Creation Vs. Evolution: You Don't Have To Be A Monkey To Believe Creation Series

Sunday AM—7/3/05

SERIES: Genesis—The First Soap Opera

MESSAGE 1: Creation Vs. Evolution—You Don’t Have To Be A Monkey To Believe In A Creator

Felt Need Intro:

Good morning! I hope you are doing great this morning. We’re going to begin a message series this morning that’s a little different than we normally do on Sunday mornings. On Wednesday nights, we like to try to pick on book of the Bible and work our way through it, passage by passage. It really is the best way to study the Bible. It lends itself well to discussion and interaction as we ask questions about the verses we’re studying, figure out what it meant for them back then, what it means for us today, and what we’re going to do about it. I encourage you to come on Wednesdays if it all possible. We just finished a series on the book of Daniel. Well, we’re going to do something on Sunday mornings that I thought we might enjoy and that I think might just benefit us all. We’re going to begin a message series on the very first book of the Bible…the book of Genesis.

If you’ve never read the book of Genesis, then you really are missing out. It has some really important and some really interesting stuff in it. Genesis has 50 chapters, so we aren’t going to be able to cover every story…aren’t you grateful for that? But, we will look at some of the highlights and some of the low lights…learning from great things that happened and from some bad things that happened. If you’ve never really got into the book of Genesis before, you’ll probably be surprised at some of the stuff that’s in it. Every time I read it, I think this ought to be on prime time television. Sometimes Genesis appears more like a soap opera than it does a book of the Bible. But, all the way through we see how God is beginning to work in the lives of men and women that will turn to him.

So, this morning we begin our message series called, “Genesis: The First Soap Opera”. And with Genesis, you must start with chapter 1. The beginning of it all. So, today we are going to look at God creating the world with a message called, “Creation Vs. Evolution—You Don’t Have To Be A Monkey To Believe In A Creator.”

Would you open your Bibles with me to Genesis 1?

This morning we are going to read the first chapter, but what I’d rather us do is for all of us to read the book of Genesis together as a church. I would like for everyone in our church to read one chapter a day, starting today. How many of you would be willing to take the Genesis Challenge and do your best to read one chapter a day. If you do that it will take you seven weeks to read it and you will have read the entire book of Genesis in less time than our series will last. My plan is to also get others involved and let them share on portions of Genesis that they enjoy or that challenge them.

Before we read together, let me show you something. I was in a training session at work where they showed some of these videos. It’s some TV commercials from a business called careerbuilder.com. Strangely enough, this is ironically similar to what my job is like during the week…

Show videos:

• Careerbuilder.com Monkey videos

The whole point of these videos of course is to use humor as a way to get you to use their website to find your next job. There’s always someone at work that just monkey’s around all the time or someone you just don’t get along with. Sometimes that’s enough to make you want a new job. Well, the whole point is that we aren’t supposed to work with monkeys. And if your job makes you work with monkeys, come to us, because we can help you find a better job.

Here’s the interesting thing though…there’s a theory out there that says that maybe we should be more tolerant of those monkeys. Why is that? Because they are our ancestors. We came from monkeys right? Isn’t that what evolution says?

There are lots of views and there have been hundreds of books written about where we all came from. But, there are three major views out there about how life came into being.

1. Evolution

Evolution claims that all of life came from one simple cell that just evolved over a period of millions and millions of years. Strict believers in evolution totally deny the existence of God as a Creator. Life just evolved and cell turned into scum which turned into tadpoles which turned into fish which turned into monkeys which turned into humans. Now, it’s not quite like that but basically it is. Life came into existence on it’s own.