Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires Series

“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep. While a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’ and there was light … and God saw that the light was good” (Genesis 1:1-4)

Genesis … the beginning. In Hebrew, it is the first word of the Bible.

And how did creation start?

Words.

God spoke, “Let there be light” … and there was light.

To me, the writers of the Bible had to be inspired. None of us were there when God created the universe and all the life within it. We know that it had to have a beginning. We know that the power and the person to create such a universe and fill it with life had to be, well, immense … intelligent far beyond our comprehension … powerful beyond imagination … and very, very, very creative. All this didn’t just pop into existence. Too much thought had to go into it. Creation is too precise, too beautiful, too interconnected, to just be a random accident or a series of random accidents.

“Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our own image, according to our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). So …. Let’s go on the basis that this true. Right now, there’s a voice in your head. We call it “thought” or “thinking.” Right now that voice is talking to you. It’s saying things. You are having a complete conversation without moving your mouth. Maybe you’re thinking … talking to yourself … about what I’m saying right now. Maybe the voice in your head is wondering where I’m going with all this … or it’s wondering when I’m going to shut up … or who’s going to win the Super Bowl … or planning out the rest of your day. Right now, there is an invisible voice inside your talking to you, just as I have a voice talking inside my head right now wondering if I’ve lost you already.

We have this voice inside our heads and it starts talking to us the minute we open our eyes and it keeps talking all day until we go to sleep … and maybe keeps on talking even when we’re asleep. I don’t know because I’m, well, asleep. Something’s going on when we sleep because we dream, which is cool. How nice of God to play movies in our heads while we sleep for seven or eight hours? Some of those dreams seem pretty real, amen? And sometimes we’re the stars in our own nocturnal movies.

How often do you think about that voice? How often are you aware of it? I mean, that voice talks to you all the time but when was the last time you were “aware” of it? What does it sound like? I assume it sounds like me because it is in my heard, but I really don’t know what it sounds like because I’ve never heard it with my hears … just with my mind. I imagine it can be like hearing a recording of my voice. My voice never sounds anything like what I think I sound like. Maybe it’s the same with the voice inside my head.

Where do all these non-stop “thoughts” come from? “Well, Pastor, they come from my brain … duh!” Okay … but where inside your brain do they come from? Is your “mind” a thing? A place? Is it just your brain “talking” to you? How? It has no mouth, throat, tongue. Do these thoughts come from God? Or some “unseen” place where thoughts are born … “generated”? Nobody here is sitting here with a blank mind. Not one of us is here thinking nothing. All our minds are thinking right now … and these thoughts come from a “formless void” … some place dark and deep … beyond our consciousness. They come out of that darkness, that place and become “conscious” … they become real … and we can say and picture an infinite number of things.

In other words, we can “create” with our minds as God creates with His mind. And we can make the things that we think of, the things we picture with our minds, real. Remember our discussion on temptation two weeks ago. Sin doesn’t just happen … it starts with a what? A thought. And that thought leads to action.

God created the universe with His mind and then He let those thoughts out … He spoke … “Let there be” … and it happened … it was created. And then He created us and He gave us this power … the power to have thoughts … the power to express our thoughts … to share our thoughts. “Then the Lord said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make Him a helper as his partner. So out of the ground the Lord formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was it’s name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field” (Genesis 2:18-20). Giving the creatures, the plants, the celestial bodies names … the beginning of communication. When I say “tiger” you picture a tiger. When I say lizard,” you know what I mean.