John 1:1-5
ICE BREAKER
Most people believe the world is getting worse, not better.
The crucial question is: Where is Jesus in this?
Does the darkness win?
We know the right answer is that darkness does not win, not in the long run.
But, it is very difficult to observe the world getting worse from our vantage point.
Discuss what Jesus is up to in this.
John wants to help us in discerning what Jesus is up to in the here and now.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
- Where do you see or perpetuate darkness in your life? What are ways you can invite Christ to be the light to overcome the darkness?
Spend some time as a group to reflect on the work of the Spirit in your lives collectively.
What have you been able to overcome because of His deep work within you?
- Pause to reflect on the size of creation. Think about the stars in the sky outnumbering the grains of the sand on the entire earth.
Reflect on some of the other marvels of creation in the notes section below. With the greatness of Christ on full display through His creation, reflect on one of the most difficult situations you currently face.
Let the marvels of His creation affect your perspective on your current trials.
Lay this issue at His feet and surrender it to Him once again.
Share with the group some of your reflections.
Share what it is that tends to pull you away from trusting His greatness with the trials you face.
As a group take some time to eflect on His faithfulness through the many trials in your lives.
- Every Christ follower should be decidedly pro life.
We must protect the unborn child. But we must also be pro life in all our interactions–we bring life to people by how we relate.
To be pro life is to be pro life in every aspect of our humanity.
We contend for the value of each human being no matter how weak, or how old or how unproductive, nobody’s a nobody and all are to be respected by us as they are by God.
Share with the group how you have personally tasted the life of Christ through the body of Christ?
So, when we see the world getting worse around us and we seek an answer to the question: “Where is Jesus in all this?”
We say that He is present in us and through us. The honor to be Jesus to one another is breathtakingly beautiful!
Name the ways your own life has been blessed by Christ’s presence in the body of Christ.
Group leaders, consider praying together thanking God for His presence and His movement in the body of Christ.
NOTES AND QUOTES
We see another dimension of Christ as creator in John 1:3:
“All things were made through HIm, and without Him was not anything made that was made.”
Jesus is the main agent of creation.
As we look at creation we can learn some very important things about the creator.
We will look at three categories of creation:
- the size of creation
- the fine tuning of creation
- the complexity of creation
First, let’s look at the size of creation.
There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on the earth.
Our galaxy is the Milky Way and there are 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone.
There are roughly 285 galaxies for every person on earth (7 billion).
So, what do we see about our creator through His creation?
We see that our creator has enormous power and that He is over the top creative.
Christ has both the power to make creation vast and He has the care to make it beautiful.
The second category of creation is its precision.
6 conditions are required at the same time for the universe to exist(this instantly rules out evolution as these conditions cannot gradually come into play).
The first of these six conditions is gravitational constant.
The precision required for gravitational constant is 1:10 to the 34th power.
(See the slides that correspond to this sermon for a reference to the other five conditions required for the universe to exist.)
Think of these 6 conditions in this way: if we create a universe we must have these six conditions and we have to adjust all 6 dials perfectly and at the same time.
The knob for the first gravitational constant is 10 to the 34th power.
We have to get it precise and if we are off one click the universe won’t exist.
The universe cannot sort of come into being and adjust over time.
It has to be precise to even be in existence.
The third category of creation is complexity.
Complexity means that creation is a vast array of different things.
Our first look at complexity is the bird kingdom.
Imagine a contest to see who could invent a machine that weighs one pound and can travel 7 thousand miles to an exact spot.
It cannot stop for fuel nor for repairs, it must fly non stop to the exact same spot each year.
And, it must almost be able to reproduce itself.
No man can do this.
But God did just this thing when he created the Godwit bird!
It goes 7 thousand miles when it migrates and it does it without drinking or feeding.
The second example of complexity is the woodpecker.
A woodpecker pecks at 200 pecks per second and over two thousand per minute.
The force is a thousand times the force of gravity.
The force is so great that he must close his eyes, if he did not close his eyes they would fly out of his head.
His beak does not wear out.
Another example of complexity is the cuttlefish(see the slides for a picture).
This fish can change his color and the texture of his skin and the shape of his body.
If he is swimming he can change his body shape and his color in less than a second. He’s colorblind and only sees in shades of green. So, somehow the body changes its color and shape on its own. We have no idea how it does this.
A human being is the most complex of all creatures that are created.
The human eye has 40 complex substances.
All 40 must be present for an eye to develop.
This fact tells us that the eye could not evolve. It must be precise and complete from inception.
The eye can see between 4 and 10 million colors.
Our retina has 137 million cells most of which are rods which see light.
The human eye can see a candle 15 miles away.
Every second the eye sends one billion messages to the brain.
Psalm 139 says that we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
At some point as we observe the created order we conclude that the creator is to be feared!
One final example of the complexity of creation is human tears.
There are different kinds of tears.
Tears of grief, laughing tears, tears from peeling an onion, and tears of change.
Jesus knows our grief. He feels it intensely. He knows our tears and He sculpted them.
After John speaks of Christ the creator he adds the following in chapter one verse four: “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.”
Jesus fills us with light.
So light flows out of us as Jesus pours life into us.
Each Sunday we have a time to worship this creator who did all this for us.
At times we lose the fear and the wonder of our creator and the creation and what we are made for.
John writes of an adversarial presence in 1:5:
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
So, even though it feels like things are getting worse in life, darkness does not win.
The light wins.
The darkness that comes onto us devastates us and we can’t control this.
But we can control what flows out of us and whether that will be light or darkness.
The largest living thing on the planet is fungus.
Fungus is all around us decomposing what has died.
Fungus decomposes–it takes death and turns it into life. Death does not win.
