Dr. Bradford Reaves
Crossway Christian Fellowship
Hagerstown, MD, USA
www.mycrossway.org
View this and other messages at: https://mycrossway.churchcenter.com/channels/8118
This is the inaugural worship service for CrossWay Christian Fellowship
I wish to thank all of you for being here this morning as we celebrate the birth of CrossWay Christian Fellowship. Of special thanks this morning: Pastor Lee Reams, Miles Larson with the Brethren Church, and David Hobbs with Heritage Academy who provides this wonderful facility for us to use, thank you. This is a momentous occasion and there are so many stories of how God provided, directed, and blessed this church plant. I also want to take a moment to recognize my partner in ministry, who is often working behind the scenes with me, but no less important, and that is my wife, Andrea. Lastly, and most importantly, may we give honor to our Lord Jesus Christ.
Most of you know, but it is worth mentioning that I believe that there are many ways in which the Church must do better. And you have to admit we have some unique habits, especially from someone who is not a Christian looking in from the outside. Where else in the world can you go to see a sober man in a 3-piece suit dance the jig with everyone clapping? The practice of raising our hands, putting money on a plate, talking about blood, being joyful in times of sorrow, church potlucks...
But one of the more profound practices in the modern church of real concern is the number of believers who go to church every week and do not know their Bible, much less read it on a regular basis. Now, I don’t mean to belittle you, if you are one of those people, that’s not my goal. I believe we do something about it. Because if we truly believe this book to be the infallible and inspired Word of the Almighty God that holds the key to man’s questions and eternity, then why aren’t we doing more?
We are a Christian Church and a Brethren Church because we believe that Jesus is who He says He is, and we have accepted His sacrifice as payment for my sin. Beyond that, the first and foremost assertion of Christianity is implied by the question, What is man? The answer the psalmist gives to his own question demonstrates a starting point for Christianity that is different from any other belief system, secular or religious, except for Judaism:
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have set in place, what is man that You are mindful of him, the son of man that You care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. (Psalm 8:3-5)
These magnificent words were penned nearly three thousand years ago by a man marveling at the beauty and diversity of what he saw around him in nature — and yet recognizing the distinctiveness of a human being in contrast to nature.
This is why we started several weeks ago with the creation narrative. Because we have answered this question, “What is man?” If we are going to provide the answer to our destiny. I teach what the Bible teaches on the issue of creation, that God made the heavens and earth, along with everything in the heavens and the earth in 6 days. They are 6 literal days because that is what the Bible teaches and there is plenty of science to substantiate that, so why do we allow secular humanist scientists to teach us and our children otherwise? Why would it be ok for a Christian to question the Biblical view of this issue, but they are scoffed at for questioning the veracity of science?
Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson are on a camping trip. After a good meal, they lay down and went to sleep. In the middle of the night, Holmes nudges Watson awake, and says, "Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see."
"I see stars and millions of stars, my dear Holmes."
"And what would you infer from these stars?"
"Well, a number of things," he says. “Astronomically, I observe that there are millions of galaxies and billions of stars and planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Meteorologically, I expect that the weather will be fine and clear tomorrow. Theologically, I see that God is all-powerful, and man, his creation, small and insignificant. Why, Holmes? What does this mean to you?"
To which, Holmes replies, "Watson, you fool. Someone has stolen our tent!"
It is a funny story, but if we look at it against the backdrop of Creation, we see that an enormous robbery has taken place in which someone has stolen from you that which provides shelter for your life and we don’t even know it. It is not accidental that those who stick to a scientific single vision of ultimate reality start by denying a Creator, and from there, all other doctrines soon follow until you have nothing left than tradition and false teaching that is plaguing the church today that is actually leading people astray. It is how we have churches teaching you just need enough faith to be wealthy and happy, or churches that are teaching “grave sucking” as a means of acquiring deeper knowledge.
And so now we come to the point in the creation story where the final touches of heaven and earth are being prepared for the flagship of God’s creation, man. For the sake of clarity, I am going to start from verse 1 of the narrative and read through it.
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1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. 6 And God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” 7 And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. 8 And God called the expanse Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day. 9 And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. 10 God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. 11 And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. 12 The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening and there was morning, the third day. 14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. 16 And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. 17 And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, 18 to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. 20 And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.” 21 So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” 23 And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day. 24 And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so. 25 And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” (Genesis 1:1–26 ESV)
What we just read is the most amazing account of our origin. No man has a first-hand understanding of how things came to be, but we are given this through Scripture. God prepares for us a perfect home to give us life and sustain our life. Here we see it all unfold and meanwhile, we lean on the hope found in the evolutionists' equation of time+chance+matter.
In his book There Is a God, Anthony Flew reflects on an argument regarding the probability of human origin that he had to deal with in his younger days. The argument runs like this: How long would it take for an infinite number of monkeys pounding on an infinite number of typewriters to compose a sonnet by Shakespeare? (Believe it or not, this argument was based on an experiment conducted by the British National Council of the Arts.) A computer was placed in a cage with six monkeys, and after one month of hammering away at the keys and using the computer as a bathroom, the monkeys produced fifty typed pages — but not one single word.
This is amazing, considering that the shortest word in the English language could be a one-letter word such as the letter a or I. But a one-letter word is only a word if there is space on either side of it. Flew points out that if one considers that there are thirty keys on a keyboard, the possibility of getting a one-letter word is one in 30 x 30 x 30, which is one in 27,000. If these attempts could not even result in one one-letter word, what is the possibility of getting just the first line of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, let alone a whole sonnet?
“If you took the entire universe and converted it to computer chips — forget the monkeys — each one weighing a millionth of a gram, and had each computer chip able to spin out 488 trials at, say, a million times a second; if you turn the entire universe into these microcomputer chips and these chips were spinning a million times a second [producing] random letters, the number of trials you would get since the beginning of time would be 10 to the 90th trials. It would be off again by a factor of 10 to the 600th. You will never get a sonnet by chance — let alone the complete works of Shakespeare. The Universe would have to be 10 to the 600th times larger. Yet the world just thinks the monkeys can do it every time.” (Zacharias, Has Christianity Failed You?)
And so, CrossWay Christian Fellowship, THIS IS US! We are joining the ranks and being established by God as a church who holds in our hands the Words of Hope and the answers to the origin, meaning, morality, and destiny in a world that has not only lost the meaning of origin, meaning, morality, and destiny, but it is stubbornly and deliberately ignoring the fact that the tent has been stolen.
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68 Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, (John 6:68)
Warren Wiersbe said, “The scientist tells us that the world is a closed system and that nothing has changed. The historian tells us that life is a closed book and nothing is new. The philosopher tells us that life is a deep problem and nothing is understood. This is life under the sun.” Life is futile and fruitless without the understanding that there is a God and there is a Savior and meaning is only found when we submit our lives to the lordship of Christ. Will you come to him today?
