Second Stage Ministries

After God had created the world and gave Adam his instructions, God said: “'It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.'" - Genesis 2:18 NIV God knew right from the start that man should not be alone. He knew from the start that man could not do life alone. We need people to interact with and to do this thing called life, and when that element is missing or infrequent - loneliness can come aboard and start whispering all kinds of things to us, making us feel worse, and that is not the way God wants it. But we also find something else out right from the very beginning. After Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (which we will look at in the next post) and they were hiding from God, we see these words in Genesis 3: “Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was  walking in the garden  in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the...

Over the last couple of posts, we have seen the world take shape with the voice of God. We have seen how God shaped us with His two hands. We have also looked at God's view of rest.  Today we are going to take an imaginative look at the paradise that God had created for Adam and Eve to live in. It must have been quite an amazing place to be in, and it was all for them and the animals. I can imagine that it must have been a place of pure awe. The trees and plants along the banks of the river (Genesis 2:10). The animals playing in the fields and water. The sunrises and sunsets. The endless supply of food from the trees and plants. Then the only thing Adam and Eve had to do was enjoy the space that God had made for them. God did, however, give them some responsibilities in the Garden.  1 - Work and care for the Garden     "The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it." - Genesis 2:15 NIV But I believe th...

The Dawn - part 3 - God Rested As we continue our look at the book of Genesis, we are going to be looking at the last day of Creation in this post. We can find the last day of Creation in Genesis 2: “By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.” - Genesis 2:2 NIV Now I always ask this question whenever I reference this day of Creation - Did God really need to rest? Did He fall down in His lazy boy and exhausted from all the work? No. Of course not! However, He did know a little bit about us. So by "resting" on the seventh day, God is showing us a rhythm. A rhythm of work, work, work, work, work, work, rest. Work, work, work, work, work, work, rest. God wants us to rest. Rest is good for the soul. Rest is good, period. But we have been conditioned to think that rest is lazy and unproductive. We say to ourselves - "Here I am sitting here when I could be doing something....

In the last post we talked about how God spoke and the world was created. We can see this in Genesis 1. But towards the end of Genesis 1 we see the Creation story take a turn to a different type of creating. God went from speaking things in to existence to forming us in to existence. “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” - Genesis 1:27 NIV “Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” - Genesis 2:7 NIV These verses put a whole new look on the creation story. For the longest time I thought Genesis 2 was the next part of the story. But really Genesis 2 zooms in on how God created us and how the Garden of Eden became Adam and Eve's home. Can you picture this? God creating Adam from the dust of the ground and if He created Adam that way that mean He created all of us that way! God formed ...

Every story has to start somewhere. About a month ago, a friend and I started a book called "The Story" written by Max Lucado and Ryan Frazee. In this book they zero in on the great story of God that runs through the Bible. It's a story of amazing love, forgiveness and grace.  In the first part of the story, we see the Earth as a formless void and the words: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” – Genesis 1:1-2 (NIV) But as we read the first 25 verses of Genesis 1 we start to see a pattern in HOW God is creating the heavens and the Earth. Throughout those verses we see these three words… “….GOD SAID…” [1] So I picture God looking down or “hovering” over the Earth. Then God begins to speak. “Let there be light, sky, dry ground, seas and oceans, trees and plants. Let there be sun, moon and stars.” [2]...

As I was thinking about what to write for this post, I was reminded of this little story in Luke 10: “As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, 'Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!' 'Martha, Martha,' the Lord answered, 'you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.'" - Luke 10:38-42 NIV This was me this past week. I was focused on many things and was feeling a little stressed just like Martha. I needed to homework, work on a lesson for church, help the kids, work on things around the house, write a blog post or two and g...

There are some exciting changes coming. One of those changes is that I am going to be doing a short post for the videos that we also do through this ministry. If you didn’t know about the videos – check out the information at the end of this post. There are also NEW links at the top of this page. Last year at this time I posted my very first blog post here. At that time the blog was called “Breathe”. I had a lot of overflow from what God had been teaching me over the summer of 2016. God showed me a lot and I needed a place to put it all. So I sat down and started to unload my mind and the blog was born. I just wanted to give the people who read my blog and little breath of God to start, end or lift their day. This is still true today. I am sharing the different things that God has taught me, things I have discovered along my journey with God, and things I have learned through others. Over the last year, we have had many different posts on many different topics. We even went t...