10:30 Call to Worship: Worship Leader
8/28/2016
The Solid Rock
Everlasting God
Holy Spirit
Amazed
Pastoral Prayer:
Slides:
James 5: 14 Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. 15And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up.
Congregational Prayer: Earthquake victims in Italy, Flood victims in LA.,
Review Summer Theme:
Empowered Summer Service:
Slide:
• Empowering Service – God calls us to impact our community through empowered service, each one stepping up, knowing that we are blessed to be a blessing.
Sermon:
Slide: Empowering Summer Service
• Empowering Service – God calls us to impact our community through empowered service, each one stepping up, knowing that we are blessed to be a blessing.
It is from a position of strength, that we bless others, by empowering service.
On the journey to full empowerment, we must address heart issues that hinder our empowerment.
Today, we again speak on as a subtitle:
Subtitle:
Slide: Racial Equality
How did we get to this point in the global community where racial tensions continue to flare up?
A deeper question is how are there so many different races and languages of people, when Genesis records the first human beings were Adam and Eve, so shouldn’t all their children be similar.
By God’s grace and his help, I hope to show you the scriptures that trace our beginnings, what went wrong, what went right, and why we now, in a racially diverse global community, living on a broken planet, that is subject to the violent tornadoes we read of in Indiana, and the earthquake in Italy.
I hope to have you leave here today, completely convinced that God the Father, Jesus the Son, created everything and everyone and the Holy Spirit, working in community together to invite others into their trinity of community.
God is on mission to reconcile all of creation to himself, and those whom he has reconciled are to join that mission to bring all others into relationship with God, through Christ Jesus.
We are going to tackle this topic as we are on the journey of empowered service.
We want to serve, but not in a deferring way, to a person who is in a dominating personality.
We serve by the power of the Holy Spirit, with a heart full of the fruit of the Holy Spirit.
We do not serve out of feeling less than others, or those we are to always defer to others.
That all leads to a dysfunctional view of our identity, and we want to follow Jesus, not a dysfunction.
As we prepare for this sermon, here is something light.
Joke: A mom had come home after work and found a big hole in the middle of the pie she had made before going to work. She found a gooey spoon lying in the sink and crumbs all over the floor.
She went to find her son.
David, she said, “you promised me that you wouldn’t touch the pie I made. And I promised you that if you did touch the pie, I would discipline you.”
A look of relief came over David. “Now that I’ve broken my promise, he said, I think it would be all right for you to break yours too.”
As we rise for the reading of scripture, let us be thankful, that even if we break our promises, that God, will never break his.
Hebrews 2
Slides:
11So now Jesus and the ones he makes holy have the same Father. That is why Jesus is not ashamed to call them his brothers and sisters.12For he said to God,
“I will proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters.
John 17:
Slide:
23I am in them and you are in me. May they experience such perfect unity that the world will know that you sent me and that you love them as much as you love me.
The Word of the Lord,
Thanks be to God.
Prayer:
Lord,
There is so much pressure to conform to the standards, customs, and ways of this world.
At the base of that conformity is the battle over the belief that you are the creator as written in the bible.
AS we all are being fed the diet of conforming to the world’s standards, that includes the belief that humanity has evolved over billions of years from dust, instead of being created from dust.
Help us, and help us understand our identity, in Christ, and recognize you as Creator,
In Jesus name,
Amen.
I humbly approach identity issues, including gender and racial equality, and realize that it is quite possible to not get the scriptures correct.
I also say, that it is possible that others also don’t have it correct, and in a relationship with God, we have the opportunity to search the scriptures.
It was God’s plan to love every human being equally as much as he loved Jesus.
No one is loved more or less than another. We are all loved equally, and are to love others equally.
Slide: How Did We Get Here?
Genesis 1 is a kind of overview, and Genesis 2 is more of a detailed account. Much of the New Testament was written with the teachings of Genesis forming the foundations of belief.
In the controversial text of scripture in 1 Cor. 11, the passage we will soon read, formed Paul’s understanding of where we came from.
That passage, often misunderstood, and misapplied is:
1 Cor. 11: 8 For the first man didn’t come from woman, but the first woman came from man.9And man was not made for woman, but woman was made for man.10For this reason, and because the angels are watching, a woman should wear a covering on her head to show she is under authority.
(you may need to hear the full sermon, but the short answer is, it is the woman herself who has been given the authority and freedom to choose who, if anyone will be here authority. She is free to be her authority, under Christ, as well as give that authority over her body to someone else as in marriage. And. Men also can freely choose to give authority over their body to their wife)
11But among the Lord’s people, women are not independent of men, and men are not independent of women.12For although the first woman came from man, every other man was born from a woman, and everything comes from God.
The creation account is where this comes from. And, for the mathematicians in the room, it may be fun for you to check out my commentary, who said the scripture I just read is a laid out similar to a mathematical equation, to illustrate that males and females are equal to one another.
My sense this past week, in preparing for this message is to slowly go through the passages of scripture that deal with our beginnings, and the beginnings of different races, languages and people groups.
There remain a lot of misunderstandings of humanities beginnings.
If you want, please turn in your bible, or look up here.
Slides:
Ge. 1: 26Then God said, “Let us make human beingsin our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.”
27So God created human beings in his own image.
In the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
28Then God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it.
The next passages are the ones Paul is referring to in the 1 Cor. 11 passages.
Slides:
Ge. 2: 7Then thelordGod formed the man from the dust of the ground. He breathed the breath of life into the man’s nostrils, and the man became a living person.
The great gift of being made in the image of God is complex. One aspect is the gift of being given free will.
Slides:
Ge. 2: 15ThelordGod placed the man in the Garden of Eden to tend and watch over it.16But thelordGod warned him, “You may freely eat the fruit of every tree in the garden—17except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you eat its fruit, you are sure to die.”
Slides:
Ge. 1: 21So thelordGod caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. While the man slept, thelordGod took out one of the man’s ribs and closed up the opening.22Then thelordGod made a woman from the rib, and he brought her to the man.
23“At last!” the man exclaimed.
“This one is bone from my bone,
and flesh from my flesh!
She will be called ‘woman,’
because she was taken from ‘man.’”
Adam from the dust, by God
Eve from the rib of Adam, also by God.
Now, all humans come from a woman.
8For the first man didn’t come from woman, but the first woman came from man.9And man was not made for woman, but woman was made for man.
12For although the first woman came from man, every other man was born from a woman, and everything comes from God.
The debate on evolution vs. creation is answered by the prhase, everything comes from God.
Males come from God.
Females come from God.
Caucasians come from God.
Blacks come from God.
Asians come from God.
Jews come from God.
Gentiles come from God.
EVERYTHING comes from God.
We are taught, and told, that everything evolved, not everything was created.
This is a huge issue, not easily solved in short Sunday morning service.
Adam and Eve were created, but something happened.
They used their free will, which was the primary thing of being made into the image of God, to willfully sin, and just as promised they died.
If I held up a ripe banana, it would be great for eating, but it is dead.
If I held up a tomato, it looks good, but it is dead.
They were dead, as we were dead, before Christ, even though they and we had life in us. It was not the eternal life of Christ.
This free will chose to go against the Lord and the Lord’s ways,
And in mankind’s disobedience, the Lord intervened.
As dead to God, mankind began to come up with their own ideas of what the world should be like.
In Genesis we can read of the Tower of Babel and
Dispersion of the languages, and races. Ancient peoples had come into such unity, and that unity was against the Lord, that the Lord had to disperse them by changing them from one language, to all the languages we now experience.
Slide
Ge: 11:6
“The people are united, and they all speak the same language. After this, nothing they set out to do will be impossible for them!7Come, let’s go down and confuse the people with different languages. Then they won’t be able to understand each other.”
Another passage in 1 Chronicles 1 In the days of Peleg, the earth was divided. There is room in the passage for the breaking up of the continents.
Slide:
1 Chr. 1:
19Eber had two sons. The first was named Peleg (which means “division”), for during his lifetime the people of the world were divided into different language groups.
The dispersion of the races, the separation of the races, was as a direct result of God intervening in the affairs of humanity who were using their unity against the Lord and the Lord’s ways.
Pause and ask, and clarify.
So far, this is a very brief understanding of how human beings were created, and how from one married, monogamous balanced pair; they became the source of all humans.
From those two, there are 7.4 billion and growing.
And there is estimated, 107 billion people have lived. This means that we are nowhere near close to having more alive than dead. In fact, there are 15 dead people for every person living.
The bringing back together of the races, the unity of the races will even more so be the result of God intervening the affairs of humanity through death, burial, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.
The short answer to all problems of humanity is traced back to the sin of Adam and Eve, the first, actual, human beings.
The short answer to all the solutions of humanity are traced back to the full and complete atonement of Jesus Christ through his death, burial and resurrection,
Slide:
Ga. 3: 28There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus.
On Christ, was placed the curses of sin upon all the races. All curses were lifted, and In Christ there is formed a new humanity.
In Christ, all inequalities are removed and we are equals.
No one is less than, or more than another.
Everything is from God.
Some may appear to be more gifted than another, but that is not take away from the reality that in Christ, we are equal, we are one.
Some have said, that time is the great equalizer.
Others say, death is the great equalizer.
Others have said, a gun in the hand of a woman is the great equalizer.
Others have said, a porta potty is the great equalizer.
But in reality, it is only Christ who is the great equalizer.
Christ makes us equal to one another.
Christ, and the ones he makes holy have the same Father.
And the Same Father loves us as much as he loves Jesus.
There remain racial distinctions, and there also is in place, racial equality.
Just as there gender distinctions, there are males, and there are females. and in Christ, forming a new humanity, did not take away the gender distinctions, but Jesus did remove the gender inequalities, making both genders equal, forming a balanced pair. That balanced pair is not just in relationship family relationship, but also in work relationships, political relations, etc.
Males and females are equal.