Do you ever need a Word from the Lord...I mean really need to hear his voice? Maybe you have a huge decision to make and you want to get it right. Say something devastating happens...and you truly hope to know that the Lord is there...that he cares. Do you ever look for his presence, his voice, his fingerprints...anything...to help stave off the desperate fear that there’s really no one out there for you...no God who watches, who listens, who acts?
We’ve all been praying for the J. family because of the loss of John’s mom. This week, one of our members told me that just before she passed, he sat up straight in bed, wide awake, at 4:00AM awakened by a dream about the Jackson family. “Pray for this family,” he was told. So he did. Through the night our brother poured out his prayers for the J’s.

The message of Genesis is that times have always been perilous. Man’s destructive tendencies, coupled with the unbridled power of creation keep us continually hanging over the precipice of annihilation. We are inveterate apocalyptic knob-twisters. God created the building blocks of matter; we figure out how to split them and blow things up in the process. God created genetic coding; we can’t wait to fiddle with eggs and chromosomes. We have sown the biological and environmental and nuclear win...and now we’re praying we don’t reap the whirlwind.
The Bible has always been concerned about the end. This morning we look at a time when the end almost came for us before we even had a chance to really get going. As amazing and upsetting as our own capacity for self-destruction is, it seems even more unsettling that long ago, in the time of a Noah, God chose to wipe out almost all people on earth. Does that strike you as strange?...somehow out of character for God?

It was Abraham who first gave us the notion that faith calls for us to “venture out.” Humans are almost by definition creatures on the move. The word for “human” in the Tibetan language means “one who moves.” Someone once suggested that the scientific name for humans should not be “homo sapiens,” but “homo mobilius.”
Today’s scripture, from the twelfth chapter of Genesis, describes the call of Abraham to move...to travel...to venture out with God. I don’t think there is a more important text in the entire Old Testament. This is where the history of the people of God really begins. This text marks the end of primeval history, and the start of God’s historical relationship with Israel.

The Genesis Creation account. Is it science? Is it a blueprint? Is it an answer against the secular humanists? No, not really. It is proclamation...it is lyric praise...it is song. The Genesis Creation account. Is it antiquated wives= tale? Is it myth? Is it hopeful fable? It is deep, powerful truth.

    Jesus said, “If you love me, you will obey what I command.”  Many of us here this morning are a little uncomfortable with commands...or at least certain commands?  We chafe under the seeming inflexibility of “the rules,” we bend God’s commands and sometimes break them and try to explain them away or just plain ignore them.  Sometimes rules seem dusty and  out of date and senseless anyway.  Did you know that in Tennessee, it is illegal for a driver to be blindfolded while driving a vehicle?  In Indiana, it is against the law to shoot open a can of food. (So that’s why they make pop tops!)  In Kentucky, it is a crime to use a reptile during any part of a religious service.  “I don’t care if it is testimony time...put that snake away!”