Message: In both Genesis 1 and Matthew 1 I see the order of God at work and the result is not only fruitfulness, but so much variety and creativity also. What struck me about this first was when I was reading about the different things that God separated out. This began with the light being separated from day to night and then the expanse into the sky and the waters but he did the same with many other things as well. Once these major categories were separated out it gave room for the creation of varieties and species. The things God created depended on those important separations that God made so before he began creating the things he had to start with a foundation of order. The order God established in the beginning are described in just a few short sentences but as I started thinking about what our world would look like if he hadn’t separated the night from the day and the waters from the sky I realized that we ourselves, and nothing we have would even be possible without it.
Command: If I want to be fruitful and creative, I have to have a foundation of order and structure in my life.
Promise: If I lay a foundation of order and structure, this provides an environment for fruitfulness and creativity.
Warning: If I try to skip the foundation of order and structure, and try to get right into productivity, I won’t be able to maintain or grow. I will constantly find myself needing elements that I am not prepared for. This not only kills the momentum but it also kills the drive and passion to keep going. I have learned from my own experience that those stops and starts are exhausting and when I develop a pattern of this kind of inconsistency it becomes harder and harder to get motivated to begin again.
Application: I am feeling all of this to my core right now. I have been off-track and undisciplined in many areas of my life right now. I see lots of fruitfulness in the areas I have maintained, but I feel the dread and the reality of what discipline is required of me for the areas I have let go. If I want to be productive and creative I need to establish a separation between some things in my life and maintain proper boundaries for them. This means I need to create set times for the different things I manage and stop allowing an overlap. I need to create designated time to work on my home and secondary job responsibilities so that during my primary job work hours I am not allowing other things to creep in and make me less productive. I need to make sure that I maximize the time that I have to get tasks done without laziness creeping in so that I can shut it all off in the evenings that I have off with my husband so I can be 100% in the moment in my marriage. Everything needs to have a time and a place so that I am not robbing one area to make up something I need an another area.
