek philosopher Aristotle I ran across: he said, "We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. It makes no small difference then whether we form habits of one kind or another from our youth. No, it actually makes a very great difference, or rather, it's all the difference."
Listen to me: the way you train your kids to do good—there is nothing you can do to ensure the happiness of your kids like teaching them how to do good. Because when they learn to do good and they get in the habit of doing good, it generates happiness in them.
And understand, Jesus is the modifying, the motivating force behind that. With Christ living in you, you just have that yearning to do the right thing. Doing good things leads to happiness in an individual's life, and they end up like Abel and not like Cain, where they have an attitude of gratitude and not one of resentment. Everything in their life will go better.
I believe this is the most important text in the entire Old Testament for people living today. When you see those radicals on TV, do you sense that they're really interested in doing good and loving people, or do you sense resentment and bitterness when they talk? Amen?
Goodness and happiness—they're interrelated. The scripture says its urge is towards you. The inclination of the human soul is that if it has not submitted itself to the leadership of the Holy Spirit, it is always towards sin. That's just the natural result of not being led by and filled with the Holy Spirit.
Brother, you have a lot to learn. You're a young Christian, so don't be easy on yourself because you're not really going to get this for a while. But as you hang out with Jesus and learn more from Him, you get this urge to do good. You don't even know where that came from, but all of a sudden, you catch yourself doing things you would have never done before that are good. Then you start to walk in happiness, and you really don't understand that, but you're doing it because you're doing what God created you to do.
That's how you're walking in this happiness. Here's the most empowering idea in this whole thing: the sin may be crouching at the door, and its desire is for you, but you should rule over it. From the Hebrew Bible, it says you can master it; you can be its master. It means that we have a moral free will.
Dennis Prager's commentary in Genesis says that we can rule over our desire to do wrong. This is the most empowering idea of life. Self-control begins with the thoughts, and the thoughts create the words. The things that we say basically dictate what's in our heart. If you change the heart, you change the thought. If you change the thought, you change the confession. You change the confession, and you change someone's entire life.
This is a spiritual principle. Jesus came to change the heart. Why did He change the heart? Because the thoughts will change. When the thoughts change, the confession changes. When the confession changes, the entire life has changed, and you have this heart to do good.
There is demonic oppression—that's a real thing; there's no question about that. What the name "demon" comes to get control of is your will. But I found there are too many people—I think, in my opinion, there are too many people that use that as an excuse to abstain from personal responsibility. "Oh, the devil made me do it." Sometimes that's very true, but most of the time, if you take responsibility for your life to change your habits and you tell God, "I need help," He'll help you, and He'll show you how to do good and how to do the right thing and how to keep sin, which is crouching at the door, from taking your life over.
The first thing the church has got to do is acknowledge that sin still exists, and it's still an important thing. If you want to be happy, you've got to learn how to live a life where you've handled your sin problems.
John Steinbeck wrote a book called "East of Eden." It's one of the great works in American literature. It's the story of two couples who migrate from Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl into California, starting over. They've lost everything. That was a tough time. You know, my grandmother used to tell me that when she was a little girl, they would take towels, soak them in water, and stick them in the windows around the perimeter of the windows to keep the dust out. She said, "Still, the dust!" Can you imagine day after day after day, dust blowing?
I don't know if you know this or not, but the government—the federal...
This is a story of a couple, and the key to the story is that generations have succeeded them unwittingly reenacting the fall of Adam and Eve and the rivalry of Cain and Abel. This is a pattern in people that are not grateful and people that have problems they have overcome. You can take the story of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and overlay it over their life, and it'll be what will happen.
The central character in this book is Lee. He's a Chinese-American, and he learned the story of Cain and Abel from a Christian friend. Lee knew Hebrew, and he became captivated by Genesis 4:7, especially the last part that you may master it. He consulted in the book; he consulted with Chinese elders in San Francisco. He consulted all the different versions of the interpretations of the Bible. He hired a Jewish rabbi to coach him to figure out exactly what that passage meant.
After two years of inquiry, he felt like he had actually gained insight into the depth and the meaning of the verses of Genesis chapter 4. He basically spent his life pursuing the truth that is embedded in these scriptures. He concluded that the word that God gave Cain about mastering it—the trouble that was mastering the sin that's at your door—is a word. The Hebrew word is "timshol," and it means that you may rule.
The King James interprets it as "will rule." That's not really what I mean; it means that you've got a 50/50 chance of making it. I don't know how to put it in better terms. It's not a guarantee. Don't you think for one minute that Jesus came to guarantee that you're going to make it. He came to give you the tools to help you. He came to give you what you needed to make it, but it's up to you whether you pursue those and apply them to your life or not.
If you just become resentful and bitter and angry, then you're on your own. The sin is crouching at your door, and it will take you out. When it took Cain out, he came under a curse, was banished from the land, and he produced generations—generations of murderers.
I've seen people afflicted. I've seen parents that are bitter, and I see in their children the pain in their children, and I see how that thing turns into a generational curse. "Somebody owes me something." Then I see other kids that grow up in a house full of gratitude, and the people that are grateful and humble and thankful for God endure difficult things—lose the farm, lose the business, go...
Lee knew this "timshol" was an important word: "thou mayest rule." In the book, in other words, the Bible is teaching that this is what Prager says in his commentary. In other words, the Bible is teaching that human beings have a choice. This is the choice, in Steinbeck's words, he placed in Lee's mouth. This choice is what makes a man; it's what distinguishes a man from an animal. A cat has no choice; a bee must make honey.
These 16 verses are a history of humankind in any age and culture or race. This one word and its meaning were so significant to Steinbeck that in the final word in his 600-page novel was the Hebrew word "timshol." You have a chance to make it—to choose to do right. God will never take that away from you.
The choices that you make define your life. Do you believe that? The choices that you make define your life; you don't define it. Your choices define it.
I would throw this part in without the presence and the empowerment of the Holy Ghost. See, I grew up in a real disciplined... What am I trying to say? My dad taught me about choices early, and he showed me guys that had made bad choices. He said, "You end up like them. You make the choices they make; that's what you get."
He believed in discipline; he believed in hard work. He was determined; he had a strong will. In your will, you can't make it if you don't have a strong enough will. The world will just chew you up and spit you out.
But I found something out as I began to grow older. I realized that it wasn't enough to have a strong will and be disciplined—that life is full of train wrecks. Can I get a witness out of somebody? Am I the only one that's been in a train wreck or two? It's full of disappointments.
But what I discovered when I got saved was after I got filled with the Holy Ghost, I found that the Holy Spirit is the thing in me—the only thing in me—that makes me make right choices. I would have made wrong choices over and over again even after I had been filled by the power of the Holy Spirit.
You know when Jesus took of the third cup of the Passover—the Redemption Cup—in Matthew 26:27-28, He told His disciples, because He knew they were going to make a bunch of bad choices, He told them, "Drink from it, all of you, for this is my blood of the New Covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins."
He said, "This is the blood of the New Covenant," and He was referring to Jeremiah chapter 31. Turn to Jeremiah 31, starting in verse 31. This is the passage He was referring to. If you're there, say amen!
"Behold, the days are coming," says the Lord, "when I will make a New Covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them out of the hand..."
He's saying, "I will give them an awareness to do good, and it will come from my word." Now, it's not just some scripture that they've studied. How many times have you read the story of Cain and Abel, and you didn't get any of this out of it? You can read words, and you can memorize them, but that doesn't mean the truth of it is released into your heart.
He said, "I'm going to make the truth of my word released into their heart and give them a desire to do good." Now, this is what He said to His prophet Ezekiel about this same thing in Ezekiel 36:27. He said, "I'll put my spirit within you, and I'll cause you to walk in my statutes, and you'll keep my judgments, and you'll do them."
You know why you'll do good? It's because you've got the power of the Holy Ghost inside of you. So when the church says, "Oh, I don't..." Well, you might as well, in Bill's words, tear the church down and build a toot and tell them there at least people can get some good out of it. They can buy a Big Gulp and enjoy that because without the Holy Spirit, you have no chance of doing good—every time, no chance.
You have to learn, though, to heed that urge that's in you. You've got to listen to that little voice inside of you that says, "You need to go see your friend." You need to listen to that little voice that says, "Take the money that's in your pockets and dump it out on the altar."
I want to see: are you grateful, or are you resentful? That's what the offering does, folks; it demonstrates gratefulness. You know what? It's crazy. When you put the altar out there at a feast, God doesn't care about the amount you bring. He wants to know what's in your heart when you bring it up there. Are you Cain, or are you Abel?
This is why this church has prospered like it has—you as individuals—because you really are grateful for what God has done for you, and you trust Him.
You show me somebody—if I had a young woman say, "I want you to meet..." This happens to me all the time. This happened to me at a wedding in Amarillo. A young girl that used to go to church here a long time ago—she's her friend's family, and she was there at the wedding. She brought her boyfriend up to me. I don't know this young man; he seems like a wonderful young man.
I'm glad to meet you. How are you? We talked for a minute, and she said, "He knows you because he loads trucks at the feed store where you're going by." I said, "I recognize you now; I remember you." She said, "You know, he's a really hard worker."
I said, "What do you want me to do? You want me to do an evaluation?" Is that what you're after here? I couldn't figure out what exactly she was wanting—confirmation because her father doesn't live here; he's in another state.
So I told her, "I have met him, and he seems like a wonderful young man. I know he works hard because he's the first one to load me up when I go into the feed store. He meets me out there and gets me loaded up."
But my point is, here's what I would tell her: is he grateful? Is he basically grateful, or are there any signs of resentment? Because if there's even a seed of resentment in him anywhere, you're going to have trouble in this relationship.
This is the most powerful principle, and I had to even learn to go back and dig from a psychologist that I'm not even sure—I don't know if he's saved or not; he just knows the word. He looked at it, and he realized that all of his psychological training was wrapped up in those 16 verses.
I love the word of God; it's living, sharper, and powerful than a two-edged sword, and you never learn it all. You can constantly extract things from the word, amen?
So there have been times in my life when I have flirted with resentment. I had bad things happen to me; it wasn't my fault—that's my side of the story anyway, sticking to it, amen? I realized that I was flirting with resentment, but I would go to my study, and I would say, "God, help me. I'm really developing a hard place in my heart for this person."
Only You can help, and all of a sudden, God would give me compassion for that person that hurt me and actually show me where some of their resentment comes from.
You can be grateful, or you can be bitter, but you can't be both. Amen?
on Nov 05, 2023
