This is the Introduction to the Sermon. You will receive the full manuscript sermon in Word format when you purchase.
Title: “The Design of the Church”
Series: Church as God Intended
Introduction:
[1]You and your friend are hiking in the Black Hills of South Dakota. As you round a hill, you come upon a sight that stops you in your tracks. In front of you are four giant faces carved into stone. Each head is as tall as a six-story building. The faces are a perfect likeness of four American presidents—Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Lincoln.
After taking photos of this magnificent find, what conclusions would you come to concerning its origin? How did these faces appear on this mountainside? What reasonable options are there to explain it?
Perhaps they happened through chance. Over the years, wind and rock slides combined to produce these four faces. But that seems silly, doesn't it? We know that Mount Rushmore exhibits the three signs of design: forethought, planning, and intention.
Mount Rushmore is the brainchild of sculptor John Gutzon Borglum. Borglum wanted to create a memorial of America's most revered presidents (intention). Borglum and his four hundred workers devised an ingenious method of removing more than eight hundred million pounds of stone created by the blasting (planning). Before the blasting could begin, designers mapped out the size and shape of each president. The presidents' noses are twenty feet long and rest above mouths that are eighteen feet wide. Each of the presidents' eyes is eleven feet across. The carvings are scaled to individuals who would stand 465 feet tall (forethought). After fourteen years of work, the four busts were completed, and Mount Rushmore opened to the public in 1941.
We often use this example to illustrate God’s design of creation, but it has another equally valid and interesting analogy – the church.
The Church has been designed with God’s forethought, planning, and intention. In fact, this church you are a part of today is a part of God’s grand design.
There are three very specific things we can say about God’s design today:
[1] J. P. Moreland; Tim Muehlhoff, The God Conversation (InterVarsity Press, 2007),