Adore: The Creator

Open your Bible with me to Genesis, chapter One.

We have been traveling through the Gospel of Mark together for quite a while.

But for the next few weeks, as we prepare our hearts to celebrate Christmas together, we are going to focus our attention together on Adoration.

O come, let us Adore Him. O come, let us Adore Him! O come, let us Adore Him, Christ the Lord!!

I love this time of year. I love everything about the Christmas season.

But more and more, louder and louder, the adoration we see in the world around us is not for the child born in a manger.

It is for what might come under the Christmas tree.

It is for family gatherings, special foods, and decorations.

It is for lighting spectaculars and events.

It is for hot cocoa, and love stories, and everything magical.

And the problem that we face is not that any one of those things is wrong for us to enjoy.

The problem is that we adore them instead of the King born to die that we might have life in Him.

And so, as we draw near to the Birthday of Jesus, we are going to draw near to Him and reflect on the many reasons that We have to adore Jesus.

THE WORD ADORE means to worship or honor as a deity or as divine.

It is to be filled with awe and wonder at the One who is beyond us.

We use the word to mean loving admiration and devotion.

We use it to speak of things we are fond of.

But its best use is its first: the absolute love, awe, and wonder owed to God because of Who He Is!

Jesus is our God and King and we have every reason to adore Him. We are going to consider four between now and the end of the year.

We will adore Him as…

The God of Creation

The Light of the World

The Suffering Servant

And as GOd with Us

This morning, we will consider Him, the God of creation. We will see three different pictures of God as creator, three reasons that we should adore Him. Let us look together at Genesis 1, starting in verse 1. As we will be jumping around some this morning, I won’t ask you to stand with me as I normally would.

Genesis 1:1–3 CSB

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness covered the surface of the watery depths, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

This season, I pray that you will look all around you and choose to

Adore the God Who creates.

Verse 1 of our passage marks the beginning.

Not the beginning of God, but the beginning of time.

Before the beginning, there was nothing but God.

God is the exclusive artist of creation.

He works alone and needs help from no one.

His work is sovereign, as He does whatever He chooses.

His work is effortless. A man could work a thousand lifetimes to accomplish what God does in a single spoken Word.

Everything that is, that was, or that ever will be begins with God. He acts before anything else even exists and He is independent of the creation that He crafts.

The words we translate “formless and void” in verse two give us a picture of a barren wasteland. Uninhabitable, unordered, empty, and dark.

No light revealing what is there or what is not.

I’m reminded of a movie where a child looks up the North Pole in an encyclopedia to find that it is dark, cold, empty, and devoid of life.

This was the world before God spoke, and yet what does it say? He was present

The Spirit of God was hovering over the waters…” God was on the move. He was present and purposeful in His movement.

Up to this point, creation is disordered and empty. It is unable to produce life or do anything else on its own.

But…God spoke. The God of Creation spoke! LET US ADORE HIM.

God spoke, And in a moment, the history of everything was changed.

God spoke, and by His words creation is born.

And in His first act within His creation, God creates light!

God shows us immediately that He is the destroyer of darkness.

Light reveals. Light brings order.

Light sustains life. We will unpack this more next week-but it is no coincidence that Jesus comes as the Light of the World.

But the point this morning is that God brings light to the chaos by the power of His Word.

We can adore God as He brings order, beauty, and purpose where none existed.

It was true at the dawn of creation

And it is true in our lives today.

Let’s continue, moving forward to John 1:1

John 1:1 CSB

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

This season, as you gather with family and friends, won’t you choose to

Adore the Word Who creates.

It would seem to the onlooker that I am up here this morning merely to repeat myself, and yet I do so because that is what God does in our second text!

John deliberately repeats the opening phrase of Genesis…in the beginning.

But then He tells us something about Jesus. He speaks of God the Son.

John says “in the beginning was the Word.”

The word was here tells us that the Word already was when the beginning began.

The Word comes from before the beginning.

The Word comes from that time, that place, that eternity when the only thing that was, was God.

And that is exactly what John says about it, in case there was any doubt…

The Word was with God-Not only was the Word present with God the Father, but He was in relationship with Him.

The Word was God- The Word is not a creature. He is not a creation, a secondary being. He shares in the divine essence.

In other words, John identifies the Creator of the Universe from Genesis 1:1, the God Who made everything, as the eternal WORD.

FOR YOU AND I, THE MOMENT COULD NOT GET ANY BIGGER, because John goes on to say in verse 14:

John 1:14 CSB

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

THIS INFANT, THIS KING, THIS CHILD IN A MANGER is the WORD OF GOD, WRAPPED IN HUMAN FLESH.

THIS IS THE ONE WHO SPEAKS AND PLANETS ARE FORMED.

Jesus is the agent of creation-He is the One who acted in making everything that is.

How incredible that our Creator is the One who enters into His creation.

In art and in music, every creator develops a character, a style, a fingerprint if you will, that can be seen in all of their works.

I remember studying music and getting to a place where I could recognize the music of Bach or Beethoven or Mozart even if I had never heard the piece before.

The same is true of paintings. Fans of Picasso don’t need long to recognize His works.

And the same is true of you and I. Jesus, the One who created everything, has His fingerprints all over you.

Now, imagine with me for a moment that you had the privilege of sitting down and talking to Picasso. Imagine that he sat with you and showed you his art, interpreted it for you.

Imagine that you sat with Mozart and he explained to you what he was hearing, or envisioning when he put pen to the page. Imagine such a composer describing to you in his own words what he wanted to convey to his listeners, even as you listened to the music that he was describing.

Or, perhaps we could take our imaginations a step further. Imagine for a moment, that Mozart could somehow, himself, become the music. That is, that when you listened to His music, that what you were hearing was not the music that Mozart wrote, but Mozart himself.

That in looking at every brush stroke of a master painter was to actually look at the painter themselves because they had somehow entered into their art in such a way that it actually embodied who they are.

And as crazy, as impossible, as enchanting as that idea may sound, friends, will you realize this morning that this is exactly what Jesus did.

Jesus, the Word made flesh created everything that is. He created it all. He set it into motion. And then, in our darkest hour, Jesus entered into His own work of Art.

He came that We might know Him deeply and intimately.

He came to be the light in our darkness and to free us from it.

He came that He might show us all that He created us for.

Ephesians 2:10 CSB

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time for us to do.

Won’t you adore the Word made flesh, the Creator of everything, for that is what He created you to do!

The Apostle Paul expands on what John 1:1 declares in Colossians 1:15-20. Let’s turn there now together:

Colossians 1:15–20 CSB

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For everything was created by him, in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities— all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and by him all things hold together. He is also the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile everything to himself, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

This season, as you spend time enjoying the festivities that will fill our homes and our city,

Adore the Son Who creates, sustains, and reconciles.

We will speak of Emmanuel, of God with us, in the coming weeks.

But for now, let us revel in that which can be seen.

Hebrews 11:1 CSB

Now faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen.

Before His appearing, what remained unseen was God.

The evidence of Him has been seen and heard since the dawn of creation.

But Jesus is the full and perfect revelation of God.

He is the visible expression of the invisible God.

No longer do we have to wonder who God is, for He lives and has walked among us.

Our faith is not in the invisible, nor is it built on something made by human hands.

Our faith is the One Who came, Who lived and died, and Who rose again.

He is, as Paul echoes John and Genesis in 15-16, the creator of all things.

There is a law, a concept in physics, called the law of first cause.

It is actually a derivative of thermal dynamics.

You see, we know that for everything that is and everything that happens, there is a cause.

The law of first cause simply states that necessarily something caused everything else to exist and to occur.

The world of science scratches their heads, postulates theories, and searches for the cause that started it all.

You and I can open the Bible and read that the first cause has a name, and His name is Jesus!

Jesus isn’t part of creation-He is its cause.

Jesus didn’t enter a world that was foreign to Him.

Nothing that He encountered here caught Him by surprise.

Our world was

created by Him

through Him

and For Him.

Jesus is the One that continues to hold the universe together.

Everything works only because He tells it to.

Your lungs fill with air because He gives the command.

He is the one that numbers our days.

He holds all things in His hands.

And when we break His law, when we choose rebellion over obedience, Jesus is the One who brings reconciliation.

You and I took His perfect creation and we chose to rebel against Him. We brought sin and death into the world.

Since that time, all of mankind has been striving, trying to find a way back to God.

Every religion in the world has a roadmap that leads to what they think is righteousness.

The problem is that we have broken God’s Law and by doing so we have broken the world.

On our own, we cannot make ourselves right with God, because we are incapable of fixing what we broke.

And if that weren’t enough, we continue to choose rebellion against God.

Every other religion in the word takes to view, the position, that man is basically good and that we can choose between right and wrong.

But listen to what God tells us in Psalm 14

Psalm 14:1–3 CSB

The fool says in his heart, “There’s no God.” They are corrupt; they do vile deeds. There is no one who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on the human race to see if there is one who is wise, one who seeks God. All have turned away; all alike have become corrupt. There is no one who does good, not even one.

All of mankind lives in constant rebellion against God.

We made ourselves enemies of God by pursuing the opposite of what He calls us to, desires, and is working towards.

What we deserve is death and destruction. Instead, God continues to sustain the earth and showers us over and again with His mercies.

What is even more astounding, more awe inspiring than the fact that He continues to love us is that He acted on His love for us, His enemies, to the extent that He took it completely on Himself to reconcile our relationship with Him.

Look at verses 18-20 of Colossians 1 once more:

Colossians 1:18–20 CSB

He is also the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile everything to himself, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

Jesus died on the cross to pay the price for your offenses against Him.

His blood washed clean the ledger of our debt.

Christmas carries the promise of peace on earth because it makes the cross possible. Even as Paul writes in Romans 5:1

Romans 5:1 CSB

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Jesus not only created everything that is, He died to redeem it, so that through faith in Him we might have His peace.

O Come, let us Adore Him.

This Christmas, our adoration of this child born King of the Universe is not the cuddly-giggles type of adoration.

It is the awe and wonder of the God who created everything entering His creation to redeem it.

Our adoration is that His new-found humanity was not enough, but that this child who was fully man and fully God would choose to die so that we might live.

JESUS IS…

The God who speaks light into darkness…

The Word of God made flesh…

The Creator who entered creation to reconcile it to Himself.

Today, let the baby of the manger draw us to our knees.

Let us bow before Him, crying glory to God in the Highest! Peace on those with whom He is pleased.

As we enter this Advent, this time of preparation, I don’t know where your adoration lies.

I pray you will turn with all your heart to worship the God who made You, the Word Who became like You, and died to bring you to Himself.

As we pray now together, if today you have decided to live your life giving Jesus your adoration, I would love the chance to talk with you about what that looks like.

I’ll be right here after the service, or you could make a note on a connections card or send me a not through the qr code on the chair in front of you.

But in a world where so many things are calling you, Won’t you come and adore Him, He is Christ, the Lord.

PRAY