Made for Greatness

Cody Lafflin

Living Radical • Sermon • Submitted 7 years ago

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Introduction

God can do amazing things with our lives. We are even called to amazing things! Sometimes, this world puts us down to think we are nothing that we are no good and forget the very important reality is that we are made in the image of God. Do know what that means? It means from the very time you were formed, from the very time God had decided that you would be apart of His creation, you were destined to represent Him! Who here knows that an ambassador of a nation or a president of a nation has a big role to fill and that his job is no little matter? Yes its a pretty big deal job!! He represents the people, he speaks on their behalf, he has big shoes to fill of those that came before him. We are called to represent God, ever since the design was in place that we would be created this way (human) we were suppose to represent God! However, there was a probablm that rushed into the scene in the very beginning, can anyone tell me what that is? Yup sin!

The Fall

After the whole creation account, Genesis chapter 3 talks about how humanity fell into sin from the get go. The were made for greatness aka for a great God. Their very likeness, the way they were made was to point towards the creator! They have a Mind, Spirit, and Soul. God is Father, Son, Holy Spirit! Do you see the comparison?

But mankind messed up. Adam and Eve saw that fruit looked very good from the very get go! They wanted it so bad, knowing that their creator did not want them to eat of the tree, they let the serpent justify their means to take and eat of it. Do you know why they wanted that fruit so bad? Because the serpent had deceived them when he said when you eat of it you won’t die you’ll become like God, knowing good and evil . In their minds it was quite possible that they thought they would become so much like God that they would have His powers as well. Lusting after the same thing the serpent had since the beginning in heaven, they would have wanted the throne of God too. They were made for greatness but not to take over the throne of God! And when they ate of that fruit, when they realized the sin they had committed, they became afraid and ashamed that they rebelled against their creator! They had realized that they were no match for His awesome measureless power and they knew they deserved to be destroyed for the treason they committed. But God in His mercy and love for the most beloved of his creation had had a plan from the very beginning to bail them out of their sin from the get go!

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In other words God is saying, there will come a savior that will crush all the power that that the serpent had displayed over his dear creation that day! And He will deliver God’s mankind out of the Tierney of sin that has enslaved them! He will rescue them! And do you know what God had done? He did the biggest act of love that no one could have expected Him to do in the way that He had done. He came to earth shown His love to us with His own love!! We don’t deserve it and let me tell you why it’s because of the sin that we have been infected with that makes us, (by our choice) say, “I want to be my own god and I want to be on my own throne. I want to be in control of myself.” In effect we are saying, “I don’t want to live for You God although it was You who created me and it is You who own me. I will be my own justice and my own law!!” Since the fall man has been playing a very fatal game and we see this in our wars and our riots, take the holocaust for example, the mass Jewish genocide! Horrors happen when we decide to sit on our own throne. Although you and I are not Hitler, according to scripture nothing good dwells in our flesh! The only good thing that can dwell in us is Christ! And understanding where we come from, our treasonous nature that wars in our flesh helps us understand just how awestrucking the mercy the Cross brouhgt!! We don’t deserve it! We deserve every bit to be burned up!! But Christ offers salvation to us!

Let me briefly tell you about a man who we in our would or day in age we would deem to deserved hell more the you or I! Saul! He was a Jewish pharasees! He persecuted Christians!! He hated them so much that his actions even led to some of them being killed! But God and His mercy wanted Him to be saved and once Paul had seen that blinding light and was ministered to by one of God’s faithful! He converted from all of his prideful ignorant ideals and because he had seen the risen Christ he was even deemed an apostle! Paul become an amazing asset to the Church! The witness he had, being a former persecutor of the church to now being apart of it spoke volumes. By the power of God, the authority he spoke with while he taught in the synagogues, to the Jews and gentiles, and the letters he wrote to the churches has brought millions of lives through the gates of heaven. Paul was an example of an extremely faithful Christian. I think the type of faithfulness that Paul practiced is the kind of faithfulness Christ deserves! Don’t? God expects it! Paul was so blessed in his ministry that people would be healed by the power of God working through him! Paul was so faithful in fact God had worked through him to show that God power was much stronger than any superstition!

God had worked so powerfully through Paul that Paul had performed miracles. Read 19:13-21.

So we read first that Paul’s faith is so powerfully at work with in him. That people are touching there cloths to him and taking these back to their sick and they were being healed! A little background Ephesus was a really superstitious place, so it was no wonder why people were touching cloths to Paul like this, however these people instead of receiving a false power or doing a false ritual it would seem that God was willing to minister to these people loosely through their superstition. For example they may have done this sorta thing with diviners or the witch doctors in their day hoping to get some result. Here they hear of a man coming in the name of Jesus and so they might be like why not maybe this man bears the name of one who is just powerful enough to fix their problems! Unlike all the others before them they got more than what they were expecting a man that bears the name of One who doesn’t only fix one problem but all problems to a very powerful extent. Then the story line shifts a little dramatically and we see just how steeped in supernatural superstitious sin these people are.