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Quite a few years ago, there was a best-selling book by Robert Fulgum which was entitled All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. The point of the book was that the most important lessons of living your life were learned in the first year -- actually the first day -- of school. I don't remember all of them, but they were lessons like: Share. Take a nap. Pay attention to the teacher. There's a time for play and a time for work. Clean up after yourselves. We only have a limited time each day. Fulgum's point was that there are a lot of people that have graduated from high school and even college who never really learned the most basic principles of kindergarten! They maybe can do Algebra or write a term paper, but they haven't learned some of the more important things in life. I've known quite a few church folks that obviously could stand to go back to kindergarten and re-learn some of those same lessons!

There's nothing as important as getting a firm hold on the basic principles of something. To learn to read and write a language, you must first learn the alphabet. In school, they don't stick you in Trig or Calculus and begin to teach you Cosine and Tangents and functional derivatives or logarithms. They don't stick you in Algebra two and say "okay, little Bobby, welcome to math on your first day at school; today we are going to graph and calculate volume of all the conic sections." No. They start by showing you two apples and saying "this is one apple and this is one apple and if we put the apples together we get two apples!" "Okay, Bobbie, how many apples are there?" Okay, Bobby if we have two pears and one apple here and one pear and one apple here and we combine them, then what do we have?" And the answer isn't "fruit salad!" If Bobby doesn't learn the basic principles that two apples and two apples is four apples, then he'll never be able to understand the deeper principles of math. In learning and mastering anything, we must keep "First Things First."

It's the same way with learning about God and how God works. As our text we read in the Book of Romans what is a somewhat startling scripture when you first understand it. The Apostle Paul is discussing how that when sinners stand before God one day, they will not be able to claim "ignorance" as an excuse. There will be nobody who will be able to say "but God, I didn't know you existed or how to find you or that you were there." And the reason that they will not be able to say that is because Paul said "creation reveals to us that there is a God and also much of His ways to us." But I want to re-read this passage of scripture in the English Standard Version so you can easily catch a phrase out of it:

Paul said that God's invisible attributes -- in other words, how He works and moves and operates -- and His eternal power -- what God is capable of doing, and His divine nature -- who God really is; His identity and substance -- have all been clearly revealed ever since the creation of the world! Not since the creation of the Garden of Eden. Not just since the creation of man. But from the creation of the world!

If that is true, then we should be able to not only learn about who God is and what He can do, but we should be able to learn about how God operates in our life today from studying what He did in Creation. And so a great truth is revealed to us here: the first few chapters of Genesis were not just written to debunk evolution or to classify how the world was created. It was written to be more than just a science lesson on the universe. But it was written to teach us of the most basic principles of God. Here are some of the most basic and first things that God desired for us to know about Him. Certainly all of the scripture teaches us about Him, but we must keep "first things first." We must learn the most basic things or we will never grasp the deeper revelations of God's ways.

So this series is a result of my turning back from Romans chapter 1 to Genesis chapter 1 and reading the creation story with a desire to see what is revealed of God's nature in these verses. This series will probably run for only four lessons and we will only cover the first five verses of the first chapter of Genesis. I hope you learn and never forget the first things that God ever wanted you to know about Himself!

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The very first revelation of God is found in the first four words of the Bible: "in the beginning, God . . . !" You don't have to go any further to learn something important!

It's important because what we do NOT find is a world of darkness waiting around for thousands of years for God to show up. What we do NOT find is a mess that -- after a while -- God decides to become involved in it. But what we find is that "in the beginning, God" is there! In the beginning God is already present and active! In the beginning, God's creative power is already at work. He has been unseen and unperceived, and before this we have no record of what He was doing, but God is already present and has a plan and has a will and His power is there, in the beginning!

The first thing that this teaches us is that God is not limited by your perception or existence. The prophet, Jeremiah, wrote:

God was telling Jeremiah that "I was involved in your life from the beginning of beginnings. Before you were even formed. Before you ever came into being in the womb of your mother." God said "even before all of that, I knew you and consecrated you and appointed you a prophet to the nations." Before Jeremiah knew there was a God, God knew there was a Jeremiah! Before Jeremiah knew that God had a plan, God had a plan for Jeremiah! Before Jeremiah had a tongue that could learn to say the word "consecrate," God already had consecrated and set aside Jeremiah's life for a particular calling and power. Looking at Jeremiah's life we can see "in the beginning, God" was already working, even before Jeremiah could even grasp the concept of God.

Most of you to which I am preaching were not raised in church. Most of you do not come from a long legacy of Apostolic people. Most of you spent some years and even decades living for the devil before you came to the knowledge of the truth of God's Word and love and His plan of salvation. Most of you received the Holy Ghost after many years of not even knowing it existed. There used to be an old song that said "I have no regrets, I have no regrets, since I met Jesus Christ I can say I have no regrets. The only thing that I would have done different is made my decision just a little bit sooner; since I met Jesus Christ I can say I have no regrets!" And some of you lived the first part of your lives unaware of the power and glory of God and what was possible to receive from Him!

If you are not careful, it can be easy to say "God just got involved in my life a few years ago." Or to view it as "God just found out who I am and became involved in my life recently." Ahh, but you've forgotten the very first lesson of God's Word and that is "in the beginning, God!" You just recently became aware of Him, perhaps, but God has been there from the beginning! Before you were aware of Him, He was aware of you! Before you even existed, He knew you and had a plan for your life! If you got the Holy Ghost at the age of forty, God did not just suddenly discover you, but God saw your spiritual hunger before you were conceived and despite the sin and pain and circumstances in which you were born, God was moving you towards a time and place where you would have an encounter with Him! I like what Bro. Arnold said at Family Camp: some of you were sinning and doing all manners of unGodly things and the devil wanted to destroy you, but God had His hand on you! You didn't even know that He knew you but He was guiding you to a place where you could come to know Him! Maybe it seems that He only recently got involved, but I'm here to tell you "in the beginning, God" was there!

I think back over my short life and I can see how that even in the beginning God was working things out. As the unwanted child of a fifteen year old girl, I was destined to become just another statistic of sin. My biological mother didn't want me. My biological grandmother didn't want me. My biological father did not want the responsibility of raising a child. But God saw a man and a woman who physically could not have any more children and yet were praying for a miracle and God worked it out that I was raised from birth by parents that loved God and were filled with the Holy Ghost! In the beginning, God was working in my life and putting into my path the steps for me to do something for Him!

When I was five or six, there was a family that just happened to get transferred to our area and began attending the local church. This family was the Cox family who had a son one year older than me. Most of you've met Bro. Brandon Cox from San Antonio. He was that friend. As we grew up, we separated and he went into the Army and I went into the ministry. I ended up in San Antonio, doing music and teaching Bible Studies. Brandon ended up in San Antonio, having believed a lie from the devil and believing that he could never do anything in God because of the mistakes of some bad choices. He ran into an old friend of mine in the bathroom at a wedding and discovered that I was in the same town! He called me and came to church. We invited him over and preached to him for several hours! God gets the glory, but now he's living for God, with a wife and kids that are living for God and preaching the Gospel! Accident? Oh, no! Something that God put together recently!? Oh no. I believe that before I was born, God had already arranged things. In the beginning, God was working and had a call on Brandon's life and a call on my life and He was making sure that we would support each other and help remind each other of the purpose of our lives!

And so I'm preaching to you! You are not here by accident. I am not here by accident. Bro. Patrick didn't found a church in Castroville, Texas by accident. It was no accident that you came to this part of the state of Texas. It was no accident that Daniel Whaley walked through those doors a few years ago having been raised twenty miles from where I spent my teenage years. It is no accident that any of you are here right now. Because you may have just recently become aware of God working in your life, but He's been working a long, long time! In the beginning, God! In the beginning, God was already working to bring you to a place where you could experience and respond to His glory and power! It's the first lesson created by God: In the beginning, God!

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The plan of God for Jeremiah's life had been in place for eternity, but Jeremiah only became aware of it after he had been born and grown up into a young man and heard God reveal it. It's the same with creation. God's plan had been in place for eternity, but we only became aware of it when God revealed it to us by manifesting Himself. The second principle that we need to learn is then this: We tend to view God's involvement in our everyday situations only in terms of when we see Him show up and work in an obvious manner.

Most of you know that I have stopped saying something that I once said all the time: "God is seldom early, but He's always right on time." I stopped saying that because I felt like God spoke to me and said "if you would call me early, then I would come early." And yet another reason why we feel as if God only shows up at the last minute, is that we judge God's involvement in our situations by what we can "see Him do." If we cannot physically see or "feel" something happening then we are convinced that God has not shown up yet.

But let me remind you of the first principle that God revealed about Himself: In the beginning God . . . ! Just because you don't see God until Genesis 1:1 doesn't mean that God was not working or planning or seeing or active before that. Indeed, well before the Bible starts recording God's dealing with man, God had everything worked out!

We often times think that just because we can't see God working, that He is not there. I've had people come to me frustrated and ask me "preacher, where is God at?" If you've ever wondered that, can I tell you that God is already involved in your situations!? God already has the answer and knows about your situation. Jesus taught this:

"Your Father knows what you need before you ask Him!" In another place, Jesus asked this question:

If something is needed in your child's life and you as a father know about it, then what do you do? You supply within your means that need! Even if the child is not aware of the need, themselves. Think about a child going to school for the first time. They have no idea what school is like and they don't know that they need an eraser or pencils or crayons or a sleeping mat or a backpack. They don't understand that they are going to need those things. But the parents do and usually the teachers communicate with the parents what is needed so that before the child ever steps into school, the parents go gather everything that will be needed. When the child comes home and says "I need an eraser" the father can say there's already one in your backpack. The child wasn't aware of it being there or his father's involvement until he asked, but it was already there all the time. Before the child was even aware of his need -- back in the beginning -- the father was already providing the needs.

It's just that sort of simple analogy that Jesus was using to teach us the same principle! If earthly fathers can foresee the needs of their earthly children and be able to provide what he has already prepared for him to have, then how much more does our heavenly Father -- God Almighty -- know what we need long before we ever even think to ask and already has it prepared to give us?! When we pray and God gives us His blessing, we get all excited because it has suddenly become made known to us that God had our answer, but He had it all the time even before we knew we needed it!

The importance of prayer, then, is not to surprise God with our requests of things that He forgot to provide, but to acknowledge our awareness of the need for things that He already has in place! We sometimes pray like we are trying to help or coerce God to manufacture or come up with an answer, but God already had the solution before we even were aware of the problem! If you've got sickness, then your healing is available and has been before you were even aware of that you were sick! God waits to give it to us when we pray so that we will continue talking to Him and thus developing a relationship with Him and so that He will get the glory. He waits to give it to you when you pray so that you can say "thank you." If God just automatically healed you every time you were sick, then you would take it for granted and He would never get the glory and the praise that He deserves! What looks to us as a "delay" is really just God waiting for us to ask!

And let me say this: God only gives His blessings to those who really have faith. And too often times because we come into prayer thinking that we are trying to convince God of something, because we don't see immediate results, we stop believing and trusting God and then we never receive our answer because our lack of faith stops God's ability to give it to us! So when you are praying, don't allow doubt or unbelief to enter into your mind because there is no problem with God's ability to do anything. In the beginning, God was creating a solution to your problem long before you ever even knew there was a problem!

And, since we are here, let me also say this: sometimes people think that God hasn't answered their prayers because He hasn't answered them in the way that they desired. An earthly father knows that sometimes the best answer to a child's request is not exactly what the child would want at that moment. Giving the child all of the candy that they want may not be the best for the child, even if the child doesn't understand that. When I was growing up, every time that we went to Walmart, I would scream and beg for a GI Joe figure. Never mind that I had a zillion of them, I always wanted a new one. And I can remember my mom explaining to me that "I have the money to buy you one, Jeremiah, but I'm not going to do so today because if I buy you one every time you come here, you will never learn to appreciate the ones that you do have and what will I get you on special occasions?" That didn't make sense to my mind then, but it does now.

Our job is not to figure things out but to pray in faith. If God does not do an instant healing when I pray for a situation, I do not lose faith in God but I continue trusting that He knows best and either the healing is a gradual process, or something better and greater can be accomplished through delaying the healing. If I prayed with faith, the issue is not me or God, but rather that I understand that as my heavenly Father, He knows best, even when it makes no sense to my perspective. Whatever happens, you can be assured that before you even knew about the situation, God already knew and had prepared an answer because in the beginning, God!

And let me also point out this: the scripture says that:

All good things in your life came from God. If you read on in Genesis chapter 1, you will eventually come to a place where God looks at everything and says "it is good." Those "good things" started way back with "in the beginning, God created." If there is something good in your life, then it is because in the beginning before anyone -- even yourself -- was aware, God was working to bring it about in your life. As finite humans, we tend to praise God only when we can see physically that He has been working lately. If you praise God only when things are going great, then you view God in the shallowness of your current perception and you need to get a deeper revelation of God's ways. Even if I can't see God moving anywhere, He knows about my situation and is working to bring good things in my life. If you have any good thing, then know that it was because God was working behind the scenes to produce it in your life. Therefore regardless of what kind of day it seemed to be -- good or bad -- we ought to praise God every chance that we have because whether we can see it or not "God is working" to bring about goodness and great things!

In Malachi chapter 3, we find that God issues a challenge:

God says "pay your tithes and offerings and see if I will not open the windows of heaven and pour you down a blessing." The point is that the financial blessing is already there behind a window waiting to be poured out, but what releases the blessing is obedience to God's financial plan.

In the book of Job, at the end of the great trial of Job's life, God appeared in a whirlwind and asked Job some questions. One of them is particuraly interesting to our study here. God asked:

God said that He has "storehouses of hail and snow" reserved for the time of trouble. The image is of great piles of snow and hail that God has reserved for when the conditions on earth are right to receive such things.

In these verses is a principle that God is trying to show us. Every blessing and action and deed that we could ever need in our life has already been provided and stored up and God is just waiting for the conditions to get right in our life before He releases them. Sometimes when people get mad at God because they can't see any sign of God's blessings in their life, the problem is not God because He has been working from the beginning and has blessings stored up, but the problem is that through they have not obeyed God's Word or commandment and therefore have not opened the window of heaven and activated the blessing being poured out over their life! In the beginning God was creating blessings for them, but they never got the revelation that obedience to the plan of God is what opens the window so that they can have the blessing poured out! Or maybe they received the blessing but were poor stewards of what God poured out. If you will obey God's Word and do things His way, then you can't help but be blessed, and if you do not obey God's Word, then the windows of heaven of blessing will stay shut and the windows of cursing and judgment will be opened. Either way, though, God had everything prepared before you ever knew that there was a need. In the beginning, God!

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There is a story that I am quite fond of in the New Testament that is found at the end of the 17th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. In it, we find that the temple tax collectors come around collecting the "half-shekel" temple tax and they find Peter and ask him "does your master pay this tax?" Peter, as usual, responds without thinking and says "of course, my master pays this tax." He then goes to find Jesus and says "um, now we have to pay this tax, because I've promised it." And Jesus rebukes him. There are several reasons for this but suffice it to say that Jesus did not work a normal job and therefore was not liable for taxes of any sort. Furthermore, Jesus was the Lord of the temple, and certainly the king does not pay taxes. Jesus was not bound to pay this tax, it was not necessarily the will of God for them to have to pay this tax, and yet now because of Peter's ignorance and mouth, they have now agreed to pay this tax. Oh, and they all are broke.

But Jesus has the solution. He tells Peter to take a hook and line and go to such and such place on the shores of the Sea of Galilee and cast the hook into the water. He then tells him that the first fish that you catch will have a shekel coin in it's mouth and that's exactly enough to pay the tax for both of them!

Peter goes out and throws his line in the water. Sure enough a fish bites it and when he pulls it in, is astonished to find that the fish has swallowed a shekel coin just as Jesus had said! God has provided an escape out of Peter's situation of his own doing miraculously!

There is a principle in the Gospels that Jesus never miraculously created something if He could use natural means instead. What that means is that when, say, He fed the five thousand with bread and fishes, that He did not pull down a gourmet meal out of the sky -- and He could have if He had wanted -- but instead used a boy's sack lunch that was available and miraculously multiplied it! God can just manufacture stuff out of mid air if He wants, but He usually chooses to use ordinary means to do the miraculous!

So I believe that God did not create a fish the second that Jesus spoke to Peter about going to fish and then poof caused a coin to appear that day. Rather I believe that God used a normal fish that was swimming around before that day happened and that someone happened to drop a coin accidentally into the sea and that God tapped that fish on the shoulder -- if fish have shoulders -- and said "hey Gil, swallow that!" And that God directed that little fish to the right point and let him get hungry at the right time so that before Peter was ever aware that the temple tax guys were coming after him, there was a fish swimming around in the Sea of Galilee with just the right coin in it's mouth!

Before Peter even knew there was a tax and made a mistake by obligating himself to the tax, Jesus had already provided the tax payment! Catch what I am saying and it ought to give you hope! Before Peter ever messed up a situation by saying and doing the wrong thing and the creating a problem which was entirely his own fault and then he runs to Jesus saying "I've messed up and I'm bringing you a situation that I have created and that it's my fault that it has happened." Before it even came to that, Jesus already had the solution ready and waiting and doing fin twirls and loop de loops in the sea of Galilee!

In the beginning, God! Maybe your mess is of your own creation and your own devising. Maybe it's totally your fault, and you are to blame. Still you should know that in the beginning before you ever realized that you were making a mistake, God's mercy has provided you a solution. It's there and has already been there before you came to Him with your issue. Now the only way you can get the solution that God has worked out for you is to be like Peter and no matter how strange or foreign that the request of God's Word seems, obey it! You will find that it is your obedience that unlocks the blessings and mercy of God. In the beginning, God already had everything in place, but He's just waiting on you to obey His commands so that He can release the answer to you! You are not waiting on God, but rather God is waiting on you. No matter what the circumstance, "in the beginning, God . . ."!