Reality Check

Teacher’s Resource:
Bwana’s Guide:

“Reality Checks” are devotional outlines for outdoor preachers and teachers that have worked well on Creation Safaris, in line with our motto Escape to Reality.  These lessons should be thought out with additional Scriptures, explanations, illustrations, and personal testimonies to make them your own.  Above all, handle with prayer.
David F. Coppedge


Theme:  Just as NASA promotes the space program by advertising the practical applications (spinoffs) of space technology, we can motivate people to be students of and activists for creation science, because of its practical applications in the Christian life.

Creation Science is...

  1. A Motivation to FITNESS (Ps 139, I Cor 10:31)

    If the body is a product of chance, why not get drunk, experiment, or be lazy?  But if it is a masterpiece of God’s design, it should be kept in peak condition.

    Note: Passages like I Tim 4:8 (“bodily exercise profits little”) and II Cor 12:9 (“strength is made perfect in weakness”) and Jer 9:23 (“let not the mighty man boast”) do not argue against exercise, but against boasting about it, and having wrong priorities.  Exercise can even promote godliness because it requires godly attributes such as self-control and discipline.  Prov. 24:5 says “A wise man is strong, and a man of understanding increases power.”

  2. A Motivation to WISDOM (Ps 8, Ps 24:1)

    Environmental crises are threatening life on earth and require wisdom to sort through complex and competing interests.  Humanists have no foundation for conservation – if evolution were true, why not compete for resources? – but Christians do have a foundation.  Our guiding principle: Psalm 24:1   we are not owners of the planet, but stewards.

  3. A Motivation to WITNESS (Jer 10:11-12)

    The only real God is the one who created everything.  Evangelism becomes effective, even exciting, when we realize we are not just presenting one of many religious views but the self-revelation of the Creator-God who is really there.
    Read Francis Schaeffer, Genesis in Space and Time, pp. 30-31:

         It is either not knowing or denying the createdness of things that is at the root of the blackness of modern man’s difficulties.  Give up creation as space-time, historic reality, and all that is left is what Simone Weil called uncreatedness.  It is not that something does not exist, but that it just stands there, autonomous to itself, without solutions and without answers.  Once one removes the createdness of all things, meaning and categories can only be some sort of leap, with or without drugs, into an irrational world.  Modern man’s blackness, therefore, rests primarily upon his losing the reality of the createdness of all things (all things except the personal God who always has been).
         But because I and all Christians know truly, even though not exhaustively, “why” something is there, why the world has form and men have mannishness, I can meet a Simone Weil or a modern man in despair and we can talk.  There is a discussible answer as to why things are the way they are, and this is the framework for my thankfulness, as it should be for every Christian.   Unless we reach back into the things that we have discussed here, even thankfulness for salvation becomes meaningless, because it is suspended in a vacuum.  In truth, as Jeremiah says, “The portion of Jacob is not like them: for he is the former of all things.”  I now can be thankful both for the knowledge of what is and for my salvation in Jesus Christ.  For both are rooted in the fact that the portion of Jacob is not like the gods old or new.  He is different.  He is the former of all things.

    Notice how Schaeffer underscores the Creation Safari motto: Escape to Reality, and how he links creation and thankfulness.