Created Not Creator

Intro: before we get into the message for this morning. I wanted to share thoughts about the next few weeks.

New Series called Entangled.

We want to look at what it is Christians believe, why we believe it and what we are supposed to do with it.

We will look at Orthodox Christian beliefs as well as Cultural beliefs.

Each week I’ll post a new video, you will get it in our mid week email

There will be sermon notes each week

and a ground floor after every service.

We want to invite you into dialogue.

These are complex times and complex issues. The church has a message of incredible love in Christ and we want to be a people who can engage well with the world.

take a broad view of scripture a broad view of the gospel and a broad view of the culture and see how those things interact

For this morning:

Our Search for Meaning is satisfied in the reality that We are Created in the Image of God.

if we are going to talk about human sexuality then we need to talk about the created order

because where we believe we come from matters how we view one another

if we believe we are created then it sets up a whole under of the value and dignity of humanity and the created order

Ephesians 1:3–6 ESV

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.

But what happens when we forget that?

When humanity loses that?

When we forget that we have come from somewhere, are connected to someone, and are going somewhere (telos)?

Then we only have the present moment and however it is we can define meaning within that.

like waking up and not knowing where we are

on the road. The main character sal wakes up in the middle of the day and doesn’t Realize where he is

I spent all day sleeping in a room at a small, gloomy old hotel near the railroad line. The bed was big and clean and hard. I woke up as the sun was getting red — and for about fifteen seconds I didn’t know who I was! I was far away from home, tired from traveling, and in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my early life and the West of my future. And maybe that’s why I truly forgot who I was, on that strange red afternoon. Pg 5 on the road **

The Christian is called to have long term memory regarding where we have come from and where we are going.

Now this is a series that will deal with issues of sexuality in the culture. And we will get to that today but for Christians we have to have better starting points.

And if you are here this morning and you are not a christian or you are seeking or looking. Maybe you have a perspective on sexuality that would be different from what you here.

Im going to invite to lean in. Please join the discussion

Stick around afterwords and engage in the ground floor. Ask questions and challenge thoughts

We have forgotten how to engage in dialogue around hard things.

We have only spoke to what we agree with or disagree with. We rarely go deeper Than that.

Because we often pick a starting point where We want to begin at where we disagree with the world.

The disagreement is already over at that point.

I’m going to ask us to begin somewhere else, and through that, be able to tell a more compelling story about human flourishing.

Because everything we are going to talk about this month has to do with purpose, identity and meaning

People want to be seen, they need to be seen. People want purpose.

And we will go to great lengths to get it.

Any length to get it.

And when people try to find that definition outside of God, things get difficult very quickly.

When we forget, things can get difficult.

- We were created to find the entirety of our lives and meaning in God.

- That’s why Christ came. So that what we lost, we could find in Him again.

- There is not better news than we have been seen and acted upon by a selfless act of love by Christ.

when we forget things get difficult. Because we have forgotten Christ has shown up

- Because until that is realized we will try to find ways to fill that pursuit for meaning.

- We love to find meaning and self definition.

- Nothing fills our days more than a pursuit for identity.

- And we will keep going until we find something worthwhile.

Because we look for meaning anywhere, we will try to find that meaning anywhere. We will build meaning into our lives using anything we can,

- Because we build lives off fragments not the whole

this is something we find ourselves doing all the time as people. We find importance in the pieces and the parts of ourselves, not in the whole value of the self.

And to be fair there is value in the pieces and parts of what we do, but those things are never enough to create a whole definition.

We are taught to think in terms of distinctiveness of the self, all our pieces and parts, not the whole.

We do this with every part of our life. Work, family, hobbies, ideas, and even within our sexuality.

This is the current frame of our culture.

Puzzles. Each puzzle paints a picture

But what happens when we try to find the picture in a lot of other pictures.

We need someone who knows the picture on the box.

We have given sex and sexuality the highest place of human meaning in our culture. That there is nothing greater than achieving sexual fulfillment or ordering your life based on your sexuality.

But sex and sexuality, while very important, were never given that kind of importance. Never given the highest order of importance.

we order sex at the highest level of human achieving but it cannot deliver highest and utmost level results

The conversation around sexual ethics has to happen in the church because culture has confused humanities highest ordering as being sexuality. It has divinized our sexuality in terms of purpose and identity. The church communicates that sexuality is important but it is not the most important. We have to return our sexuality to where it belongs. It is part of our identity and purpose. It is not the whole.

Sexuality becomes the largest fragment we can find in order to work to become whole

The writer named Michel Foucault places sex above the human soul. The problem is that when sex is the highest demand of human identity, it will always face toward getting individual needs met.

The issue is not sex. it’s that we have made far too much out of sex.

We have tried to find ourselves in sexual pursuits.

We have tried to find ourselves in sexual identity

But even though these are vastly important things, they will never be the whole thing.

They are part of who you are but not the whole of who you are.

We look at this entangled culture and this pursuit is the highest order.

This is what people are chasing after.

There is a reason sexuality is the highest ordering of human flourishing

Because outside of Christ it is the most powerful driver of human identity.

It’s everywhere because people are trying to find themselves. We are trying to make sense of our lives and are telling the story through sexuality.

We have looked to sexuality to complete us. We do it in the world and we do it in the church. We think that identifying by our sexuality will complete us or that speaking against another’s identity will complete us.

What can we do about it?

Let’s look at the created order

Genesis 1:26–28 ESV

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.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 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.”

This passage comes in the beginning of the Bible. God is the author of all creation. He is speaking creation into being, He is holding all things together. He is the authority over all things.

The God who created the whole of all things is Himself completely whole. He is the actual, the unmoved mover.

He creates humanity within the whole created order. That creation is called good. In creating humanity? Very good.

We are created into a complete picture. One that, on this side of a brokenness that we have created, we are trying to restore.

Jesus coming on our behalf is the restoration of that entire picture.

God never works in parts, He is after fullness and wholeness.

All of God, in all of His planning, Giving all of Jesus to restore us back to wholeness.

We look at how God created and how He redeemed and it is a reminder that

We are more valuable than any sense of fragmented definition.

We need to define ourselves as whole people.

And we are called to invite others into that definition of wholeness.

Now, I am making comments about the culture as a whole and I will continue to do so, because we do want to talk about the way in which we search for meaning and the way in which we do so in ways that don’t work.

Because, when it comes down to it, we are all sexually broken. And we equally need the redemption of Christ applied to our lives.

We don’t get a pass because we are in church or because you have perfect attendance.

No one gets a pass. Not even one.

Unfortunately, it is necessary to mention that the church doesn’t even have the moral high ground here.

We have not earned our way into believing that we have exceeded expectations in our own sexual sin and identity

We need to be reminded that we need the same redemption that everyone needs. The difference between us and anyone else is simply that we have agreed with Christ that He is the One do to it.

And prayerfully our lives will look different, that they will be marked by a grace that comes from God HImself.

But that isn’t always the case.

So the idea in this series is not to point fingers at those who are sexually different.

It is to realize just how much we need the fullness of Jesus in our lives to redeem that which is broken.

And when there are people who share different perspectives on sexuality than us, the goal is not to strong arm them into agreeing, it is to invite them into the same redemptive relationship with Christ that we have and need.

It is to exact compassion for others who are trying to find their way in the world through fragments and not the whole.

We can Trust the created order. The way that God has created us, and that God Himself has created us. He has given us meaning because we are created in His image.