Let Me Introduce You
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Genesis 1:1 (NIV)
This earth is a supernatural testimony. It's an irrefutable sign that there is but one God. The size, position, and angle of the earth is a scientific phenomenon. Even to this day, if we were but a few degrees closer to the sun, we would disintegrate and if we were a few degrees farther from the sun, we would freeze. The axis of the Earth is tilted at a perfect 23 degree angle. It's no mistake that it is, it allows equal global distribution to the ray of the sun making it possible for the entirety of the food chain on the earth to exist. What about the combination of nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere we breathe every day? Think about it for a moment. Every single day of your life, God makes sure that nitrogen and oxygen are mixed in the exact perfect combination. It doesn't happen on any other planet that way, but this one.
The moon controls the tides. It's like the hotel maid that cleans the oceans! Even the waves don't crash to the shore in vanity - the tides crashing to the shore drag impurities into the depths of the sea. It's almost like nature's constant recycling program!
It simply boggles the human mind to think that the stars will rotate with such exact precision. But it is true. It's as if we are all operating by an atomic clock that moves silently around the orbit.
The sun, the moon, the stars, all of these are like celestial evangelists above. They, in fact, circle the earth every 24 hours shouting in every language that there is a God. The heavens declare the glory of God and the earth shows forth his handiwork (Psalm 19:1). It's an eternal God who created heaven and earth, flung the stars in space and breathed into a handful of dirt until it became a human being. It's God who sits on the circle of the earth and measures the mountains in a scale and holds all seven seas in the palm of his hand. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
This is what it means: there was nothing before God. There was no one before God. The writers of the Book of Genesis wanted the Israelites who were fighting to emerge from simply being a nomadic tribal community until they could become a nation state society. The writers wanted them to understand the very foundation, the bedrock, the platform of their identity and their existence, and it was this: Israel - you didn't get here on your own. You were created by God.
Get this wrong and everything else is wrong. God needs not to prove anything to us. We are the direct result of the creative expression of God. And here's what it means: our lives in terms of significance, impact, worth and value is based upon the trust and confidence of our faith.
Something Is Going to Happen
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
John 1:1 (NIV)
In the beginning was the Word. You’ve heard those words before. Where have we heard them? In Genesis. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
John is building a bridge to introduce Christ, and the very first thing he says is, “Here’s how you interpret who Jesus is: In the beginning.” John unapologetically introduces Jesus as being the God of Genesis, and it’s this parallelism that sets the stage for John’s announcement. It’s as if John is saying, “Since you know God’s eternal presence, God’s reason, and God’s planning existed before anything was created, I want to tell you that Jesus is God revealing God’s self in a way to make God’s reasoning rational to you as a human.”
Jesus is God. And in the confusing season when John was ministering, when it was considered forbidden to even mention the name of God because God’s name was holy, they would often refer to the actions of God by saying “the word of God,” which refers to an action rather than an idea or a person. God’s actions are His words and God’s words are His actions. That’s why it is believed that the Bible, the Word of God, is sharper than a two-edged sword—because it is action. It cuts between bone and marrow. Here’s what it means: when you engage the Word of God, something is going to happen.
When you believe in God as revealed in Jesus, you are sending a message to all who encounter you. That message is bold and clear. The active presence of God in your life is the explanation for why you walk the way you do. It explains why you cannot give up. It explains why you’re not married to a negative view of life. It explains why you believe that things work out for good. It explains why you know justice will roll down like a river and righteousness like a mighty stream—why love is preferable and that it covers a multitude of sins.
To say you follow Jesus and believe in Jesus is to boldly confess that you have surrendered to God’s actions as revealed in Jesus Christ.
The Comfort Has Come
But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.
John 14:26 (NIV)
I, you, us, we are not without guilt—all of us—but my Advocate has pleaded for me so that I am not getting what I deserve. And what is it that I deserve? Death for the wages of sin is what we all deserve. Instead, we are comforted by the knowledge of the grace and mercy that God has extended to us. The opportunities you are chasing in life are not based on you deserving them. The Advocate has pleaded for you to have a right to chase life more abundantly based upon the paid sacrifice of Jesus, whose blood was enough to atone for all of our sins.
God created us and gave us free will, knowing that it would cause us at times to make choices for the satisfaction of the flesh. So think of it like this: God set it up so that you would not have to stand before Him based on your guilt, receiving the wages of your sin. He sends Jesus to tell you that you don’t have to live as a slave to sin, and He proves it to us by taking on sin without sinning. He knows that even with that knowledge, we are going to sometimes choose the flesh over the spirit. So He sends the Advocate who stands as a reminder, in the place of our guilt, of the sacrifice of His Son, so that God is not revengeful or vindictive.
Jesus then introduces what will be the gifting of the Holy Spirit—not among you, but inside of you. This emphasizes the enduring nature of the Holy Spirit’s presence and the Holy Spirit’s guidance in the lives of believers. The Spirit moves in us all the time, in every believer, never having to divide His time. The Spirit’s movements include moving between temporal and eternal realms. You are connected to an eternal reality that you are existing in right now, which means you are in God’s presence as you always will be.
God wants to dispense grace to you. Therefore, He arranged things so that you could be the recipient of His grace that connects you to His eternal being.
Why Me?
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
Genesis 1:26 (NIV)
You are more important than earth-level existence. Becoming educated and employment-placed and relationally connected and economically weighted… These are earth-level pursuits. These are earth-bound preoccupations. But while we may have preoccupations that are earth-bound, we can never lose sight of the fact that each one of us also has a transcendent meaning. We have a meaning that is above going to work every day, above working until 65, having a retirement celebration, and moving somewhere that doesn’t get snow. Here’s what Scripture says: God called you and ordained you before you even made your physical appearance in creation.
How else can you understand yourself if you don’t know who created you? You’ll be stuck on earth-bound issues rather than connected to your transcendent meaning in life. Believe in God because God created you. God loves you. God sustains you. He provides for you. You grow in God because it’s the only way to understand your purpose at a transcendent level. Why are you here? The answer lies in knowing God.
If you want to know why you have been created, it’s because God, standing in nothingness, decided He wanted to create something that looked just like Him that He could fellowship with. And you are the result of that. So when you come into church every weekend, one of the things you ought to thank God for is that God made sure no accident would prevent you from being there. Only Providence could have determined that you would turn out to be the you that you have turned out to be. And in light of that, is God not worthy for us to enter his gates with thanksgiving?
God wants to spend your life with you. Please don’t bypass that fact. God wants to spend your life with you, letting you enjoy going around resembling Him and sharing in His creativity. You were created to know Him and fellowship with Him.
Sowing Seeds
But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.
Matthew 13:23 (NIV)
There’s an old story that goes like this: An aged and frail Emperor knew his time was limited and it was time to name a successor. He called all the young people in his kingdom together. He gave to each one of them one seed and told them, these seeds are special. Go home, plant the seed, and water it. Come back here in one year with what you have grown from this one seed, and when you bring back what you have grown, I will judge it and I’ll then choose my successor.
Young Ling was there that day and he, like the others, was given his one seed. He went home, seized a pot, planted the seed, and watered it carefully. Every day, he would water it and watch to see if that seed had grown. Others around him began bragging about the growth they were seeing. Others claimed to have had tall trees and tall plants, but not Ling. And he, of course, said nothing to his friends.
It was time, however, to present what they had been able to do with the seed given to them. Youth from all over that kingdom brought to the emperor their plants for inspection. When Ling got to the palace, he looked around at the beautiful plants of all shapes and sizes. Ling set his empty pot on the floor among all of the growth around him.
Kids, of course, started laughing, being cruel as they sometimes can be. Then, in walks the emperor, and amidst all of this growth and greenery, he spots Ling’s empty pot in the back and orders guards to bring them up to the front. The emperor turns to the crowd and says,
“Behold, this is your new emperor. One year ago I gave everyone here a seed. But I gave every one of you boiled seeds. I knew when I gave them to you that they would not grow. All of you went out and replaced what I gave you and brought me back fakery. And yet Ling was the only one with the courage and honesty to bring me back the seed I gave him. Therefore, he is the one who will be the kingdom’s new emperor.”
This is what has happened to the spiritual understanding of God’s church and the disappointment that the seeds we have planted have demonstrated little to no growth. This reality has tempted far too many who have initially claimed Christ to exchange Christianity for counterfeit seed, which looks good but is not the result of what has been extended from the hand of God.
Jesus understood the danger of the seed of the kingdom when placed in the hands of those who would not scatter it appropriately. So He decided to image it in what is referred to as the Parable of the Sower.
