Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Growing in Grace. Have you ever tried to assemble a new bicycle or maybe a new desk without looking at the instructions? Let me tell you it can be frustrating. Trust me, I know because I've tried to assemble both a bicycle and a desk without taking time to read through the assembly instructions.
Speaker: So let's just say that it was a big mistake and it took unnecessary time and emotional energy. You know, as our children and our students prepare to return to school, I would like to share a message that will save them unnecessary time, energy, mistakes, and so forth.
Speaker: The maker of mankind revealed how he made us in Genesis chapter 1, verses 26 to 31. So let's take some time to review his instructions for assembly.
Speaker: He made us. And so he knows how to put things together in life. So if I could say anything to our kids and to our students as they're preparing to go back to school, this is what I would say.
Speaker: Genesis 1, verse 26 says, Then god said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.
Speaker: So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them.
Speaker: And God blessed them. And God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.
Speaker: And God said, behold, i have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit.
Speaker: You shall have them for food and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has breath of life,
Speaker: I have given every green plant for food. And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made and behold, it was very good.
Speaker: And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. What would I like for our kids and our students to know, even college students?
Speaker: I would say first, when I read where God says, then God said, let us make man in Genesis 1 verse 26.
Speaker: It made me think of the intelligent designer. that is behind the creation of mankind. I mean, just think about it. The human brain has 100 billion neurons, which is said to be the estimated number of trees in the Amazon rainforest. Can you believe that? I mean, that's amazing how God designed the human brain. But then you think about the nose, the human nose.
Speaker: has 10 million receptors in the roof of the nasal cavity, enabling it to sense, get this, 10,000 different smells.
Speaker: How about the eye? Well, the human eye has 137 million light-sensitive cells and 40 subsystems.
Speaker: The eye, the optic nerve, and the visual cortex they interpret roughly 1.5 million pulse messages, here it comes, per millisecond.
Speaker: Wow, you mean 1.5 million pulse messages per millisecond? So all of that, your eyes looking and you just see it. And how did it all start?
Speaker: Well, here's what Psalm 139 verse 13 says. For you formed my inward parts. You knitted me together in my mother's womb.
Speaker: I praise you. for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works. My soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Speaker: You know, there's some beautiful verses that are in the Bible that tell us how amazing it is that God created us. And when I think about anatomy,
Speaker: And I think about how God created each one of these students, these children that are going to go to school. I just think, Lord, what a great creator we have. And, you know, there's a lot of potential in every student, every child that's going to go to school.
Speaker: And you know what that potential, where it all came from? I think it came from the image, the image of God. it says the image for the creation of mankind was this.
Speaker: God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness. So in other words, there are things that when God was designing mankind,
Speaker: He said, I'm going to put this in there because this is the way I operate. This is who I am. And so i I think back to something I read a long time ago by a man named Louis Burkhoff.
Speaker: He said there are five elements to being created in the image of God. What does that mean anyway? Well, let's say it means first you have a soul.
Speaker: So there's spirituality. There's an invisible part. There's this immortality that's a part of every person that goes on into eternity after this life. But there's also your mind.
Speaker: Your mind is a part of the image of God. Think about how he put together the brain, the nose, the eye, and so forth. But also in addition to our mind that allows us to think, to reason, to choose, to create art and so forth, we also have a moral nature.
Speaker: How do you know what is good and what is evil? What's right what's wrong? Why is it we choose to love? You know why? Because God put it within us.
Speaker: He made us like him. Those things are things that resemble him. But also, he gave us our body. Our body. Do you know that there's no animal with some of the human attributes that we have? Let me just choose one because of time.
Speaker: How about the opposing thumb? The opposing thumb. There are no animals that have an opposing thumb that helps us to grip and grasp and to hold on a pen and a pencil. When they're in the classroom, they're going to be using that opposing thumb, I guarantee you, to hold on to whatever it is they're riding with.
Speaker: But think about also the position and our role in the world. He says in this passage, I made you. that you would rule, that you would manage the earth and the animals and so forth.
Speaker: That makes me think about the importance of the creation of mankind. He said, let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heavens, over livestock, over all the earth, over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.
Speaker: Wow. Wow. The issue is, do we represent God well in the way that we oversee things? Are we showing his preference for order and not chaos?
Speaker: Do we use our platforms that he's given to us in life to care? Are we reflecting his glory? You know, mankind, we're the pinnacle of creation.
Speaker: We're not the same as animals. We're actually supposed to be managers over the animals. There's also this intention with the creation of mankind.
Speaker: It says, so God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Get this. male and female, he created them.
Speaker: I know that our society is currently struggling with gender confusion and so forth, but all of that could be simplified if we would simply go back to the instruction manual, go back to the Bible, return and say, okay, wait, the Bible clearly says that God made manhood and God made womanhood.
Speaker: If you go to the book of Romans in Romans chapter 1, verses 18 through 32, what happens when a when a culture, when a society, when mankind overall, it doesn't matter who or what, whether it's one person or many people, whenever we begin to say, you know what, there is no creator.
Speaker: then something begins to go wrong within us. And we can reach this point where we have a depraved mind and we can get so confused over things like manhood and womanhood and how God created us.
Speaker: You know, I like that word created because it reminds me of the ingenuity for the creation of mankind. can you Can you imagine someone who thought this all up?
Speaker: that It says three times in one verse, verse 27, so God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them three times.
Speaker: Do you know something that God designed the human body to exist in a gravitational environment? Blood flow and a sense of balance are influenced by the gravitational pull of the earth.
Speaker: Do you know what would happen to us if gravity was not there? Without gravity, the blood in our body would all pool in the lower part of the body.
Speaker: The brain would be deprived of the blood. Let me tell you what a man from long ago named Sir Frederick Hoyle. Have you ever heard of Sir Frederick Hoyle? He was the founder of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University.
Speaker: Here's what he said about the likelihood that all that we see that God's created could have just spontaneously happened. He said that would be like, he compared it to the probability of spontaneous life to lining up one and then 10 followed by 50 zeros, that many blind people.
Speaker: So you got blind people lined up and it's an incredibly large number. But you give each of them a Rubik's Cube, but it's a scrambled Rubik's Cube, and you tell them, okay, everyone, i want you to try to solve the Rubik's Cube, and it would be like, this is what Sir Frederick Hoyle said,
Speaker: The fact that all of this just happened by chance, that would be like all of those people who can't even see what they're moving on the Rubik's Cube. They can't tell the colors, right? So they're trying to line up all the colors without the advantage of sight, and all of them solve it at exactly the same moment.
Speaker: That's phenomenal, isn't it? that is how likely it would be that there's no creator. That's incredible. But then i love this inclination from the creation of mankind.
Speaker: Verse 28 says, and God blessed them. Let me ask you a question. Do you think that God has blessed you? Like, did you decide how you would have the the arms, the legs, the eyes, the ears, the nose, the health,
Speaker: the brain, the talents, the abilities. Did did you do all that? You know, Psalm 34 verse eight says, taste and see that the Lord is good. You know, Psalm 107 verse one and Psalm 108 verse one tells us that, you know, because God blessed us and because God's inclination as our creator is to give us all of these things that we need,
Speaker: then the natural response would be to say, to the goodness of God is to say, you know, I'm just so grateful. I'm so grateful that the way you made me, God, I'm so truly thankful. I just want all of our students to go to school and maybe they see someone who's maybe got an outfit on that they wish they could have.
Speaker: Maybe they saw some of the students drive into the student parking lot and they think, man, I wish I had a vehicle like that. Or maybe they're seeing the grade that they get on their paper and it's a C, but they see the person sitting across the aisle from them in school and they always get an A. And so they're thinking, man, I wish I'd get ah got an A every single time. Man.
Speaker: If we only knew how God has blessed us, we would truly say, God, I thank you for what you have given to me. Because I guarantee you if we only knew enough people around the face of the earth, we would truly be grateful for what we have.
Speaker: We would say, God, I thank you for what you've given to me. There's also this thing where God speaks. It says in Genesis 128, and God said to them, sometime, maybe not now, but sometime I encourage you to read Psalm 19.
Speaker: Psalm 19, because Psalm 19 says that everything that God made out there, all of creation, you know what he's doing through it? He's speaking. And it's like God is speaking day and night, day and night, from day to day.
Speaker: It's like he's trying to tell us something about him. Like the order, for example, he's trying to say how he loves, you know, harmony and order. But then he also not only uses creation that's out there, but there's something that he placed within every human being that also lets us know something about him in terms of right and wrong.
Speaker: You know what it is? Psalm 19 brings it up, the conscience. Your conscience. Don't you know that your conscience is a gift? If we didn't have a conscience and some people dull their conscience and that's why they really get in bad trouble, then think of all the things we would do that were bad and wrong.
Speaker: But somehow God's placed it within us, this innate ability to say, this is right and that's wrong. But just because we get so confused on that one sometimes, God said, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to make it clearer.
Speaker: And so Psalm 19 says he also gave us his law. He gave us his word. He gave us the commandments. And so God uses the word of God.
Speaker: to help us know more specifically how he wants us to live. What are the attitudes that we should have? What are the attitudes that we should not have? What about actions? Are there some behaviors that we should do?
Speaker: Are there some behaviors that we should not do? Well, the Bible makes it even clearer so that we have creation and the conscience and the commandments, but let's say that we still don't quite get it and that we're still saying, oh God, if you would just make it so clear the way you want me to live.
Speaker: You know what he did? He sent the Messiah, the Redeemer, the Savior, the Christ. That's the fourth way that I think we can hear God speak to us. When we see the life of Jesus found in the Gospels, found in the Word of God,
Speaker: You know what it does? It helps us to know what God is interjecting into life today. We can look into his word, we can study the life of Christ. We can even observe creation and we can try our best to keep our conscience clear so that it doesn't get confused.
Speaker: But you know, the whole thing is that God has instructions, instructions to the creation of mankind. What did God say he wanted us to do?
Speaker: He said in verse 28, here's what I want you to do. I want you to be fruitful. And I want you to multiply. And I want you to fill the earth. And I want you to subdue it. And I want you to have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.
Speaker: That's what God wants us to do. That's why abortion is so horrendous, because God is like, no, that's what I actually want you to do. I want you to be fruitful. I want you to multiply. I want you to fill the earth.
Speaker: Some people say we shouldn't be filling the earth. We should be very concerned. And God is like, no, I want you to have families. I want you to love your wife. I want you to love your kids because every one of them also were made in my image.
Speaker: There's also some indispensables for the creation of mankind. Indispensables. And God said, behold, i have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit.
Speaker: You shall have them for food and to every beast of the earth. and to every bird of the heavens, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life. I've given every green plant for food, and it was so.
Speaker: Have you ever thought about how God put us at exactly the right spot? Exactly the right spot. There's a man named Ken Ham. He's the founder of ah a website called Answers in Genesis.
Speaker: But here's a statement that he made in an article he wrote called Earth Just Right for Life. Listen to what he says. Listen to it closely.
Speaker: Some of the conditions that make Earth perfectly suited to host life are its distance from the sun. in the so-called Goldilocks zone, not too far away and not too close to the sun.
Speaker: Abundant liquid water, a breathable atmosphere, the perfectly sized sun to provide energy without killing life, and a perfectly sized moon to control the tides.
Speaker: See, I think that's well said by Ken Ham. you know Think about, let's say, okay, what if you wanted to leave Earth? Maybe you say, I don't like it here. People are really broken and messed up here.
Speaker: I believe I want to live somewhere else. Okay, where is it that you would go? Would you say, put me on a rocket and let me go to Venus? No, you would not want to go to Venus. It's way too close to the sun.
Speaker: You would not last on Venus. But then you could say, no, I think I'll go to Mars. and I believe I'll live on Mars. No, you wouldn't choose Mars because Mars is too far away from the sun.
Speaker: It's so amazing that the Milky Way hosts 100 billion planets that we can't live on. it's It just goes to show the uniqueness of Earth.
Speaker: It's like There's no liquid water on those planets. And if you were to go by exobiology, life beyond the earth, there's no evidence.
Speaker: There's no data that we have that we could sustain life on any other planet than this planet right here where God placed us.
Speaker: I don't know about you, but I can't believe that was just an accident. I can't believe that that was just sort of random chance or luck. No.
Speaker: That was a designer God who's got such incredible wisdom, knowledge, intelligence, whatever you want to call it. It's just amazing that he set this up.
Speaker: And that's why I'm so thankful for the book of Genesis that brings us back to the basics, back to the basics so that we can know my life counts.
Speaker: See, that's what verse 31 says. also tells me as we end the first chapter of Genesis. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
Speaker: And there was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day. You know, when your child goes to elementary school,
Speaker: when your student goes to junior high or to high school or maybe even to college, to some graduate school, you know, their value will not be related to their looks.
Speaker: Their value will not be related to their possessions. Their value will not be related to their positions that they might be able to obtain or not obtain at the school.
Speaker: No, you know what? Their value will be because they are a special creation of God. And God looked at them and God looked at this earth and God looks at every person on the face of the earth of this earth. And you know what he said?
Speaker: We have it written right here and in this chapter. He said, it was very good. Listen, God loves you. God loves your child. God loves the students that go all around the world, every race, you know every city, every country, every tribe, every people, every tongue, every nation.
Speaker: He loves. He loves you. He made a place for you to live. He made you. He designed you. Remember what we read earlier? Even when we were in our mother's womb, God was intricately involved in shaping and designing each one of us so that we would have all the instruments that we would need to live this life He even took the trouble of saying they're going to need oxygen so that they can breathe.
Speaker: They're going to need water, liquid water, so that they could ah function and and not ah you know dry up on the inside. The Lord thought of everything we need. He thought of the food heat that we would need.
Speaker: Everything. I'm just so grateful when I read through God's word from Genesis all the way to Revelation. God is revealing to us who he is.
Speaker: And I don't know about you, but I stand in awe at who he is. I want to worship him for who he is because he's wise and he's powerful.
Speaker: He's loving, he's gracious, he's merciful, he's faithful, he is good. There's so many things I could say about God. He's just, he's righteous, he's holy.
Speaker: Man, I'm so glad that he controls everything because I cannot, I cannot control everything and I should not control everything. You would not want me control of everything out there.
Speaker: But I just thought to myself, you know, it's so beautiful as our kids go to school to learn more. I want them to know who is it that gave them the mind that they can put to good use and learn more.
Speaker: I want us to close our time together by praying for all of our children, for all of our students and so forth. Let's pray for them that they will be able to really learn so much as they start this new year of school. But I also want them to know that the greatest knowledge of all is to know God, to know their creator,
Speaker: And you can come to know him through his son, Jesus Christ. You can actually come into a very intimate, close relationship with him that could even reach that level of having fellowship with him.
Speaker: So that when you open a copy of God's word, it's like he's there with you speaking through his word so that you can hear what he wants you to do in your life.
Speaker: So let's go to the Lord in prayer and let's pray. I want to pray over parents too, and I want to pray over the teachers and the administration. So let's pray together. Oh Lord, I thank you so much for designing this planet.
Speaker: I thank you so much for the trees, for the fruit. Thank you for the plants, for the vegetables. I thank you for the animals. I thank you for all of our waterways, for our
