94-54 The Lord God made them all

The picture is from Genesis chapter 1, verse 1. In the deep, God created the heaven and the earth. Now the earth was fullness of energy. Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

And God said, Let there be light. And there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from darkness.

God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And there was evening, and there was morning, the first day. And God said, Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water.

So God made the expanse, and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. God called the expanse sky, and there was evening, and there was morning, the second day.

And God said, Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear. And it was so. God called the dry ground land, and gathered waters he called seas.

And God saw that it was good. Then God said, Let the land produce vegetation, seed-bearing plants and trees, on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds. And it was so.

The land produced vegetation, plants bearing seed according to their kinds, and trees bearing fruit with seed in it, according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good, and there was evening, and there was morning, the third day. And God said, Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years.

And let there be lights in the expanse of sky to give light on the earth. And it was so. God made two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night.

He also made the stars. God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good, and there was evening, and there was morning, the fourth day.

And God said, Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky. So God created the great creatures of the sea, and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

God blessed them and said, Be fruitful and increase in number, and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth. And there was evening, and there was morning, the fifth day. And God said, Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds, livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind.

And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created him. Male and female, he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it, rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, and over every living creature that moves on the ground. Then God said, I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth, and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.

And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground, everything that has breath of life in it, I give every green plant for food. And it was so. God saw all that he had made and it was very good.

And there was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day. Thank you, Anne, for that dignified reading of that beautiful passage. Thank you, Tony, too.

You can tell he used to be a teacher, can't you? Just imagine him standing up before the class. Now, class, hands up if you haven't done your homework. There we are.

Now, I would urge you to stay if you haven't been around. It is a wonderful demonstration of creativity. Now, you've got to put up with me for a few minutes before the other Tim comes.

I wanted us to think about a creation theme this evening. It just seems so appropriate when we've got so many visual aids all around us. You may remember back at the beginning of the year, there was a 17-year-old who was sent on a safari.

He was in a detention center for young offenders somewhere near Gloucester and created a bit of a fuss earlier on. And this is a report of the safari that he was given as part of his punishment. He said, Cairo was totally disgusting rubbish.

I hope I'm not letting the tab in for any liability claims here from the Egyptian Tourist Board. But this is what he said, not me. The pyramids were just bits of rock.

I would rather see God's creations than man's creations. The cruise down the Nile, that's very nice and good. I watched the sun rise over the mountaintops.

That was Mount Sinai. The wildlife was very excellent. Victoria Falls was excellent.

God's creation. Man hadn't touched it. Well, he obviously enjoyed himself and wanted to go again very quickly because he was back re-offending as soon as he was let out.

But I rather took to that young lad. I thought he had a point, really. It is true that whatever God makes is very wonderful and beautiful, isn't it? Until man gets his hands on it.

But if you were David Attenborough at this time, you'd say, hang on, hang on a bit. This isn't really God's creations. This is just part of nature.

Okay, it's the miracle of nature. But don't go rushing on too quickly about God and him making things. I actually think that the wildlife programs on television are some of the most harmful that we have, quite honestly, because they are deliberately anti-God.

So where did it all come from? Are we here as a result of personal choice or just impersonal chance? Do we come from fate or father? You see, when we went to school, and those of us who are still there, we were probably taught in our biology lessons that Genesis is rubbish and God is redundant. So who do we believe? Well, I'm not terribly phased by science. It wasn't that long ago that I went to school, but I know that a lot of what they taught me when I went to school is now right out of the window because science is always changing.

Science is fallible. Very, very few scientists today believe in evolution the way Darwin taught it. That's why they took his portrait off the 50-pound note at the back of last year, because they thought his work wasn't really worth it anymore.

It had been discredited. You see, when I was at school, I was taught that there were a lot of things called vestigial organs, some of which I still had and some of which I left behind when I was an embryo. And I was taught that these were just a load of evolutionary hangovers when my ancestors were just fish or reptiles, like gill slits, for example, which apparently I used to have in my mother's womb, and you did too.

But these vestigial organs, there used to be 180 of them, have got whittled down to about two or three now because they keep finding uses for these things that they thought were completely useless. And indeed, the evolutionary assumptions about our vestigial organs severely held back the progress of medical science because people said, oh, they're useless, and they weren't trying to look for use for them when they did have a lot of use. Indeed, those gill slits developed into the thymus gland and the middle ear canals, both very essential for our well-being today.

And another thing they taught me when I went to school was that as an embryo, I and you went through a number of stages. How many of you were taught this? Perhaps you'd like to put your hands up. I'll try not to be the schoolmaster, but I was taught we went through an amoeba stage and then a fish stage and then a bird stage.

How many of you were taught this? Any of you remember this? Perhaps you can't remember back that far. Well, that's absolute garbage now. It used to be summed up by a very highfalutin phrase.

I don't think I can recite it, so I'll have to read it. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. That was the language scientists used.

They said, oh, yes, of course, ontogeny replicates phylogeny. And if you say that, you can sound very, very intelligent indeed. And, I mean, who can argue with that? You can't argue with ontogeny replicates phylogeny, can you? Nobody can.

But it's scientific gibberish, and actually it's being completely discredited now. So science is always changing, and if I have to make a choice between science and Scripture, I'll take Scripture any day because God was actually there when it all happened, unlike any scientists that you might happen to know. Having said that, we also have to realize that our interpretation of Scripture, our interpretation of Scripture, is also fallible.

And we mustn't give ourselves too many unnecessary problems by holding to things that the Bible doesn't necessarily teach. You know, Galileo got into serious trouble for holding that the world is round, and people said to him, ah, but the Bible talks about the four corners of the earth. There we are.

A circle doesn't have corners, does it? Therefore, the word must be square. But, I mean, we talk about the stars coming out at night, but we don't sort of think, well, where do they shoot off to during the day, do we? It's just the way we speak. And the Bible has to be read on God's terms, not on our terms.

And the trouble is that today some scientists think, oh, well, I'm a scientist, so the Bible must be written for me, for scientists. But, of course, it's not. It's written for everybody all over.

And if you look at Genesis 1, in the very highest sense of this phrase, it is sheer poetry. It's not the way that I was taught to write up a laboratory experiment in my first year, where you had to have method and then observations and then conclusion. I was taught this, and it's obviously stuck with me.

But Genesis 1 is not like that. Indeed, it's all based around three numbers, the three perfect numbers, 3, 7, and 10. If you look at the first three days, you'll find that there are three separations, light from darkness, the water above and below the sky or the expanse, and the sea and the dry land.

And here, God is making space in which to work. And then in the next three days, there are three acts of creation, the sun, moon, and stars, the fish and the birds, and then animals and man. First, God makes the habitat, and then he makes the inhabitants.

And you'll see that on days three and six, he actually performs two creative acts. It's very carefully worked out. There are a number of sevens here.

There are seven days, obviously. There are seven God saw that it was goods, and there are seven and it was so's. And there are a number of tens here.

God said comes ten times. God made comes ten times. And according to their kind comes ten times.

And there are a number of threes here, three let there be's, three blessings, three types of vegetation, three types of animal. This really is a literary masterpiece. It is inspired literature, as I believe, God directly to Moses.

And it has to be read on its own terms. And I believe that is literally rather than literalistically. And there's quite a difference there.

If you look at chapter two, verse five, I think you will see that you cannot take chapter one literalistically because it just won't work out. But it is a masterpiece. If you read the ancient myths, the Gilgamesh epics and so on, after having read Genesis one, you really will go from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Because on this page, God is telling us so very, very much. He's telling us so much about himself. He's telling us that he is powerful.

Obviously, he can create things with just a word. No sinner said than done. That he is personal.

That he is plural. Let us make man in our own image. That he is loving.

That he is feeling. That he is good. That he blesses his creation.

That he is orderly because he makes everything according to their own kinds. That he is eternal because he is there from the beginning. That he is supreme.

He is God over all. He is not caught up with his creation. He is independent and above his creation.

And, of course, that he is highly creative. He's telling us all these things about himself. But, you know, the most fantastic thing about this God we read of in Genesis chapter one is this.

That he made you to have a relationship with him. Just think about that. The reason he made you was to have a relationship with him.

You may have seen the cartoon about the two monkeys in the zoo talking to one another. One was saying to the other in the cage, Am I my keeper's brother? Well, think about it. But it's a very important question, isn't it? Are you related to the apes? Now, I thought I had to tackle this subject sometime.

And it turned out to be convenient this evening. Because, for a start, I know some of you have to think about these things in biology lessons. You do get up against it, really.

And you wonder whether there are any answers to what you hear. You only hear one side of the story. And I remember when I was back in my own class, although you're taught rather differently than I was, the basic stuff is still the same.

That's partly because they actually take a long time before the truth actually, even in scientific circles, filters down to the classroom. It has to go through the professors, first of all, and then the normal, ordinary graduates. And then they become teachers.

And eventually, a long time afterwards, you get something a bit straighter nearer to what is perceived to be the truth. The other reason, I think, is because I believe there's somebody here who's still sheltering behind the old thing that science has disproved Christianity. And that's just not so.

It's a very convenient refuge point, but it's just not true. Sometimes we Christians do get accused of being naive and gullible. Admittedly, our faith works best on a simple level.

That's undoubtedly true. But having said that, we are not unthinking. We don't take our brains out when we become Christians.

And we have thought about this. At least I have and a number of us have. And although we haven't got all the answers, neither have the scientists.

Quite honestly, they have not. We have at least as many answers as they do. So I want us to think about concentrating, sort of using Genesis 1 verse 31 as a frame, on, first of all, everything that God made.

The Lord God made them all. God saw all that he had made. And then secondly, that it was exceedingly good.

Who has made all things well. As the same hymn puts it, it was very good, it was very beautiful. And that's the framework.

Now in Hebrew there's a special word for the word create. It's the word bara. And it means to create something out of nothing.

And this is something that only God can do. This word bara is only ever used of God and it's never used of human beings because the best that human beings do is to manufacture something out of something that's already given. Whereas God can make things out of nothing.

He can truly create. And in this chapter, this word bara, create, comes, surprise, surprise, at three points during the narrative and the third time it comes three times. So number one, we read that God created the heavens and the earth.

He created matter. Secondly, in verse 21, we read that God created the birds and the great creatures of the sea and everything with which the water teems. He created life, the first creation of life.

And then the third point in verse 27, we read this three times here just to underline it and put it in bold and capitals and everything else that you can put it in to reinforce this. God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him.

Male and female he created them. So let's have a look at these three. Created matter.

Now of course if you get hold of a physics textbook, what it will say is in effect this. First of all there was absolutely nothing and then there was a big bang and then there was something. Now obviously that contradicts the first law of thermodynamics which states that matter can neither be created nor destroyed.

But it doesn't really seem to bother the physicists because they say well there was an exception at the start of time for some reason. And then they say that from this massive explosion, the fallout of all of this was the most complex and ordered universe that you could possibly wish to imagine. Now that's also rather strange because if you had an explosion in a print factory you would not expect to end up with a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

And indeed you wouldn't expect to end up with anything sensible at all. And indeed that contradicts the second law of thermodynamics which states that systems always run down. They always become more and more chaotic.

They never become more and more ordered. Well the first and the second laws of thermodynamics are scientifically proved and demonstrated principles but the account that scientists give for the origin of matter are certainly not and they contradict all of the observed scientific principles that we have. Professor Paul Davis, he's a British astronomer, talks about the miracle of the big bang for this reason.

You see if you're an evolutionist you have to believe in miracles only you have to have rather more faith than we do because these miracles happen out of complete chance rather than by design of someone who is behind them. Now what about animate life after we've looked at matter? Well again we have the same story. People used to believe in the spontaneous generation of life.

They used to believe that if you had a really smelly, sweaty shirt and they used to know about this in the Middle Ages because they never had a bath, they only had one pair of clothes and if you left it out and put a bit of grain on it after 30 days you would produce a mouse. That was how mice were supposed to be made by these theories. Now there was a guy called Louis Pasteur.

He was quite a bright French scientist and he established that living things never arise from non-living matter. That was his principle and that was how the matter rested until the evolutionists got going and they turned the clock right back. And you may have heard of the experiment, you may not know the name of the guy who performed it but he was a guy called Stanley Miller in 1953 who put an electric charge, he zapped this current through a mixture of ammonium, hydrogen and water vapor and hey presto what did he get? Amino acids.

And everybody said life created in a test tube. Well as Time Magazine last year reported it was a beautiful picture but unfortunately probably wrong. Now you've all heard of that experiment.

It's all given proof as evidence as to how life could come about. It's probably wrong. It's widely denied in the scientific community now.

You see even if you could do that with no intelligent person doing it then that experiment would never actually form the base of life because the amino acids which were formed in this experiment and are always formed when it's done in laboratory conditions are always a mixture of left-handed amino acids and right-handed amino acids. Whereas for life to form you can only possibly have left-handed amino acids. Once you get one right-handed amino acid that's it.

It just blows the whole thing. It just falls down the system. And there are other snags as well about this commonly given origin of life.

For example if you have oxygen in the primeval soup I don't know what you think of when you hear that phrase primeval soup. I always think about my school ham and pea soup that they used to dish up. I always used to imagine it was something a bit like that.

Not that anybody's ever seen any primeval soup and there's not any evidence that it ever existed actually. But if you had oxygen around at the time then as soon as life would start to emerge these amino acids somehow forming into DNA although they couldn't do it it would be immediately oxidized and that would be the end of the story. But having said that if you have no oxygen you have no ozone.

And if you have no ozone you just get a lethal dose of ultraviolet as we know today. So you've got no life that way either. So whether you've got oxygen or not you've got no life.

It's catch 22. Indeed somebody has calculated the probability even if these amino acids could be formed in this way of them combining in a way which allows for reproduction is 1 over 10 to the power 87. Now I believe that there are only 10 to the power 30 atoms in the whole of the universe.

So you can see that the probability of 1 over 10 to the power 87 is just a little bit unlikely. But what's really bad news for the evolutionists is other calculations that Professor Freight Hoyle some of you will have heard of him and his sidekick or partner Chandra Wickramsinger have made. Because they've said but life you see isn't just life.

We have an incredible number of enzymes which are extraordinary protein molecules. We have about 2,000 of them and they're all very, very improbable compounds but we need them to sustain life as we know it. And the probability that these have all come about by chance is 1 over 10 to the power 40,000.

That's 10 with 40,000 noughts on the end. It's just unbelievable. It's even less than the chances of two all British singles finals at Wimbledon.

It's just not ever going to happen. So Professor Hoyle and Wickramsinger have come to the amazing conclusion that life must have been seeded here from outer space. It didn't start here at all.

It couldn't have done so it must have come from somewhere else. And indeed in that they've been joined by a number of scientists including the Nobel Prize winner Professor Francis Crick. And he says that life is such a complicated system it's the most complex system of all that it could not possibly have come about by gradual evolutionary development.

It seems that that must be the final nail in the coffin of evolution. Well that's everything that God made. The third special creation that he made was man and woman together in the image of God.

And of course it's when that is denied that our problems really begin. It's when we're told that we've just climbed out of the jungle, crawled out of the pond in some way and we treat ourselves as animals that life begins to disintegrate. More of that a little bit later.

Certainly let's have a look at the phrase very good, very beautiful. He has made all things well. We'd have to say that, wouldn't we? I mean you can't have eyes and look around you here this evening and not say that God has made all things well.

I was up on the downs on Monday. I was on an orchid hunt. I thought I stood a good chance.

I knew where to go and I wasn't disappointed. I found my bee orchids I was looking for. I haven't got the pictures back yet but if any of you want me to show you them later on you can see them.

These incredible flowers which look just like a bumblebee has landed inside. How could they possibly come into being? You see if they evolved gradually, slowly then there must have been a time when the thing inside looked absolutely nothing like a bee at all. Therefore it would have no competitive advantage over any other orchid.

Therefore it would never have turned into a bee shape in the middle, would it? It must be there by somebody's deliberate design. Somebody perhaps who has a little bit of a sense of humour. I think it must be said.

Somebody who likes making things beautiful because they are beautiful flowers. God, Father God. The Bible of course does allow for what we might call micro evolution.

If you believe the Bible you have to believe in some what we might loosely define as evolution because obviously you have to believe that everybody all over the world all mankind are descended from one single pair of human beings. Our knowledge of genetics now allows us this that we could have all come, whatever our skin colour whatever our face shape whether we've got slit eyes or eyes as we have in the West we could all have come from two human parents just a matter of a few thousand years ago. But the Bible does not allow for macro evolution between families.

There is no evolution inter-genus as the biologists would put it because we have been made after our own kind. That is how God made us. And the fossil record bears this out.

You see when mollusks, clams, oysters, snails and slugs suddenly burst onto the fossil record they do so all complete and all very different from one another. So that any sort of mollusk that you might know today resembles almost exactly the first mollusk that ever appeared in the fossil record. There was never an in-between stage and that is true of all families.

The missing links are precisely that as a Guardian writer put it last year missing, believed, non-existent. And that is the conclusion that more and more evolutionists are coming to that these missing links just don't exist. Darwin thought they would be found but they never have been.

Even though many, many living species, a good proportion of our living species have been found in fossilised form those species which were supposed to have been found to bridge the gaps just haven't. Now in 1938 a fisherman of Cape Province, South Africa netted a colocanth. This was a bit of a shock to him, not to mention the colocanth because these fish were believed to have been extinct for 100 million years and one suddenly then turns up in a net and a number of others have been caught since then.

Now biologists got very excited about this because the colocanth is very closely related to a group of fish called the ripidistia and they were supposedly one of the few classic evolutionary missing links between fish and amphibia. And indeed they do have certain skeletal similarities to these land creatures on four legs. Unfortunately when they dissected it because this colocanth wasn't eaten for somebody's dinner that night they found that the heart and lungs of this fish are exactly like the heart and lungs of, well, a fish.

They had nothing to do with amphibia at all. There was no resemblance when you actually cut them open and saw their soft tissue inside. So again and again evolutionary predictions have not been borne out and that's why evolutionists now are divided pretty much evenly between those who maintain with Darwin that evolution is a gradual process as its name and those who say no, it's taken place in a series of jumps.

This is called saltational evolution. And those who hold to this believe that every so often there is a lucky break as it were. All the mutations suddenly come right together and you suddenly develop something else which is different, a different family.

However, the trouble is that the chance of, say, throwing up a feather with all of its intricate complex design to be so specialized in order to help a bird to fly from a scale is absolutely nil. Again, it's as unlikely as some of those probabilities we were talking about earlier. But of course if all you get is a frayed scale that's not going to help the poor amphibian to fly at all, is it? The poor lizard or whatever it was.

It's just going to obviously plummet straight to the ground and get eaten by a prehistoric cat of some kind. It's got to be formed fully if it's really going to work. And again, the chances are just not on.

Indeed, one of the opponents of saltational evolution, Professor Mary, says that it is the equivalent of believing in miracles. So there you are again. If you're an evolutionist, you have to believe in miracles.

A microbiologist I've been reading recently, I don't know whether you've been able to tell I've been reading microbiology recently, but Michael Denton, he's an Australian, he says this. He's not a religious man. He said, it appears absurd that chance should have thrown together devices of such complexity and ingenuity that they appear to represent the very epitome of perfection.

And that's just true. You see, you are absolutely amazing. I don't know whether you've thought that recently or looked in a mirror and said, boy, you're just amazing.

But you are. Take just one cell of your body, for example. And again, this is sort of recent knowledge from breakthroughs in molecular biology.

To appreciate a cell, you have to magnify it a thousand million times so that you could see it properly. And then it would be like a giant balloon shape sort of which would fit over London. And in this cell, you would see millions and millions of openings, all opening and closing, and streams of materials going in and out.

And if you entered in through one of these openings, you would get into a most amazing labyrinth of corridors and conduits. And they would take you all over the cell to various assembly plants and processing units. There would be a central memory bank in the nucleus of the cell, but other memory banks as well in the outlying areas.

All around, you would recognize sort of robotic-type machines, all organized in a very, very efficient way. All kinds of products being processed all over the place and made. And you would also, if you knew what they were, recognize artificial languages and decoding systems, quality control units and fail-safe devices within this one tiny little cell in your body that you couldn't see without a microscope at all.

But one of the most amazing things about this cell, with all of its complex ingenuity, is this, that it can reproduce itself in just two or three hours. All that amazing functional design. And wherever you look, you just see perfection.

Perfection everywhere, whether it's in the eye of a hawk or the human brain or the feathers of a bird. It's just everywhere. And beauty as well.

Beauty that doesn't just seem to be functional. When we make things, we like to make them beautiful, even if they don't serve any useful purpose. And when God makes things, he loves to make them beautiful, beautiful.

No wonder, at the end of his week's work, God sat back and admired what he'd done. He said, my, that's very, very good. That's excellent, excellent.

So, it's just not true that science has disproved Christianity. No matter how often you hear a phrase like that, it's just not true. I've heard it over and over again.

Actually, it's the theory of evolution which rests on missing fossils and unobserved genetics. In other words, it's not really very scientific at all. Michael Denton, who I was referring to earlier, describes evolution as the great cosmogenic myth of the 20th century.

He says that a myth is a way of going back to the beginning to explain your present beliefs. And he says, and he's not a religious man, don't forget, that the thing is that 20th century man wants to be independent. And therefore, he has to have a theory which makes him independent.

You see, if you are accidental, then you are not accountable. If you're here by design, if somebody made you, your maker is to be your master. You can't escape from that.

You belong to the one who made you. That was Darwin's problem. The latest biography of Darwin is a fascinating book.

It shows you how his whole life he's on the run from God, that he was brought up in a Christian family and had Christian friends at various stages. And you see, if you can knock out the creator, then you can run from God. But to knock out the creator, you've got to come up with evolution.

Evolution furthermore sanctions selfishness. It's a very, very destructive theory. Richard Dawkins, who makes the national press quite a lot, he's a great skeptic, again a biologist, he's written a book called The Selfish Gene.

Because evolution, of course, teaches as a key principle the survival of the fittest. Therefore, of course, we can have abortion for those who don't quite measure up. Of course, we can have euthanasia for the weak and elderly and infirm.

Of course, you can treat granny like the cat and put her down if she's no different from the cat. Evolution was the theory that Hitler worked on. He said, yes, the Aryan race are the most highly evolved people.

Therefore, we can knock out some of the others, Jews, Romanists, Gypsies, and we will be doing a service to mankind because we will be enhancing the cause of evolution. Do you see why it's so dangerous? It has done so much damage in this 20th century. There was a fellow called Cedric who was a geologist who lived at the time of Darwin and he reviewed Darwin's book.

Cedric was a Christian believer and he made this prophetic statement at the time. He said, if Darwin is accepted, humanity will suffer damage that will brutalize the human race and sink it into a lower degradation than it has ever fallen in the course of human history. That describes very eloquently in one tragic, awful sentence what has happened in the 20th century as evolution has been accepted widely and humanity has just sunk down and down and down into depths of degradation we could hardly have imagined or foretold, certainly not at the start of the century.

So what about you? You can do a Charles Darwin and you can run from God, your maker, too. But although it does seem sometimes rather threatening that you have a maker to whom you are accountable, let me tell you this. It's quite wonderful, absolutely wonderful to be loved by the God who made you.

I can't tell you how brilliant it is. I can't tell you what a wonderful thing it is to wake up every morning and know that the God who made me is with me and I can know Him as my Father who loves me, who has made me as I am, who has a plan for my life and who is totally committed to me. Of course I am accountable to Him.

Of course it means I can't just go and do my own thing as I could if I were here just by accident. But it's a wonderful thing to be loved by the God who made you. And this God who made you is so committed to you that even though His perfect creation was spoiled badly because corruption followed His creation, He made all things well and then things went wrong, very badly wrong because mankind, the crown of His creation, rebelled against Him, put two fingers up to Him as it were, went their own way and you and I are part of that.

But because of His love for each of us, because of His love for men and women, God sent His Son in order that the corruption should be undone, in order that the creation should be restored. There is creation, there is corruption, but there is Christ and by turning to Him you too can come back into the relationship with the God who made you. Let me say this, if you want to become a Christian and some of you really need to do that and you know that this evening, you haven't really got a leg to stand on and Christianity, let's face it, you know this really, is a good life.

It is the best life and it is the true life. And I just say you've got to be willing to do three things. Just hear me out as I finish.

Number one, you've got to be willing to give up everything that you do that you know is wrong. That's the first thing that you must be willing to do if you are to become a Christian. Secondly, you must be willing to be known as a Christian.

You can't be a Christian on the quiet. You have got to declare it to your friends, to your schoolmates, to your workmates, to your family. You've got to let anybody and everybody know.

And thirdly, you've got to hand over the keys of your life to Jesus Christ to put Him in the driving seat so that He can be in control and make of your life the very best to fulfil your true potential, all that He has given to you, all that He has locked up within you. Those three things. And then, by the fabulous mercy of God, you are able to become a Christian at His own invitation and offer and know that He is your God, your Creator, your Saviour, the One with whom you will spend the whole of the rest of eternity.

Praise and worship and adore Worthy, oh worthy are you Worthy to be thanked and praised And worshipped and adored Singing Hallelujah Lamb of God, Lord We worship and adore you With major glories blown Hallelujah Glory to the healing You're more than a conqueror You're Lord of everything Worthy, oh worthy are you Worthy to be thanked and praised And worshipped and adored Worthy, oh worthy are you Worthy to be thanked and praised And worshipped and adored Singing Hallelujah Lamb of God, Lord We worship and adore you With major glories blown Hallelujah Glory to the healing You're more than a conqueror You're Lord of everything