We just started a new sermon series at my new church. It’s called Living God’s Story and it’s a 40 week journey spanning Genesis to Revelation. I am not sure I have ever been a part of a 40 week sermon series before and if I have, obviously I have repressed it – 40 weeks! That’s like an entire episode of one of those shows on the Lifetime Channel (they take that whole “Lifetime” brand way too literally).
Seriously, I am excited about going through the Scriptures as a community and you can read more about it here and you can do a number of other things on that link like listen to the sermon, check out a family discussion guide, there’s a prayer guide and a new feature called the “Scrapbook page”.
If you have been following this blog since January, you may remember me committing to reading the Bible this year. I realized fairly quickly that I wasn’t going to be able to blog through it as I secretly hoped. I was so concerned that I would not finish my reading as publicly proclaimed that I started aggressively reading ahead. I finished in the first week of June. Yes, looking back on it, I wish I could have trusted my discipline and blogged a little more (but it takes a good bit of time).
Now I’m thinking of blogging throughout the sermon series. There’s little chance that I’ll finish the sermon series before Bryan delivers the messages so I have a shot here, right? So here it goes.
The first message was entitled, “In the Beginning, God Created”. As I mentioned in a series of posts back in January, I happen to like the beginning of Genesis though there are numerous frustrations one encounters when reading the text. In preparing for the sermon and to teach the Oasis class (a class for our LIFE Community leaders who are leading their groups through the sermon series), I think I fell back in love with the aspect of God’s creativity and His love for humanity.
Probably about 10 years ago, I was caught up with the question of why God bothered creating us. Later I started to appreciated God’s relational traits but thought the possibility of theistic evolution undermined that. And while I do not claim to hold that view today, I see that I have always been guilty of underestimating God’s character when it comes to loving His creation. It could very well be that God loved humanity so much that it brought Him joy to see and guide our evolution through perhaps the genetic code as Francis Collins suggests in The Language of God.
It could also very well be that it brought God joy to create all of creation in a week. These days I am perfectly content not to know the how. And that’s probably my new favorite feature of the book of Genesis. In an age when the world believed the myths of gods creating and killing humans for their own enjoyment and entertainment, the Hebrew story spoke of a God that intended for humans to live a life in harmony with Himself and with the rest of creation. Imagine that the idea of a loving God was considered “new” at one point in human civilization.
On the other hand, it’s probably not that hard to imagine – there are countless people who either don’t believe in a God, are agnostic about it, or worse, do not believe that God cares for them. As believers, it’s our responsibility to share that. Indeed He does and the story we find ourselves in begin with the words, “In the beginning God created …”
fantastic reminder. Truly the concept of a loving God was new then and is still one of the hardest things for people to grasp now. Thank you for taking the time to work on this blog and keep spreading the light.