Scripture: Genesis 2:4-17

Key Takeaways:

+ Work is a good gift from God.

“Let the Church remember this: that every maker and worker is called to serve God in his profession or trade—not outside it. The Apostles complained rightly when they said it was not meet they should leave the word of God and serve tables; their vocation was to preach the word. But the person whose vocation it is to prepare the meals beautifully might with equal justice protest: It is not meet for us to leave the service of our tables to preach the word.” – Dorothy Sayers, “Why Work?”

+ Work is to be done for God and for his glory.

Ephesians 6:5–8

+ Good work that glorifies God is ethical work.

+ Good work that glorifies God is excellent work.

"The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables. Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly – but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry?” – Dorothy Sayers, “Why Work?”

 “The Christian shoemaker does his duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes, because God is interested in good craftsmanship.” – Martin Luther

Exodus 31:1–5

Proverbs 22:29

+ Work is how we partner with God in his care of the world.

 “God Himself will milk the cows through him whose vocation that is.” – Martin Luther

+ Our identity is to be found in Jesus and his work, not ours.

“If our identity is in our work, rather than Christ, success will go to our heads, and failure will go to our hearts.” – Tim Keller

Scripture: Genesis 2:1-3

Key Takeaways:

Proverbs 26:15

+ SHABBAT = Sabbath

Isaiah 40:28

 + God created this world and put us in for:

-       His good pleasure

-       His glory

Exodus 20:8-10

+ Sabbath Keeping: Principle vs Rule

-       As Christ followers are we required to keep the Sabbath as a rule?

Mark 2:23-28

Romans 14:1; 5-6

+ Summary of work and rest:

-       Work diligently as unto the Lord.

-       Rest consistently centered on the Lord.

 “Our hearts are restless, until they find their rest in You.” – Augustine

Matthew 11:28-30

John 19:30 

+ “TETELESTAI”

Scripture: Genesis 1:26-31

Key Takeaways:

+ God made us male and female to bear his image

-       Matthew 19:3-6

+ Our bodies are a good gift from God and tell us who we are

“This is hugely important. If the body is merely a vehicle or a costume for the real you, then it is the equivalent of property. But we know this can’t really be the case. However much we might privilege the mind or soul over the body as the ‘real’ us, we know deep down that the body is an essential part of who we truly are. When people hurt your body, you know that they have not just damaged some of your property; they have violated you. What you do to someone’s body, you do to a person… We cannot escape our embodied-ness. Alastair Roberts sums it up neatly: ‘The body isn’t just something that clothes the self but is itself the self.” – Sam Allberry. What God has to say about our Bodies.

+ Some people feel an incongruence between their biological sex and their internal sense of self

“In many Western countries, we’ve seen a massive spike in teenagers questioning their gender. For instance, the Tavistock Centre in London, the main gender clinic in the United Kingdom, treated 51 (34 males, 17 females) children and teenagers in 2009 who had gender dysphoria or were identifying as trans*. In 2016, the same clinic saw 1,766 (557 males, 1,209 females) children and teenagers, and in 2019 it saw 2,364 (624 males, 1,740 females). That’s more than 5000% increase among females in 10 years. Researchers have documented similar upsurges, among biological females in particular, in many Western countries: Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States.” – Preston Sprinkle. Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church, and What the Bible Has to Say.

+ Our hope is in transformation not transition

“Christian discipleship is oriented toward living out the divine image that God created us to be. Sexed bodies are part of that image. Ontologically then, transitioning would be moving us further away from who we are, not bringing us closer to it.” – Preston Sprinkle. Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church, and What the Bible Has to Say.

-       Romans 12:1-2

-       2 Corinthians 5:17

+ See people as image bearers that are to be loved, protected, and cared for

+ Develop convictions not just gut reactions

+ Parents, own and exercise your authority compassionately

+ Seek to be a welcoming community that listens, learns, loves, and shares the truths with compassion and patience

Scripture: Genesis 1:26-31

Key Takeaways:

“The historian Tom Holland, a longtime secular progressive, recently wrote that despite his faith in God fading during his teen years, he now realizes his most fundamental instincts about life only makes sense as an inheritance from the Christian story. Holland’s book, Dominion, is a journey through Western history to narrate how our culture’s moral ideals derive “ultimately from claims made in the Bible: that humans are made in God’s image; that his Son died equally for everyone; that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.” Human rights, a universal concern for the vulnerable, human equality, sexual restraint, the reverence for humility, and the notion of moral progress itself are just a few of our common ideals that have developed in light of the Christian story. Holland can’t get past the irony: “The West, increasingly empty though the pews may be, remains firmly moored to its Christian past.” – Joshua Chatraw, Telling a Better Story

+ To Relate to God

+ To Reflect God

Genesis 2:25

+ To Represent God

 Psalm 8:1-6

Colossians 1:15

Hebrews 2:6-9

Romans 3:23-24

Scripture: Genesis 1:26-31

Key Takeaways: 

+ Every human being possesses dignity as an image bearer of God

“But human rights are just like Heaven, and, like God, it’s just a fictional story that we’ve invented and spread around. It may be a very nice story. It may be a very attractive story. We want to believe it, but it’s just a story. It’s not a reality. It is not a biological reality. Just as jellyfish and woodpeckers and ostriches have no rights, homo sapiens have no rights, also. Take a human, cut him open, look inside. You find their blood, and you find the heart and lungs and kidneys, but you don’t find any rights. The only place you find rights is in the fictional stories that humans have invented and spread around.” – Yuval Noah Harari, TED Talk

+ You Matter

+ All People Matter

+ Christianity Matters

+ Every human being is fully dependent upon God

Image: I make a sacrifice to the God → The God gives me what I want

Acts 17:24-25

Image: God reaches down in unmerited grace → We respond in joyful and obedient thanks

Ephesians 2:8-9

Scripture: Genesis 1:1-2:3

Key Takeaways:

“Today as I read Genesis 1–2 my thoughts go to high school biology and physics. How does the biblical depiction of creation relate to the big bang theory and evolution? No doubt, Genesis 1–2 has bearing on our evaluation of these modern scientific accounts of cosmic and human origins. But a moment’s thought will jar us into remembering that this comparison would not have occurred to ancient authors and readers. It is certain that the biblical account of creation was not written to counter Charles Darwin or Stephen Hawking, but it was written in the light of rival descriptions of creation...Since God’s people were constantly tempted to worship the deities of other nations, we shouldn’t be surprised that the biblical accounts of creation were shaped in such a way as to provide a clear distinction from those of other nations.” – Tremper Longman III, How to Read Genesis

+ Creation is God bringing cosmos out of chaos

+ Creation is framing and filling

+ Creation is God revealing himself

Romans 1:20

-       Declares the glory of God

Psalm 19:1-2

-       Displays the wisdom of God

+ Creation is God’s good gift to us

+ God brings about the new creation like he brought about the first creation

2 Corinthians 4:4-6

Scripture: Genesis 1:1

Key Takeaways:

Psalm 33:6

Nehemiah 9:6

Revelation 4:11

+ God Exists as the Eternal and Transcendent God

            Aseity

Hebrews 11:6

+ God Exists as the Good and Personal God

“There is a philosophical fissure between fundamental impersonalism or fundamental personalism. First of all, there is the difficulty of deriving ethical values from a nonpersonal source. If the universe is most fundamentally matter, time, and chance, then it becomes very hard to argue that one combination of those three is necessarily and of itself better than another combination  - for example, that life is better than death or kindness better than selfishness - in any way that gets deeper than a feeling or an unjustifiable decision… the impersonal cannot create obligation. From looking at the natural world, we can tell what is but not what should be. We can tell that hot is different from cold, drought from moisture, lightness from heaviness, and good from ill, but we cannot tell in any of those cases that one is better than the other in any way more profound than we happen to prefer it. Philosophers try very hard, sometimes very hard indeed, to derive something resembling commonly accepted human ethical principles from a radically impersonal universe, but such valiant and well-meaning attempts tend to be unconvincing or rely on the goodwill of the reader in granting contestable assumptions.” – Christopher Watkin, Thinking Through Creation.

+ God Exists as the Triune God

John 1:1

John 1:18

John 17:5

John 17:24

1 Peter 1:18-20

“For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.” – Aristotle, 384–322 BC

“Plato thought that in order to be worth rearing, children must be “malleable, disposed to virtue and physically fit”. If they did not prove themselves worthy, parents would “properly dispose of [them] in secret, so that no one will know what has become of them.” Aristotle thought defective children should be exposed—that is, discarded at rubbish tips, abandoned on hillsides, thrown down wells or drowned in rivers. “As to exposing or rearing the children born, let there be a law that no deformed child shall be reared.… Around the world and down through history the vast majority of cultures have considered that we are all better off without the weak.” – Glenn Scrivener, The Air We Breathe

Scripture: Psalm 23

Key Takeaways:

+ A Shepherd leads by provision, presence and protection

Matthew 16:31-22

+ We worship the Lord because He is a divine provider

+ We worship the Lord because of His divine presence

“Dear Jesus, how foolish of me to have called for human help when You are right here.” – Corrie Ten Boom, Hiding Place

+ We worship the Lord because of His divine protection

+ We are worshipping when we FOLLOW the Lord

+ LORD (all caps) = YHWH;  Lord (lower case) = Adonai 

John 10:10-11

+ Worship the Shepherd. Follow Jesus.

Scripture: Psalm 133

Key Takeaways:

+ God is pleased when His people dwell in unity

John 17:20-23

+ Renewal happens when God’s people dwell in unity

Romans 12:16

Romans 13:8

Romans 14:3

Romans 15:7

Romans 15:14

Romans 16:16

1 Corinthians 16:20

2 Corinthians 13:12

1 Peter 5:14

+ Jesus is seen when God’s people dwell in unity

Scripture: Psalm 80

Key Takeaways:

+ The Need for Renewal

– Loss of God’s presence

– Loss of Joy

Psalm 32:3-4

Psalm 31:9-10

– Loss of Spiritual Power

+ The Prayer for Renewal

Acts 3:19-20

Isaiah 30:18