SEPTEMBER 27, 2020 SUNDAY MESSAGE

Transcription Notes:

Good morning. So glad that you're here with us this morning. Hello to you that are online. Or if you're watching this later, I am Jody Lukowiak. I am the children's pastor here at Common Ground Northeast. 

As Eric mentioned, we are continuing today in The Gospel Story. We've divided it up into six movements, and we are continuing with Creation. Can any of the kids or the youth in the room with me shout out what the symbol is for creation? 

Crickets? I got a hint. 

Circle. That's right. Circle represents creation, and we remember God creating the Earth. Now, you might not know this about the Lukowiaks, but I think there's actually a gene that runs through the Lukowiaks with liking golf. 

I'm not sure I have the full gene, but my husband side of the family does, and we love to watch golf on TV. We like to go in person to see tournaments. Unfortunately, we've not been able to do that this year. We like to go putting together. We'll go to the driving range. 

James loves to go out on the golf course whenever he has a free moment. And one thing that I have learned about golf is it's pretty intricate with how you have to have yourself kind of pulled together and don't criticize how I'm holding the club or how I'm swinging. Okay, that's not why I'm here this morning, but the way you line up your legs, the way you have your hands, your shoulders. There are so many things that go into when you swing the golf club, and if you don't have it exactly right, your trajectory of the ball can go completely the way you don't want it to go. 

It might go into a water hazard. 

You might end up in a bunker. You might even end up on the fairway of a completely different hole. Similarly, with putting, if you've watched golf before you see the professionals get down and look at the line that they're going to hit, how to read the green. And if you don't hit the ball just the right way on the line, you might miss a really short putt. 

Now, some of you may not be golf fans. You may not have been to top golf, but there's other instances where we can start off on the wrong path or the wrong trajectory. Maybe you're a cross country runner and you've started off your race too fast. Maybe you were driving and you started off in the completely wrong direction. Maybe you're a student and doing a math problem and you started with a wrong equation and you ended up with a really goofy answer at the end. 

I want you to take time with the people that are in your row or if you're at home with your family or if you're journaling, we're going to do our recognized piece of response. And I want you to think about a time when you've started off on the wrong path or the wrong trajectory. So I'll give you some time to discuss and I'll give you a 32nd warning before we start up again. 

Give you about 30 seconds. Wrap up your conversations. 

Alright, I want you to keep those circumstances in mind and we are going to start talking about the gospel story and we could potentially see this story starting out as bad. It could take on a completely different trajectory if we're not careful and the greatness in Genesis could be lost and buried. If you've gone through rooted on the first day, we talk about the mysterious God and we're going to talk about some circumstances where you may have thought of God in a wrong way or in a different way. 

And maybe you think these things now or thought these things at some point in time. Let's look at some different scenarios if we jump ahead to the story of the rebellion in the fall, which I know we're not there yet. 

But if we think about that, maybe you grew up in a tradition where the focus was on the sinfulness of man, the fire and the brimstone. We're all going to hell. We're all terrible and bad people. That is one

perspective that we could start from. Maybe you even thought is God even here? 

Perhaps you think God is here to judge us, to condemn us and to give us an impossible set of rules to live by. Or maybe God just created us and he's just sitting here watching us passively do our thing. Or maybe you see God as a nine one, one operator that you only call when there's an emergency. Starting out from one of these perspectives from one of these trajectories can cause us to look at the Bible and God through a completely different lens. He could seem angry, scary and downright mean, you could read the Old Testament and be like, I don't want anything to do with this God that's being described here. 

You could look at the suffering and the punishment in the Old Testament. We could see God not being in relationship with us. We might not fill his presence. We might miss out on some of His love, Grace and mercy and all these things. All these scenarios have implications of how we look at the Bible at God's intentions and the bigger story. 

We could misconstrue God's character his identity and in turn, our own identity. If I go back to my golf analogy from earlier, we've hit the ball off the tee and we're way off the hole behind three trees and buried deep in the grass. So let's look back at what God tells us in Genesis. If we go back to the first few verses of Genesis into Eric sermon from last week, we remember that God created the water and the light in the land, and he filled those things. 

He filled them with the moon and the stars and the sun. 

And I'm going to use some of the language that we use in Godly play. He created the creatures of the sea, the creatures of the land, many legged creatures and two legged creatures. And what did God say after all this? It is good. And he just didn't say it once. 

He said it multiple times. Let us revisit the 6th day. If you want to open your Bibles or turn your devices to Genesis 128, we're going to read 28 31. I'll give you a moment to get 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. 

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. 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 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. And there was evening and there was morning the 6th day. I'm going to repeat the search of 31 again and God saw everything that he had made. And it was very good. There's a lot of emphasis of good here multiple times and then a very good all of creation had its moment on a certain day, and it's good in each part. 

And then here we see God looking at it collectively like a Symphony of talented musicians all working together. Good wasn't enough. It was very good. I went to pause here from Scripture and think about what the word good means. If you Google good, it is defined as to be desired or approved of, or have the qualities required of a particular role. 

How do we, as society define good? I know that I personally use it kind of flippantly and casually. Sometimes you might come up to me and say, hey, Jody, how are you doing? I'm good. I use it as equivalent of fine. 

In fact, when I looked up good on Google, the little similar word that came up underneath of it was the word fine. Things could be worse, things could be better. It's adequate if you look at it on a scale of one to ten. I see good being maybe just over the middle out of six parmesan wonders if our English language and meaning that we've created for good actually does it justice. We have a lot of bad in our society that jades our perspective.

Even thinking about the most tropical place that I could think of, I realized that there was probably poverty and suffering happening just around the corner. Knowing what I know about God I see his reaction being more in what I would term great. Fantastic. Wonderful. If you look at verse 31, very good. 

It might even mean awesome or awesome thoughts. If I go back to the number scale, surely it was a ten. If our children have been watching the creation video, I really love how our Godly play story starts out with creation. It starts out in the beginning. In the beginning, there was nothing. 

There was nothing except maybe a big smile. But no one was there to see it. I do this when I get excited about something, I see God doing this like, oh, look what's going to happen. This is going to be great. This is going to be fantastic. 

In Hebrew, good is the word Tove. And if we look at where Tove is used in the context, it means the following things Mary, pleasant or desirable in order. Usable. Creation was right orderly in harmony with each other. It is truly good, and it was exactly how God wanted it. 

It was perfect because we know God is perfect. And remember what God said in verse 31 that we read earlier. Every bit of creation was good. It is complete. Psalm 104, verse 31 says, May the glory of the Lord endure forever. 

May the Lord rejoice in his work as humans. Our work is often a reflection of who we are. God's work, and His reaction tells us a lot about his character. The Crossways Bible Commentary says this the additional behold. So this is the behold. 

In verse 31 invites the reader to imagine creation from God's vantage point. While many things do not appear to be good about the present day world, this was not so. At the beginning. Genesis goes on to explain why things have changed, indicating that no blame should be attributed to God. Everything he created was very good. 

It answers to God's purposes and expresses His overflowing goodness. Starting from this perspective, that can change our thinking. We can get our golf ball back on the right trajectory when we understand and remember that God sees all of creation in its original design as good. We see that God is good, he is loving, he has purpose and we have purpose. But sometimes our thinking can get us onto the wrong trajectory. 

When I first became a Christian, I struggled with the idea of unconditional love, just a little bit of background. I didn't grow up in the Church. We went to Church, maybe on Easter and on Christmas, and in my teenage years, I got it in my head that for my parents to love me, I needed to be an obedient child, follow the rules. And probably most importantly, I needed to do really well at school. Now I realized this wasn't true at the time. 

My parents really did truly love me. They still do. They're awesome people. I love them as well, but I spent a good chunk of my young life trying to please my parents and believing that was tied to how much they would love me. You do good deeds, you do them well. 

You receive love. That's how I thought. And that's how I translated that into my understanding about God. I thought that I needed to do X, Y, and Z for God to love me. I didn't understand truly what God's character was, and therefore my own identity was based on false information. 

Now we're going to move into our second piece of response time into reflection. So I want you to think about this or Journal about this, a time where you have misunderstood God or a lie that you've believed about God. And then the second question is, how did it cause you to act or to behave? I'll give you a few minutes and then I'll give you a 32nd warning. 

Give you 30 more seconds to wrap up your conversation.

Come on back. It wasn't until James was diagnosed with cancer in 2006 until I truly began to understand what God's unconditional love was. Our house, Church, our friends and our family. They did such a great job of loving us with expecting nothing. In return, people sent us gift cards from across the USA. 

I didn't even know people would stop what they were doing and take care of Carly so I could be by James's side. My thinking shifted. My understanding of God that had been influenced by my childhood wasn't how God worked at all. He doesn't need me to do XYZ for him to love me, but I understood about God's character was a lie. I didn't see God as good as it is declared in Genesis. 

My thinking began to shift in 2006 with my posture towards God. See, I was very angry with God. I was mad that James had cancer, not that God had given it to him, but that James had had cancer, and I was even more mad about the timing of it. Carly was just three months old, and I had no idea how I was going to take care of him, of James, of Carly, let alone myself. 

But God worked on me. He got me back on the right track of seeing his goodness. James tumor shrunk from being a size of a baseball to being fairly small. After just one dose of chemo. His doctors were amazed. 

You couldn't believe it. They were like, Come and look at this. And James was there to see Carly through some of her milestones. When she started to crawl, she started to roll over. He might not have been there to witness those if he was working. 

And when he felt well, I was able to get out of the house and gather my thoughts and recoup a little bit. Seeing these things and reminding myself of these things reminded me of how awesome and great and good God is. If we truly believe that he is good. The goodness from the creation story. We can trust God much like I began trusting God again after James's health issues, which, by the way, he's in remission and completely fine. 

Praise the Lord. We can see the Kingdom on Earth as it is in heaven differently. We can share a whole different story, a whole different gospel story that we are going to learn more about over the upcoming months. We can course correct those scenarios that we came up with at the beginning of my sermon. He isn't just a nine one one operator. 

He isn't here to just strictly condemn us and give us rules to follow. Our story becomes one of hope where we see the master of the universe loving us and ruling with love. We share mercy. We share Grace. We see delight. 

We share his unconditional love. When we see that God sees us as good in our original design, we see God as good our golf game where we hit it. We're no longer in the trees, behind the trees and in the rough. We've hit the fairway and we're really close to making it into the hole. Or maybe we've even hit a hole in one. 

Will you pray with me, heavenly Father, we are so thankful for your goodness. You created all the things that we get to love and enjoy, Father. The things of creation that we've learned about. Thank you for including each and every one of us in your plan. We ask that you remind us, Father, of your goodness and all the gifts of creation that you've given to us, father, help us stay on track of sharing your full gospel story and how it all began in Jesus name. 

Amen.




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COMMUNION:

 (1 COR. 11:23B-26)

“The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” 25 In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”





ANNOUNCEMENTS:





PRAYER REQUESTS:

We are hosting prayer team meetings for both the congregation at large and individuals to sign up for individual prayer. 






SUGGESTIONS FOR WORSHIP:

  • Coty Miller’s own “Praise & Worship” Spotify playlist and “Praise & Worship” YouTube playlist (slightly different from each other), both of diverse music that are being constantly updated!




  • Bethel Music :

    • Bethel Music’s hours of live music YouTube Playlist, also being constantly updated

    • Bethel provides chords to most (if not all) of their songs here (just have to register email, but free!) 





  • Live worship moments from the Upper Room YouTube Playlist

  • Journal writing! (I’m a writer too, so sometimes creative writing and writing my thoughts to God is my form of worship.) 

  • Declare and worship with truth by singing and praying scriptures. 

  • WORSHIP NIGHT! Dedicate a night to worship with friends and family, your house church or neighbors, those who need prayer, love worship, or just enjoy music through a video chat platform like Zoom. You can have one person leading at a time (switching off to whoever else wants to lead) while others sing along, pray, or prophesy, etc.

  • Serving your community, both online, in person, or both, is a great way to worship God, from spreading encouragement and God’s Word online to physically serving food to others. If you are able to go out and serve, click here for opportunities.





COMMISSIONING:

As Jesus said in John 20:21,

"Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you."

Go, be the Church! 

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 

Amen.

online gatheringKatie Ericksonworship