Noah’s ark is one of those unlikely parts of Scripture that has become almost universally popular as a children’s story in Western culture. It most likely began in the early 19th century when toymakers began making toys that focused on the boat and the animals rather than on the rest of the story; it’s an easier sell to make a nursery themed with smiling hippos rather than themed with drowning millions. The truth is, Noah’s ark does make a great children’s story, not because it’s just a story about a floating menagerie of animal life but because it’s a story of a God worthy of saving faith. A story of mankind sinking into a depravity so grave that a grieving and gracious Father had to undo almost all of creation in an attempt to wash us clean and let us live. Noah’s ark is a children’s story not because it features animals, but because it features a covenant keeping, merciful and loving Father. That makes it a story not just for little children but for all of God’s children. And like all good stories, it opens with a seemingly unsolvable problem.

A legacy is the enduring impact of a your life, your long term impact from your short time in this world. Every one leaves a legacy with their life. The question is what kind of legacy will it be? The Bible says that our legacy shapes our lineage. Those who come after us, both family and the world around us, are affected by our life that has gone before. Genesis 4 and 5 are about two paths, two legacies: Cain’s and Seth's. With the death of Abel it seemed like Cain’s legacy would inevitably be our legacy. But it is Cain’s killing of Abel that drove Adam and Eve to have another son, the son from whom the Savior will come. Humanity will be saved through this new birth, just as we will saved through our new birth in one from his line, through new birth in Christ. Unlike Cain who names his city after his own son, Eve wants a different legacy; she names her son in relation to faith and God’s goodness. His promise to save us out of our sin in Genesis 3:15 still stands. Cain’s legacy was eventually washed away by the flood, but Seth’s legacy lasts for eternity.

How do you go from weary to completely filled up full? We can ask that about life in general, but especially in our Christian life as well. Often as summer comes, our life with God can feel weary and drained, just like our bodies do in the summer heat. But in the span of 35 verses in John 4, Jesus goes from weary to satisfied. When I am tired and weary, worn out from the noonday sun of life beating down on me, my summer instinct is to jump into the pool rather than jump into a conversation about life with those around me. How does Jesus do it? It’s easy to think that it was only Jesus’ divine nature that was sustained and enlivened by doing His Father’s will. But He tells the disciples that being on mission with His Father feeds and satisfies the actual hunger of His frail human nature more than food does. Again, we ask, how did He do it? Can being on mission with our Father satisfy our worn out and weary humanity as well? How does Jesus go from sapped to satisfied? The first thing He does is He sees. Jesus sees those around Him in a way that we can too but we often don’t because of our weariness. But Jesus is able to see this woman in a way that His disciples do not or will not that overcomes His weariness. Join us in John 4 as we look at how we can also see like Jesus.

Join us this Sunday as we look at the attribute of God’s unchangeability from Psalm 102 (ft. Colin Campbell, Member at Elevate Hope Centennial).

If you have siblings or have raised siblings, you know there are plenty of opportunities for sibling rivalry. From the very moment there were siblings in the human race, there was sibling rivalry. But the story of Cain and Abel is not about sibling rivalry; it’s ultimately about man’s rivalry with God, which goes back before siblings to the first man and woman. All of what God said would happen as a result of the Fall of mankind in Genesis 3 is now playing out in this first family’s life. But it is Cain’s anger with God that he takes out on his brother Abel. From the opening verse, Genesis 4 is bittersweet. We don’t know how much time has passed since Adam and Eve were driven out of God’s presence. But even as all of the effects of sin that God said would happen are beginning to happen, we see His promised blessings coming to pass as well.

There is nothing worse than waiting for a diagnosis. You see signs and symptoms of sickness, but you don’t know why. And if you don’t know why, you don’t know if there is a cure. It consumes all of your thoughts and your prayers. When the diagnosis finally comes, even if the news is not good the diagnosis itself brings feelings of resolve and clarity, a way forward. Because worse than any bad diagnosis is the answer, “We don’t actually know what is wrong.” When we talk about the message of the Bible, we often frame it as good news and bad news. The good news is that God loves us and wants to restore us to relationship with Him; and the bad news is our passage this morning, Genesis 3. What happened to us in Genesis 3 is the worst moment in our history. But the diagnosis it gives is clarifying for any member of the human race who reads it. We can look at our thoughts and actions, look around at the state of things in the world, and know exactly what is wrong and exactly the only way to be cured: that God alone can heal and undo what is killing us and making us sick. Even in our diagnosis, we get a glimmer of the hope of the healing and restoration that God will bring to save us.

When life gets hard, people will try to give you every “trick in the book” to solve your problem. When you get news you don’t want to get, or family life is full of struggle, and all of our attempts at living the good life are falling flat – people will try to think of everything they can to soothe their inner pain. Try harder. Work harder. Work less. Get over it. Give into it. Prioritize pleasure. Give up all pleasure. But do you see what Paul is saying? What do you really need? What will actually see you through to the end? Look at Jesus. His face, the truth of His gospel, brings a real renewal (ft. Caleb Clark, Church Planting Resident at Deer Creek Church).

What an amazing Creator who thought up the idea of a men and women. Two similar and complementary beings, tailor-made to work together but also completely different. The last part of Genesis 2 shows how God remedied, in the most creative and beautiful way, something in creation that was not yet good: that man was alone in the world. I believe we need Genesis 2 today maybe more than ever. We need to value the differences between men and women. We need to celebrate the goodness of woman and the goodness of man. And we need to uphold and value the institution of Christian marriage. In Genesis 2, God shows us the goodness of His design of us, specifically as men and women.

The launch of the Artemis 2 mission has re-ignited in our national consciousness the wonder of our planet and of the human race. The four astronauts on board Artemis who returned to earth on Friday travelled farther from earth than any human being before them. Seeing the earth we live on from that distance does something to your perspective. In 1968, the first humans to orbit the moon in Apollo 8 immediately quoted Genesis 1 to the world. From their far away perspective, they could clearly see the beauty and order in our Earth that spoke of a Creator. Almost 60 years later, Victor Glover the pilot of the Artemis 2 was asked to say something to the world about Earth on Easter morning. He said, “We are so far from Earth and looking at the beauty of creation. I read the Bible and I read all the amazing things that were done for us who were created. We have this amazing thing, this spaceship called Earth, that was created to give us a place to live in the universe. You think what we are doing is special, but you are special. In all the nothingness of the universe, we have this place where we get to exist together." That was the perspective 230,000 miles from earth. The ironic beauty of Glover’s long distance perspective was that meanwhile on that blue spaceship called Earth, war was raging, people were suffering, people were dying. Those two different perspectives on the morning celebrating Easter when everything changed for the human race makes us ask the question, “What do we do with the world God made? How should we see it?” It’s easy to wax hopeful in wonder when you are hundreds of thousands of miles away. But what about when we are living down here? After Genesis 3, and until Revelation 21, our world is now a world of wonder, goodness and beauty mixed with chaos, death and evil. Like the astronauts’ perspective, Genesis 1 allowed us pull way back and look in wonder at the creation of Earth as a whole. And this morning, Genesis 2 will zoom in on earth on Day 6, to a close up of when human life was born. Genesis 2 helps us begin to answer the questions: “What happened to that wonderful world that God made?” and, “How do you love something beautiful and wonderful that has been ruined and not yet fully redeemed?” The answer is what Glover told the nation in an earlier interview: ”We all need Jesus, whether on Earth or circling the moon.” Let’s look at Genesis 2 this morning.

Easter celebrates the resurrection life of the extraordinary person of Jesus. Easter celebrates the Paradox of the Christian faith; that the way to eternal life needed to come to us through a death, and that it’s in the empty tomb of Jesus hat we find our fullness. Let’s read the Easter account from the the Gospels of Mark and John and then look at the extraordinary hope that Easter brings us even today, thousands of years later.

The Triumphal Entry was a celebration for those that loved Him; that His life, His message, His miracles and His teaching must be impacting the crowds like it did them. Jesus is getting the glory He deserves. The crowds must understand what we have come to know, that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah of God. They are beginning to love the Jesus that we love and to see how He loves us! What joy! Hear the shouts and praises! That was Palm Sunday.

And then it just absolutely unravels. Can you imagine watching Palm Sunday as one of the men and women who love and follow Jesus, and then watching, absolutely stunned and terrified, as one thing after another unravels; a mock trial, a miscarriage of justice, not just accusing Jesus but beating and flogging Him nearly to death. Jesus, once triumphant, now bloodied and seemingly defeated. And they all find themselves at the foot of a cross, watching Jesus die and hearing His cries of agony to His Father. The text records that those who loved Jesus had no words; they get no speaking parts. The only voices initially are from those who hate Him. Pride always seems to have the words while grief remains speechless. And eventually Jesus breaths his last and cries out, “It is finished.” The road I came to make for you back to God is complete; My blood will now cover you and make you clean. This little movement of disciples that Jesus had started just stands there and watches their hope literally die in front of them. So what do they do now? What should they do next? What really is there to do when the Lord of life is dead? And that is the text we focus on this morning. As we read it, try to catch what it is that the women do after they have watched Jesus die.

No one likes being disappointed. But the potential for disappointment always lurks around the corner of each great hope and each great expectation. And there is no one we expect more of than God. So when God disappoints us, it can be crushing. When was the last time you were disappointed with God? Maybe that is your struggle today; unanswered prayers or unanswered hopes. For the crowds gathered on that first Palm Sunday, disappointment with Jesus is the only way to explain a man who was almost crowned king and then executed for treason just a week later. The crowd’s disappointment with Jesus tells us a lot about our disappointments and expectations of Jesus as well. Both their expectations and their disappointment were contained in the word they shouted, “Hosanna!” Let’s look at the text and that unique word that has come to define Palm Sunday.

Join us this morning as we examine Jesus’ final prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane and learn to pray with surrender, to pray with our fellow saints and to pray in our Savior (ft. Tim Sin, Assistant Pastor at Denver Presbyterian Church).

One of the things that stirs up a sense of pride in a young child is when someone looks at them and says, “You look just like your mother!” or “You are the spitting image of your old man.” The Bible says that we were made in God’s image, minus the spitting part; that in some way when He counseled in Himself to create something different than the rest of Creation, “God created mankind in His own image.” Men and women are meant in some way to bear the very image of the One whose idea they were; to bear the image of God. Last week we saw two things that being made in the image of God means: that we have a unique design (a unique frame around us that draws out the beauty of what God has made in each one of us) and that we have value (how could God not take care of those He made in His own image? And how could we not do the same in caring for other human beings?). Today we will look at another aspect of what it means to be made in God’s image that we see in the third part of the blessing that God pronounces over the male and female He just made: God made us in His image so that we can subdue the earth that He made and so that we can rule over all other life that He made. God rules and reigns over all Creation and He wants to share that authority and responsibility with us in some way; that is exactly how the original readers would have read that verse. When we moderns tend to think of humanity being made in the image of God, we often think of ontological categories, categories of being; what are we like and what were were made to BE? But the Ancient Near Eastern cultures thought of the image of God more in terms of “What are we made to DO?” Join us this morning for our final sermon in Genesis 1.

When we look at the world around us, and sometimes at our fellow human beings, we think, “What is that? Is this how humanity was really supposed to look?” Or maybe you look at yourself and wonder, “Who am I? Am I who I am actually supposed to be?” In Genesis 1:26-28 we can actually ask the Creator and Author, whose idea human beings were, “Tell me about what you have made. Those three verses help us to see ourselves rightly; not as blobs or monsters, but what we are actually supposed to be as beings made in God’s image. An understanding of Genesis 1:26-28 is foundational for rest of Bible. Let’s look at what these foundational verses have to say for us specifically this morning.

The diversity of life on our planet is astounding; from the diversity of life in the sea and in the air to the diversity of land creatures as well. Each creature helps do its part to put the glory of God on display and sets the stage for our delight in our Creator. For the first four days of Creation, our good and loving Creator sets up a world where living things can thrive and where the crown of His creation, humanity, can live and thrive in His plan and purpose. Now on Day 5, He begins to fill His world with those living creatures, and on Day 5 we see two firsts. The first “First” is that God creates what the Hebrew calls “Nephesh” or a living soul; something with life in it. Vegetation is technically alive, but it isn’t animated by the breath of life like a creature is; this is new, this is divine CPR.  Placing the spark of a heartbeat and the spark of desire and the breath of life into creatures of dust. That word for life is used for all creatures, whether in the water, in the air, on the land or for a human being. We can look at the living creatures around us and we are made of the same stuff. We are animated by the life and breath of our Creator, and that makes us want to treat our fellow creatures with value, be they animal or human. So in one way we have a lot in common with all living creatures. But in a greater and more significant way, we are not at all the same. As G.K. Chesterton said, “Camels are endowed with the finest camel hair brushes and yet they do not paint.” Why? God makes all living creatures on Days 5 and 6, but the crucial difference is that only humanity is made in His image, after His likeness. And as a result, every human being, unlike the animals, has a craving not ultimately for earthly things but a craving for God. The animals relate to God as Creator; human beings relate to God as Creator and Father. Animals are satisfied with basic desires; we were made to only be fully satisfied in God. And when we give our life only to pursuing the basest desires of our flesh as the animals do, we give up our unique place in Creation to glorify God and we take our place as just another animal. These first creature God makes tells us a lot about His plans and purposes for our world.

Join us this Sunday in Leviticus 9 as we look at the Old Testament sacrificial system and the promise of God’s glorious presence in our worship (ft. Colin Campbell, Member at Elevate Hope Centennial).