So God Created Man

"Then the Lord God Formed a man from the dust of the ground..." (Genesis 2:7). 

Main Point: Man's value comes not from himself (we're all broken pots), but because of God who made him.

Objects Needed: Bible

books or magazines showing archeological digs and/or artifacts and/or scenes from ancient cultures

pail of sand, kitty litter or cornmeal 

broken dish (this story uses a Styrofoam cup)

garden trowel, toy shovel and/or brush (optional)

How many of you have ever heard the word "archaeologist"? `Can anyone tell me what an archaeologist does? An archaeologist is a scientist who studies people who lived a long time ago. And one of the ways that he or she studies them is by looking for places where the people used to live, and digging up things that the people used to use.

Would you like to pay "archaeologist"? Great! Let's pretend that we're scientists looking for information about ancient people.

**, take this trowel and carefully dig around to see if you can find any artifacts in our digging site. You found something? Wonderful! 

**, would you like to take this brush and gently clean off our treasure? It's a smashed up styrofoam cup! Now if this cup had been left behind by ancient peoples, we would all be really excited by the

discovery of this artifact. And we'd be excited, not because a broken cup is necessarily useful or beautiful, but because of what it might telling us about the people from long ago who made it and used it. 

Here's a photograph of some archaeologists hard at work. These scientists are carefully cleaning off a jug that was used by ancient Romans. It wasn't a very expensive or valuable jug when it was first built. It was a common jug for everyday use. It wouldn't have been considered to be very important back in the time of the Roman Empire. 

It's an important artifact to us thoughé because of what it can tell us about the ancient Romans who made the jug.

Here's a photograph of an ancient Greek vase which archaeologists carefully put together out of broken pieces——see where it was broken? It was probably broken and thrown away by a Greek household about 24dO years ago. It was garbage back then. But yesterday's trash is today's treasure if it helps us to understand the ancient Greeks who designed and manufactured it.

(Put away books and get out Bible.)

We live in a world where many people believe that the most important thing that any human being can do is think about himself. They think that the most interesting and central concerns of anyone's life are and should be what he wants, what he likes, and what he does. Man is number one, and man comes first.

But there is a big problem with this type of thinking. The problem is (get out the broken dish) that each one of us is a broken and flawed person. Each one of us has things in our lives that are ugly, and each one of us is incomplete. If all we do is look to ourselves, then all we do is look at broken dishes.

But we are valuable, and we are valuable in spite of the fact that we are broken. We know that we are of great worth because the Bible tells us that when God created man out of the dust of the earth, He created man in His own image. We are valuable because we were designed by God. We are valuable because we were built by God. We are valuable because we show something of the One who made us.