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Back to Sermons Index Back to Home Page 8th October 2006 AMWORSHIP OUR GREAT CREATOR - Pastor Colin Meadows Pivotal Psalms for Faithful Living Readings: Psalm 8, Heb 2:5-9, Ephesians 1:22-23 Ø Psalms - the Prayer Book of the Believer: For believers in earlier days, the Psalms was their praise and prayer book. Do you at times want to praise God yet are not sure what to say? Look to the psalms. Perhaps at other times you are grappling with life and want to pray but the words won’t come? Look to the psalms. The psalms are the praise and prayer book of the believer. The psalms are primarily written as poetry that seeks to tell in vivid and concrete language just who our God is and how we can walk with him. Using simile, metaphors and rich images, the psalms each bubble with life and vitality. We need to allow for the poetic images. Psalm 8 is a great example of this. As one commentator noted Psalm 8 is Genesis 1 set to music. It is a hymn of praise to the Lord of Creation. Its purpose is to praise the creator by meditating on his creation, with special reference to humanity, and to remember the Lord of Creation. Ø Recall that the LORD is Lord: Whenever the word LORD appears in capital letters in the OT it is referring to God’s personal name, Yahweh. This is the wonderful name that speaks of the God who longs for relationship with his people. Ps 8:1 “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” This name LORD lit. means “I am He who is” or ‘He who will be”. When God speaks of himself he says “I am”. When his people speak of him, they say “He is”. He is all powerful, all loving, and all trustworthy. He is the dependable and faithful God who desires the full trust of his people. The LORD of relationship, is also Lord or master or sovereign. How do we know that he is mighty? By considering his creation. He is the one who is all powerful, controlling the very universe itself. Ø Reflect on God’s creation: Consider the glory that God has set above the heavens, the work of his fingers! Our awareness of the size and complexity of our universe grows by the minute. A check on various websites produced some interesting figures. Our earth is part of our solar system which itself is a tiny speck in the Milky Way, a galaxy containing millions of stars. The Milky Way is one of thousands of galaxies in the universe which is estimated to be about 156 billion light years across and expanding. Each light year is the distance that light takes to travel in a year. Light covers around 300,000 km in a second so when you convert that to the distance traveled in a year, you get a figure of 9,460,730,472,580.8 km. To cover that distance the Voyager space crafts, launched in 1977, would need to keep going for 18,000 years, just to cover one light year! The universe is roughly 156 billion light years across, depending on which source you consult. All of that is another way of saying that the universe is very big!! The majesty of God is reflected in his creation. His power and might have been demonstrated for all to see. The Bible encourages us to look to the creation if we wish to see evidence of the Creator. Romans 1:20 “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” We have no excuse when we consider the evidence of God’s handiwork in his creation. Little children and infants can see this – why can’t adults? Ø Remember our finiteness before God: As one considers the might and power of God’s creation, we begin to realize our own finiteness. We are brought down to earth with a jolt in the face of the rest of creation. One of biggest weaknesses as humans is that of pride. That is what Satan played to in the Garden of Eden and our enemy will still try to pull that string on us today. Let us walk humbly before our God, remembering that pride goes before a fall. Walk before God and others in the right size, not puffed up like a blowfish and not deflated like a door mat. As someone rightly said “Some of us are too big for God to use.” Let us remember our finiteness before God. Ø Remember we are created in God’s image: We need to watch our pride, but we also need to remember who we are. God has made humanity the crowning act of his creation. Ps 8:5 “You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honour.” God created humanity in his own image. We were created to reflect the glory of God. We are thus different from the rest of creation. We are not just an educated animal who wears clothes. We are made in the image and likeness of God, each having a complex body that contains well over 100 trillion cells. God has invested man with a dignity that is second only to his own. As such we have been given the responsibility to have dominion over the rest of creation. Such dominion involves responsibly caring for God’s creation. We do not have a license to ravage and destroy. We are not however the lord of creation. That title belongs to another! Let us thus reveal the Lord of Creation. Ø Reveal the Lord of Creation!: As we exercise dominion
over the earth, we need to realize who the real Lord of creation is. The book of
Hebrews helps us in this regard. Heb 2:8-9 “In putting everything under him, God left nothing that is not subject to him. Yet at present we do not see everything subject to him. But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.” Yes, Jesus is the rightful Lord of Creation, the one to whom one day every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord. The first Adam sinned and lost some of his dominion but in the second Adam this has been restored. Through Christ God the Father will put everything under his feet. We will be partakers in the dominion with him, but he will be the Lord of all creation. There is coming a time when he will reign supreme over all his creation. In the light of this, the Psalmist repeats his refrain from the beginning; Ps 1:9 “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” Recall that the LORD is Lord, the sovereign master. Reflect on God’s incredible creation for it reveals his might and majesty. Remember our finiteness before God, & don’t allow pride to distort the view. Remember we are created in God’s image & are precious in His sight. Reveal the Lord of Creation, Jesus, to all through our lives and lips. How do we know there is a God? Look to the creation. How do we know there is a God who cares? Look to the Lord of Creation, Jesus. Yes, let us worship our Great Creator!
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