By Design

Wednesday, 12th of August 2009

Early in my ministry I would never have dreamed that I would be spending time doing something that had a name like blog! I guess in reality it is no different from the time I spend doing Shepherd’s Reports, teaching, one on one mentoring or counselling, it’s just in a little different format. So here goes…

As I expressed on Sunday this topic is fraught with the possibility and potential of misunderstanding. Part of my goal in blogging every week is to try and bring in some of the other thoughts and foundational material which led me to what I presented on Sunday morning. While I have not had any questions sent to me this week, I did have a conversation which I’d like to reflect on for a moment. One of the comments that I got in that conversation after the service was about the word ‘design’. Being that God ‘created’ the world and men & women, is that the right word to express what we are talking about here? Did God sit down and go through a design process so to speak and come up with the prototypes … Adam1 & Eve1? While I know we are limited by our earth-bound definitions and perspectives of words, I believe that we can make words and language work for us to communicate the meaning that we want.

In preparing any sermon series I always spend a lot of time thinking through the title as a promo tool as well as using it to help the congregation get an idea of the direction that I am going for the series. The word ‘design’ was chosen very deliberately to express the created intent of an omniscient God who really did know what He was doing when He made us like He did. I sometimes get offended for God, (I know that’s silly but…) when people go through the process of trying to figure out God and their theology about Him concerning this topic! They often come up with a fictitious chauvinistic God, who somehow let His ego/macho-ism get out of control and accidently mucked up the creation process and then led His chauvinistic writers (a la Paul…) to support that through culturally insensitive instruction to husbands, wives and churches. Wow, did I just say all of that? Ok, I do have a tendency to a ‘little’ overstatement at times … maybe people don’t go that far in their explanation of it all, but it sometimes feels like that.

All I’m trying to say with the word ‘design’ is that a God who can design and create the multiple intricacies of the biological systems in human beings, would also be very aware of the emotional, relational, social and gender specific intricacies involved in His creation. In other words God has made us specifically to be who we are as men and women, and all of the aspects of that design, when put together, give us a picture of what God’s intent was when He said “Let us make man in our image!”. We’re going to have a great time exploring that design as we go through this series. I hope and trust that when we get to the end you will at least have a better understanding of what God’s intent was. You may not always agree with me, but at least we can enjoy the process together.

In my short and very limited exposure to blogging it seems to me that part of the goal of the blog is to elicit comment, question, and participation in the conversation. Many times that seems to be done by way of inflammatory comments or opinions. Hopefully I haven’t done that in an insensitive way, and I can assure you I won’t be trying to pick a fight just for the sake of it. If you have some helpful things to add or ask, please feel free. I’m looking forward to Sunday as we explore “God’s Design of Men”. I’ll sign off with some scripture for you to meditate on.

Genesis 1:27 “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”

Blessings,
Pastor Tim

This entry was posted Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 11:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.