The text is from John 146. Jesus answered, I am the way and the truth in the life. No one comes to the father except through me. This is the Word of the Lord.

Hello friends. I got the same joy that I had last gathering with you guys. I love this community. Y'all like whatever bro get to it.

Of course one of my favorite songs going up. One of my favorite songs growing up was please believe that somehow some way we got to make it about this

life. Come on. Some way we got to make it about the one day. Boom. Boom. Some day we got to make it about this life. You never thought you heard Jay Z in church.

But this song was by Jay Z. What is a beanie seagull? I don't know. But anyway. Beanie Seagull and scar face. I would hear frequently in the passage of my father's car.

Each rapper described their experience as growing up in their hoods. Each expressed the hardships of poverty and how they cultivated a deep longing within them for quality of life that was better than the one they were experiencing.

The reason why this song was so meaningful to me growing up is still this day even though I say listeners discretion advised. It's because I long for that too.

I want a quality of life that is better than the one I've been experiencing from Philadelphia. Go Eagles. And what I saw growing up though was various forms of violence, drug usage and abuse and addiction, death from disease.

My peers get swept up into the destructive cycles of our neighborhood, struggling to keep food in the fridge and not being able to afford the utility bills. I mean, your name it, the list goes on.

And I remember thinking to myself, this can't be that there are all that there is to life. That's to be more than this.

And what I can say in hindsight is that I really wanted to experience life to the full. Who else can resonate with this type of feeling. Although your circumstances may look different as long as in all of us.

Look, I don't know about you, but I've spent years striving to save up enough money to buy a home so that I can cultivate a healthy environment for not only myself or my family, but for my friends and my extended family to come in because deep down is something in me that desires for community to be endoused in love and peace.

Or you spend days begging God to heal your child or your parent or your relative or your friend because there's something in you that desires a life of longevity not only for yourself but for those that you love.

Where you look forward to hanging out with your friends because you can't wait for another gut twisting laugh.

Because there's something in you that desires a life of delight with others. There's something within us as humans where we long for a quality of life that is good, beautiful and whole.

And then I'm walking up.

This is evident through our attempts to shape our lives in a way that we think will satisfy the longing and yet even when we have the good things having the house having the good community group all of those things are good but sometimes the longing still persists.

There's something much deeper that you long for that Jay Z and Bini Seagull and Scarface long for that I long for.

This longing finds this origin and the story that has been told for thousands of years. Okay. You all ready?

Children of God we're going to have story time. It's the story of the Garden of Eden. In Genesis 2 there's a dry land and God calls his water to come up from the land and from the ground he forms a human and breeds his life breath into the human and the human becomes alive.

Then he plants a garden in a region called Eden and within that garden are many kinds of fruit trees that the humans can eat from and at the center there's two specific trees that many of you can tell the name of the tree of the knowledge of good and bad and the tree of life.

There's a river that flows out of the garden that splits into four and God places the human in the garden to work and keep it that's the responsibility of a priest as you will see in a later biblical stories.

...