AM I UNIQUE ben
7 WONDERS OF THE WORLD
Am I Unique [and Do I Have Any Real Value]?
Do I have any intrinsic value? Is there anything about me that makes me unique? If you put your heart and mind and destiny into science, you have to have faith to believe that science is the answer. If you put it in the philosophy of man, that some particular philosophy is the right one on which human life should be based, it takes faith to believe that. It also takes faith to believe something that has to do with God, theology, the Bible, and what it teaches about God. The Bible tells us that we are the highest creation of God on earth and that makes us, I think, extremely valuable and very unique. Psalm 19:1-4: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night, they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.”
God says that when we go out in the daytime and we look at the sun & the heavens, and at night we see the stars & planets, that all of these things speak in every world language. Since 1993, scientists have really come alive to the fact that there is a great designer. Hugh Ross says in his book, The Creator and the Cosmos, “Whenever we look in the realm of nature, we see evidence of God's design and exquisite care for his creatures. Whether we examine the cosmos on its largest scale or it's tiniest, his handiwork is evident. Because of a quickening pace of technology and scientific research, the picture of God's attributes available to us through nature grows clearer.” Radiation is slowing down in the universe which tells us how old the universe is and when and how the earth was formed. You live in a universe in which scientific evidence points to the idea of a super intelligent designer God meticulously crafting it all for the express purpose of supporting human life--your life.
Science doesn’t know who He is. We believe He is Jesus Christ, God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, who all cooperated in the creation of the world, & science now is saying there has to be a great designer. Michael Denton, who works in human molecular genetics at the University of Otago in New Zealand said this: “All the evidence available in the biological sciences supports the core proposition…that the cosmos is especially designed with life and mankind as its fundamental goal and purpose…” If you're a Christian, that doesn't sound like a big deal. But scientists now are saying that everything points to the fact that this universe, its fundamental purpose and goal is to support human life, which is exactly why God says it was all created in the first place.
You live in what astrophysicist Hugh Ross calls a “just right universe,” finely tuned by God: “Does the fine tuning [of the universe] imply purposeful design? So many parameters must be fine tuned and the degree of the fine tuning is so high, no other conclusion seems possible…Beyond just establishing that the creator is a person, the findings about design provide some evidence of what that person is like. One characteristic that stands out is His interest and care for living things, particularly the human race.” There are some “just right” parameters in which human life exists. If the universe wasn't created just so, then our world couldn’t support human life.”
Ross talks about a just right Jupiter for instance. Boston has a great Science Museum, partly because MIT is there, and they have a great planetarium. “Late in 1993, planetary scientist, George Wetherall of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., made an exciting discovery about our solar system. In observing computer simulations of our solar system, he found that without a Jupiter-sized planet, positioned just where it is, earth would be struck 1000 times more frequently than it is already by comets and comet debris. In other words, without Jupiter, impacts such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs would be common. Here is how the protection system works. Jupiter is 2-1/2 times more massive than all the other planets in our solar system combined. Because of its huge mass, its huge gravity and its location between the earth and the cloud of comets surrounding the solar system, Jupiter either draws comets (by gravity) to collide with itself as it did in July, 1994, or, more commonly, it deflects comets (again by gravity) right out of the solar system...”
God planted Jupiter strategically in exactly the right place. If you don't believe it was the God of the Bible then you have to believe that some great super intellect put it there to deflect almost all of our solar systems debris so that human life could exist on this planet.
We have a “just right” moon. Ross says, “The moon plays a critical role for life as well. Our moon is unique among solar system bodies in that it is so large relative to its planet. As a result, our moon exerts a significant gravitational pull on the Earth. Thanks to this pull, coastal sea waters are cleansed and their nutrients replenished. Also the obliquity, (tilt of the rotation axis relative to the orbital plane) of earth, is stabilized, a critical factor for avoiding climatic extremes.”
What does that all mean? It means the moon keeps us at a perfect 23-degree axis in order for human life to exist on this planet. The earth’s rotation is slowing down one second per year. Scientists believe that that's absolutely necessary for the Earth to stay in its rotation because of the second law of thermodynamics. Everything in the universe is slowing down, everything. So the Earth tilts just the right axis. It rotates and loses a second every single year so that it can support human life, as it exists on this planet.
We have a “just right” Galaxy-Sun-Earth system for life support.” Ross’s evidences: “Surface gravity--If stronger, the planet's atmosphere would retain too much ammonia and methane. If weaker, the planet's atmosphere would lose too much water and we could not exist. Distance from our parent star [the sun]--if farther, the planet would be too cool for a stable water cycle. If closer, planet would be too warm for a stable water cycle. The age [of our planet]--if too young, the planet would rotate too rapidly. If too old, the planet would rotate too slowly.” At one time Earth rotated so rapidly that nothing could exist on the face of it and God slowed it down to just the right speed—by the way, did you know you are spinning right now at 1100 miles per hour? Strange isn't it? I don't even feel it.
We have just right cell structures in our body. William Bradley, Ph.D., wrote a book called The Mystery of the Origins of Life. He says, “Each cell in the human body contains more information than all 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It's certainly reasonable to make the inference that this isn't the random product of unguided nature, but it's the unmistakable sign of an Intelligent Designer.” In 1905, Ernst Haeckel described living cells as being ‘homogeneous globules of plasm.’ In those days they didn't have any way of seeing the complexity that exists within the membrane of the cell. But the truth is that one-cell organism is more complicated than anything we've been able to recreate through supercomputers. One person very creatively described a single cell organism as a high-tech factory, complete with artificial languages, decoding systems, central memory banks that store and retrieve impressive amounts of information, precision control systems that regulate automatic assembly of components, proof reading & quality control mechanisms that safeguard against errors, assembly systems that use principles of prefabrication & modular construction, & a complete replication system that allows organisms to duplicate at bewildering speeds.”
You are a special creation of God.
You are fearfully and wonderfully made. Psalm 139:13-16: “You created me my inmost being; You knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made…”
[The word wonderfully means “to be formed absolutely without human effort.” In other words, miraculously.] I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” Powerful words. God knew who you were. He knew exactly the day you'd be delivered into the world. He knew exactly how many days you would live in this world, and He ordained just exactly how long your days would be—long before you were even born.
You are absolutely a unique creation. Your retina pattern—no one else has it on the entire planet. Your fingerprints—no one else has them on the entire planet. Your voice pattern—no one else has it. Your DNA is one of a kind. In fact, you are such a mess and so stringy that if you took your DNA strands and stretched them 93 million miles to the sun, they would stretch to the sun and back 400 times. That's how wonderfully and uniquely you are made. You are uniquely created by an Intelligent Designer. I believe that Designer is Jesus Christ, God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, who all cooperated together to form you.
You were created by God so that He could express His great love and grace to you.
You were not created because God needed you. God did not have some great void in His life and needed you for fellowship. He does fellowship with you and He loves to fellowship with you. But God created you to show and express His love and grace to you. He does that, first of all, through His Son, Jesus Christ. Ephesians 1:3-13: “Praise to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For He chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love, He predestined us to be adopted as His sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with His pleasure and will, to the praise of His glorious grace, which He has freely given us in the One He loves. In Him, we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that He lavished on us…” You were a sinner lost in sin, and He came and saved you by dying on the cross and all you did was say, Yes, Lord, and put your faith in Him. You did nothing to deserve it. You did nothing to earn it. He lavished His grace, His unmerited favor on us “…with all wisdom and understanding. And He made known to us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure, which He purposed in Christ to be put into effect when the times have reached their fulfillment—to bring all things in Heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ. In Him we were also chosen having predestined, according to the plan of Him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of His will, in order that we, who were the first to hope in Christ might be for the praise of His glory. And you also were included…” God chose you before the world began. He lavished His grace on you. Do you have any value? He predestined you to be one of His sons and one of His daughters. Do you have any value? Listen, when it's over for the Christian, it's not over, it's just beginning. He is going to lavish His grace and His love upon us for all of eternity.
The main thing you need to know about God is that God is the creator and the creator must create. He's been creating new human beings, & new creatures in Christ ever since Jesus died on the cross. And for all of eternity, He's going to keep creating. Do you remember when Disney World opened in Orlando with just the Magic Kingdom? Then they wanted more money--I mean they wanted to excite us some more--so they built Epcot, then MGM, then Animal Kingdom. So now there are four theme parks. They just keep on changing and making new parks & Disney creativity is nothing compared to God. For all eternity, God will keep creating, recreating and making things new and lavishing His love and grace on us. Man, that makes you extremely unique and valuable. What a great God we have!
You were created by God for His pleasure and glory.
Ephesians 1:5-6 says you were created for His pleasure and glory. You were created to give God pleasure. God also says in 1 Corinthians 10:31, “Whether therefore you eat or drink or whatsoever you do, do all to the glory of God.” You parents need to tell your kids how special they are and what a creation of God they really are—you are a special creation of God., you have intrinsic and unique value, you are one of a kind, you are one that God created and you are very special. To every person in here I want to say, you are not some random chance that just came into being. You are not a product of evolution. You are a product of a great intelligent Creator, God, who is Jesus Christ, and God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, who all cooperated in the creation of the world. You are a special creation of God and you always will be. If you trust Him as your savior, you'll find out about how special you are for all of eternity.
Every day you live in obedience to the Word of God, you are setting yourself up for the best life you could have on the face of the earth. His principles and His word are not hard to keep; they are easy to keep because the Spirit gives us the power to live the life that is written about in the word of God. Jesus gave us the example to follow when He lived on this planet. Every day that we live for Him, we give God pleasure and we give God glory. He said whatever you do, whatever you eat, or whatever you drink, do everything that you do to the honor and the glory of God.
In the book Culture Shift by David Henderson, he points out that most Americans determine their value and worth by how many bags they can carry home from the mall. That means that when you can't carry as many bags of new stuff home from the mall, you don't have any value anymore. Listen, our value isn't found in where we live, and how much money we have, and the clothes we wear, and the stuff that surrounds us. Our value is found in God. A God who created us and loves us so much that He made us uniquely the way we are. He made me with hair that I comb even as I hit 50, & some of you don’t have to waste time doing that anymore! Rick Warren says we are not a created doing; we are a created being. Do you ever talk to somebody and the first question they ask you is, “What do you do?” What difference does it make what I do? God didn't breathe into Adam and Adam became a living doing; Adam became a living being. You are not what you do; you are who you are because you belong to God. Your value is found in Him and the value of your children is found in Him, and the value of your family is found in Him, and the value of this church is found in Him. In our culture, we're getting that thing all jacked out of shape and getting it all shifted around. Our value is in the God of gods who cares for us.
You are the only created being for which God died to set you free from the bondage of sin.
1 John 4:10, “This is love: Not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” Why did Jesus come to die on the cross? Because you are a sinner and I am a sinner condemned to hell without Him. That's the facts of the Word of God. Why did He come and die? Because He loved me so much, He was willing to pay the price for my sin on the cross. You say do I understand it? No. I don't. You know what I do? I accept it by faith. I can hardly comprehend why a God would send His only son to die in my place. However, He knew that sin was so bad, so devastating, so wicked, and sin's price was so high that I'd have to spend eternity without God and eternity without God is hell. So He sent His son. Romans 6:22-23 says, “But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus Our Lord.”
You were created by God to be with Him for all eternity.
Ecclesiastes 3:11: “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from the beginning to end.” God has set something in our heart that tells us eternity is real, that things don't just end when we die. People go on and there's something after death. Let me tell you what's after death. You are going to meet God, face to face. You are going to answer before Him for your sin—personally and pay the penalty yourself. But if you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, He will stand up at the Judgment and say,”…he's/she’s one of my children. He/she doesn't have to answer for anything. I paid his/her sin debt already at the cross.” And that's what's going to happen with us. You are uniquely created by God and have great value. He says I'm valuable. He says you're valuable.
So what's the point? The point is we live in a finely tuned universe designed specifically to support human life. The question is, will you continue to believe in random chance or will you put your faith in the God of the Bible, who loves you and wants to spend eternity showing you how much? When your kids are little there are times when you want to kill them—not literally. But when they're little, there are times when you want to strangle them a little bit. The real truth is when they are little you want to get them everything you can get them and love them and show them your love. But no matter how deeply you love them, your love doesn't even compare, in the tiniest degree, to the love that God has for them. God says that He wants to show us His love for all eternity—you have great value.
Will you begin to live as a being created in the image of God, greatly loved by your Creator-God, who has left us with specific instructions on how to make the most of our lives by glorifying Him? You can waste it. You can live your life in sin. You can live your life in ways that are dishonoring to God; but man, you are just totally wasting it if you are a slave to sin. If you've come to Christ, you're set free from the bondage of sin. You don't have to give in to that stuff. You don't have to have your life ruined by sin.
A couple flew all the way to Vietnam to get a baby from an orphanage. They loved that baby before they ever got there. They desired that baby before they ever saw it. They wanted that baby so much that they flew 10,000 miles to an orphanage, and got little Zac, Zachariah Dinh, [gave him a Vietnamese middle name]. They loved that little baby before they ever saw him. The spent their money for that little baby before they ever saw him. They went 10,000 miles for that little baby, brought him home and they've loved him ever since.
Jesus Christ left all of His glory, all of His grace, all the worship that He had in heaven and came to earth because He loved you. He came far more than 10,000 miles. He stepped into a lower plane of existence, into time and space for you and me. The God who created it all stepped into His creation. He came from a place of no time; only eternity. He stepped into our plane of existence and died in your place on a cross. You have extreme value because God is real and He loves you. With heads bowed let me ask—if God loves you so much and has given you grace that you don't deserve and He's given it to all of us who sit here this morning, what are you doing with your life? What are you doing with the life God's given you? If you're here and you've never trusted Christ, silently bow your head and say, “Lord Jesus, I'm a sinner. I want a relationship with you. Forgive me of my sin. Come into my heart. Give me new life in Christ.” He'll come into your heart. He'll change your life forever and forever. Pray & ask Him to come in; He’ll not fail to do so.
Our Father and our God, we thank you for your love. We thank you for your mercy. We thank you that we are unique and that we are valuable and that you built a just-right universe to support our lives. Just the right amount of oxygen, just the right amount of hydrogen, just the right amount of carbon dioxide and all the other chemicals that were necessary for life. You put Jupiter in the right plane and the moon in the right place; and you put us on the right tilt, the right axis. You did all the things that had to be done in order for us to be able to live because you put us here to find you. Help us to do that today. Thank you for the value that you've given us in you. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. At a fundraising dinner for a school that serves learning-disabled children, the father of one of the students delivered a speech that would never be forgotten by all who attended. After extolling the school and its dedicated staff, he offered a question: "When not interfered with by outside influences, everything nature does is done with perfection. Yet my son, Shay, cannot learn things as other children do. He cannot understand things as other children do. Where is the natural order of things in my son?" The audience was stilled by the query. The father continued. "I believe that when a child like Shay, physically and mentally handicapped comes into the world, an opportunity to realize true human nature presents itself, and it comes in the way other people treat that child." Then he told the following
story.
Shay and his father had walked past a park where some boys Shay knew were playing baseball. Shay asked, "Do you think they'll let me play?" Shay's father knew that most of the boys would not want someone like Shay on their team, but the father also understood that if his son were allowed to play, it would give him a much-needed sense of belonging and some confidence to be accepted by others in spite of his handicaps. Shay's father approached one of the boys on the field and asked (not expecting much) if Shay could play. The boy looked around for guidance and said, "We're losing by six runs and the game is in the eighth inning. I guess he can be on our team and we'll try to put him in to bat in the ninth inning." Shay struggled over to the team's bench and, with a broad smile, put on a team shirt. His Father watched with a small tear in his eye and warmth in his heart. The boys saw the father's joy at his son being accepted.
In the bottom of the eighth inning, Shay's team scored a few runs but was still behind by three. In the top of the ninth inning, Shay put on a glove and played in the right field. Even though no hits came his way, he was obviously ecstatic just to be in the game and on the field, grinning from ear to ear as his father waved to him from the stands. In the bottom of the ninth inning, Shay's team scored again. Now, with two outs and the bases loaded, the potential winning run was on base and Shay was scheduled to be next at bat. At this juncture, do they let Shay bat and give away their chance to win the game? Surprisingly, Shay was given the bat. Everyone knew that a hit was all but impossible because Shay didn't even know how to hold the bat properly, much less connect with the ball. However, as Shay stepped up to the plate, the pitcher, recognizing that the other team was putting winning aside for this moment in Shay's life, moved in a few steps to lob the ball in softly so Shay could at least make contact. The first pitch came and Shay swung clumsily and missed. The pitcher again took a few steps forward to toss the ball softly towards Shay. As the pitch came in, Shay swung at the ball and hit a slow ground ball right back to the pitcher.The game would now be over.
The pitcher picked up the soft grounder and could have easily thrown the ball to the first baseman. Shay would have been out and that would have been the end of the game. Instead, the pitcher threw the ball right over the first baseman's head, out of reach of all team mates. Everyone from the stands and both teams started yelling, "Shay, run to first! Run to first!" Never in his life had Shay ever run that far, but he made it to first base. He scampered down the baseline, wide-eyed and startled. Everyone yelled, "Run to second, run to second!" Catching his breath, Shay awkwardly ran towards second, gleaming and struggling to make it to the base. By the time Shay rounded towards second base, the right fielder had the ball .. the smallest guy on their team who now had his first chance to be the hero for his team. He could have thrown the ball to the second-baseman for the tag, but he understood the pitcher's intentions so he, too, intentionally threw the ball high and far over the third-baseman's head. Shay ran toward third base deliriously as the runners ahead of him circled the bases toward home. All were screaming, "Shay, Shay, Shay, all the Way Shay" Shay reached third base because the opposing shortstop ran to help him by turning him in the direction of third base, and shouted, "Run to third! Shay, run to third!" As Shay rounded third, the boys from both teams, and the spectators, were on their feet screaming, "Shay, run home! Run home!" Shay ran to home, stepped on the plate, and was cheered as the hero who hit the grand slam and won the game for his team.
"That day", said the father softly with tears now rolling down his face, "the boys from both teams helped bring a piece of true love into this world". Shay didn't make it to another summer. He died that winter, having never forgotten being the hero and making his father so happy, and coming home and seeing his Mother tearfully embrace her little hero of the day!