Sermon Tone Analysis

Best Bet

I’m going to be in Hot Springs, AR in a couple of weeks.

My annual golf trip.

I’ve know these guys for 40 years.

There’s some good golf there.

And, there’s a horse track.

It’s one of the top second tier tracks in the country.

Not triple crown, but the winner of the AR Derby always is near the top of favorites for those races.

I went to the horse races there once when we lived in LR.

It’s a fun day.

Impressive animals, competition, the speed and power, and a little wager on the side.

I spent a little time at the $2 window.

I lost on every race, except 1.

The horse I won w/ was a long-shot.

Preacher’s Pride.

I had to bet on Preacher’s Pride.

12-1.

So I won $24.

I ended up a little ahead for the day.

I know nothing about horses and horses and horse racing.

Dumb luck that I won anything.

No faith at all.

If you watched the Kentucky Derby Sunday it’s a wonder anyone ever wins anything at a horse race.

Rich Strike won.

The horse that won was the longest shot in the field, least likely to win.

Got into the race the day before when a horse that had been in had to scratch.

So, they called that horse’s ppl.

Completely out of the blue.

They interviewed the owner and trainer after the race and asked them if they thought their horse had any chance to win.

Their response was, they never enter a horse in a race they don’t have faith that it could win.

They were about the only ones Sunday.

They had faith in their horse, but few others did.

Faith.

What is faith?

Believing, being certain, about something you can’t see.

Something you don’t have all the facts about.

Imperial evidence, objective truth, observable facts are limited, but you believe it to be true anyway.

Facts get you so far.

Then faith takes you the rest of the way.

Faith shows up in many areas of our lives all the time.

We have faith the monsoons will arrive in July.

I have faith in this stool.

You have faith in those chairs.

If you didn’t, then you wouldn’t sit in one.

Or, we sit half on, half off if we didn’t have much faith.

I have faith all of you will drive on the right side of the road every time I get in my car.

Not a certainty.

It happens from time to time that someone doesn’t.

But we’re counting on ea other.

We are ppl of faith.

Christians, church-goers are known as ppl of faith.

But really, everybody has faith.

Everyone has faith in something spiritual or religious.

Even atheists have faith.

B/C no one has all the facts and answers.

They have faith that a divine being does not exist nor determines what happens to them after they leave this life.

Atheistic, humanistic, evolutionists reject the idea of intelligent design.

That is, humans, animal life, plant life, the earth, the universe were created by an intelligent designer for a purpose.

They have faith that everything came about over billions of years of incremental changes.

No one was there to observe and record these things.

So, the research they do now gives them some facts.

But their faith takes them the rest of the way to believe in evolution.

They believe the elements that are the basic building blocks of life; carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen were in place in a muddy, soupy, liquid and was struck by lightening and that jump started the first living organism.

The electric shock like the AED in our fellowship hall.

Over the first billions of years, something crawled out of the sea and up on land and evolved into land animals.

Then, a land animal crawled back into the sea and evolved in sea mammals like whales.

That requires faith.

Ben Stein, Jewish comedian, actor, news commentator; did a documentary style movie that came out in 2008 called, Expelled.

The premise is how God is being systematically expelled from our society.

Jewish and Christian college professors are laid off when they express their belief in a Creator/ God.

He went to Auschwitz and talked about how the holocaust could only happen in an atheistic and godless society.

You remove God and then whoever has the biggest stick gets to establish the laws and determine who does not get to live.

W/ God, we all submit to an All-powerful Sovereign being greater than us who establishes the rules and determines right and wrong, good and evil, who lives and who dies.

In the movie he interviewed a number of brilliant scientists and asked the question, where did the stuff come from that became us?

Building blocks, elements, lightening; where did all that come from before it was energized?

Richard Dawkins, British evolutionary biologist and professor at Oxford, w/ a straight face, when pressed, said, “Alien insemination.”

He has more faith that aliens planted the seeds that became life on earth than he could have faith in God.

Another scientist, Richard Ruus theorized that the basic elements first appeared on the backs of crystals, once energized by a lightening strike, that jump-started life.

These are brilliant people.

But their beliefs are based on combination of facts and faith; just like ours.

Whether you are betting on horses, betting on that chair to hold you up, or betting your life on whether or not there’s a heaven and how to get there; faith is required.

Based on science, observable facts, objectivity, empirical evidence, and what is described in the Word of God; your best bet is to place your faith and bet your life on God.

Last week we looked at the first 5 verses and focused on the first 5 words of the word of God, the bible.

If you can’t trust the first 5 words then you can’t trust any of the rest of them.

The events of the first day of creation, In the beginning, God created....Light.

Today we are going to look at the rest of that first week; days 2 thru 6.

See what described as it happened and discover how God set things up perfectly for life to exist on earth.

Day 2: Sky

The vault, or some translations say expanse.

v. 20 he will say the birds will fly across the vault

v.15-17, the starts will light the vault.

The vault or expanse is the sky.

The atmosphere from earth to the outer layer of the universe.

Water was separated.

What he is saying here is if we could see it, the outer boundary of the edge of the universe is made of water.

Between the water, in the earth’s atmosphere, air filled the gap, oxygen.

Air has weight and is held in place by gravity.

Scientists cannot explain gravity other than observing that it exists.

Somehow, it is related to earth spinning on its axis.

If the earth stopped spinning, then gravity would stop pulling.

No other planet in our solar system has it like we do.