TLDR? Why the First Five Words of the Bible Change Everything
When the Bible feels like too much
Be honest. Have you ever looked at the Bible and thought, “too long, didn’t read”? You are not alone. Sixty-six books. Multiple authors. Thousands of years of history. It feels intimidating, so most of us skim. We grab a verse here, a quote there, and leave the heavy lifting to the professionals. In this Summer of Sermons episode, Daron takes that feeling head on. He opens to the very first page of Genesis and shows why the answers to your biggest questions are closer than you think. Why are you here? What is your purpose? What happens after all of this? The answers start with five words.
You were created in the image of God
“In the beginning, God created.” That is the whole foundation. This world is not random, and neither are you. Daron walks through the creation account and lands on the moment God does something different. He makes human beings in his own image. That changes everything about how you see yourself. It is why you can love, choose, forgive, and build. It is why injustice bothers you at a level deeper than your thoughts. And it is why humans create the one thing no other creature on earth can. Not offspring. The future. Every story in every history book was created by people made in the image of a creative God. You carry that same capacity every day you wake up.
Putting the broken mirror back together
So why does life still feel confusing? Daron uses a picture you will not forget. We were made to see ourselves in a perfect reflection of God’s image, but sin shattered the mirror. Now we squint at fragments and wonder who we are. Scripture is how the pieces go back together. First Corinthians 13 says we see only a reflection now, but one day we will see face to face. Every time you open the word of God, you fill in a missing piece. Not a shard a day taken out of context, but the full picture, book by book. Five minutes a day is enough to start.
What it all means…
You were created on purpose and for a purpose. The Bible is not too long to matter. It is the story of the God who made you, the image you bear, and the future you were invited to help create. Start reading. Start small. Watch what changes.
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Episode Summary:
Most of us treat the Bible like a long text we skim and skip. Too long, didn’t read. The cost of that is bigger than we think. When you don’t know where you came from or why you’re here, you start living like life is random, and that quietly drains your purpose, your work, and your relationships. In this Summer of Sermons message, Daron Earlewine opens Genesis chapter one and the first five words of the Bible to show what it means to be created on purpose and for purpose, and how reading Scripture begins to repair the broken reflection we’ve been living through.
Key Takeaways
⚡️ The first five words of the Bible, in the beginning God created, reframe your life as designed rather than accidental.
⚡️ Humans don’t just reproduce their own kind, they uniquely create the future, because we carry the image of God.
⚡️ We currently see ourselves through a broken mirror, and engaging Scripture is how the missing pieces get filled back in.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: DARON EARLEWINE: SUMMER OF SERMONS 7-8-26
Speaker note: This is a single-speaker sermon. It is labeled once and delivered as flowing prose with paragraph breaks, which is the cleanest read for a monologue.
Daron Earlewine:
Hey everybody, it’s summertime. The weather’s nice, sunsets are later, backyard barbecues, all the good stuff. Here at The Daron Earlewine Podcast, we like to change things up too. We’re bringing back the Summer of Sermons. I do the podcast, I do books, I speak, I do all kinds of stuff, and I get to speak a lot of Sundays, usually at a church here in Annapolis called Mercy Road Northeast, and sometimes other churches around the country. What we love to do in the summer is grab a couple of the greatest hits from the past twelve months and share these sermons with you. It gives you a chance to hear me communicate in a different way and get more immersed in the content. You gave us great feedback last summer that you loved the Summer of Sermons, so we’re bringing it back for 2026. I hope you enjoy the greatest hits from the past year that we pulled out. Welcome to the Summer of Sermons.
Created on purpose and for purpose.
Good morning, Mercy Road Northeast. So good to see you in a new year, and a frozen year it has been so far. I love the winter to the depths of my cold, cold bones. We’re making it through. My name is Daron Earlewine, and I get to be one of the teaching pastors here at Mercy Road Northeast. It’s a joy to be with you this morning. We’re in this series called TLDR.
Since you last saw me, I had a birthday and got a lot older. I’m starting to realize that the more birthdays you rack up, the more you understand why the older people in my life were always saying they don’t really like birthdays anymore. I get that now, very deeply. I came into the planning meeting for the sermon series and asked, so what’s the series for January? And Ken said, well, it’s called TLDR. I thought for a minute and said, I have no idea what that means, Ken. I don’t get that at all. That was the moment I felt super old and not hip at all, because I have two teenage sons and a son who’s twenty. I thought I was getting caught up on text shorthand. I’ll get a text from my kid and feel like I need to grab a Cracker Jack box and get my secret decoder ring to figure out what my son is saying to me.
I had never heard this one until last week, so now I’m really cool. Whenever somebody sends me a long text, even if it’s just a simple message, I can hit them with it. TLDR stands for too long, didn’t read. Somebody sends you a long text or a big post, and you put that on there, like, hey, this was too long, I didn’t read it, I skimmed it, wasn’t really tied into it.
I thought this was a great title, because if there’s any response we could give to most of our emotions about the Bible, it’s like, hey God, I’m sorry, but TLDR. Too long, didn’t read. Really intimidating, confusing. So I’ve done some skimming. I take it in little bite-sized chunks. But look at it. It’s all of these words, all the way from the beginning of humanity through thousands and thousands of years. You’ve got sixty-six books in here, authored by multiple different authors, spanning thousands of years. And if you’re not real familiar with the Bible, the people who are really familiar with it are in church saying, this is holy, this is the word of God. So now we’ve upped the ante, because not only do I need to read it, but if I read it wrong, I’m messing with the almighty God. So I’m just going to leave this to the professionals. Give me a couple of spoon-sized bites of sugar to help the medicine go down, because this is too much, too intimidating, TLDR.
Ever felt like that? Me too. It would be cool, and maybe you’ve done this, I’ve noticed it with my kids, they’re getting very good at AI. Maybe you go into a chatbot and say, hey, what are the main things I need to know about the Bible? It gives you the whole thing, you try to apply some of it, and there’s no reason to really get into the nuts and bolts.
But what if actually diving in and becoming a student of the word of God could transform your life? And it’s right here. You don’t have to go everywhere to find it. The questions we have are big questions. Why are we here? What’s life about? What is my unique purpose as a human being? What happens after all this is done? How do I actually love people? Where do I find the motivation and the ability to forgive people? What should I do with money, with how I give it and spend it and save it? How do I effectively live my life with God? These are big questions. If you don’t know the answer to them, or you don’t know that the answer you currently have came from a trusted source, that could be a problem.
But what if it was right here? You could read it, and it could in some ways read you and unpack the life you were created to live. Here at Mercy Road, we actually believe what the Bible says about itself. In Hebrews chapter four, it says the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow, and it exposes our innermost thoughts and desires. We believe the word of God is living and active. Even though it was written by multiple authors across sixty-six books, we believe that God himself inspired and oversaw the writing of these scriptures.
This is my go-to Bible at home. It’s an NIV Quest Study Bible. My parents gave me this Bible in high school, right after I felt called into ministry, and I’ve spent a lot of time in it. I love it, because on every page the most-asked question about that portion of the Bible is answered on the side. I’ve gained so much from living in the pages of this book. You don’t have to use a paper Bible, although maybe because I’m getting older I’ve gone old school. In the mornings I like to bring out a real Bible, touch the pages, and have it in my hands. You don’t have to. On your phone you can get an app with every English translation of the Bible ever done, right there in your pocket twenty-four hours a day. You can even push a button and it will read the Bible to you. You’d be amazed how much Bible you can read between here and Keystone.
This year we’ve declared 2025 the year of the word here at Mercy Road Northeast. Our goal as a community is to read through the New Testament in a year. You may think, the entire New Testament this year? Yes. Here’s the good news. It’s going to take you about five minutes a day. And at the end of 2025, somebody could ask you, have you ever read the whole New Testament, and you could say, yes, I have. I promise you, if you dedicate yourself to that and dig into the word of God, your life will begin to change over the next three hundred and sixty-five days. Your understanding of Jesus, his character, his teaching, and his love will not be something you heard a rumor about once, or that you trust us to give you in little bite-sized pieces for thirty minutes every Sunday. It will start to become part of the fabric of your thinking, your decision-making, your emotions, and your relationships. So once again, we’re inviting you to join us in this process.
I get to start at the very beginning today. Genesis is the first book of the Bible, all the way back at the beginning. Here’s the first point of the sermon, and probably the last point too. I could quit after this. The first sentence, the first five words of the Bible, say this. In the beginning, God created. When it started, God created.
This is a really big statement for understanding life and earth and what we’re doing here. This God that the rest of the Bible unpacks for us was, right from the beginning, central to everything we see and know, and he is creative. Everything we see and experience proceeded in its essence from the imagination, the power, the authority, and the creativity of this God. 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.
What does it mean to create? Let’s define it. To create means to bring something into existence that did not previously exist. It involves using imagination, skill, and effort to produce something new, or to transform an idea, a concept, or raw material into a tangible or conceptual form. Ultimately, to create is to exert influence over the world by shaping something unique and new. That gives me a lot of comfort, to know that’s the kind of God we get connected to in the first five words of the Bible.
This world we live in is not random. It is not accidental. It did not just magically appear. We’re not just a ball floating around in space that got here randomly, with no idea how it got here, who started it, or where it’s going, trying to find some meaning while living in a ball of chaotic randomness. If that’s your core belief, I think it would be difficult to get up and do anything on a Monday. Why should I do anything if I just live in a cosmos of absolute accidental randomness? But if it’s true that by the power and authority and imagination and order and design and intelligence of God I find myself in this cosmos, on this planet, in this body, then I was fearfully and wonderfully and powerfully and creatively made.
I was watching an award show a couple of months ago, a country music award show, and Kacey Musgraves sang a song. I love her songwriting. It’s poetic, and she has a beautiful voice. As she began to sing this song, my ears and even my spirit opened up, because the words encapsulate how a lot of people feel.
[Recitation of “The Architect” by Kacey Musgraves. Lyrics omitted from this transcript for copyright reasons. See pre-publication note.]
I think that song encapsulates the feelings of a lot of people you live next door to, work with, go to school with, live with, and maybe yourself. You look at everything that goes on in this life and you go, is this happening by chance? Is it fate? Is there design? Are there blueprints to this? I’d love to speak to the architect.
What we get in the word of God is God himself revealing, I am the architect. And here’s the beautiful thing. Yes, you can speak to me. I will speak to you through the written word of God, through Jesus Christ the living word of God, and through the still small voice of the Holy Spirit that can live within you. We have the ability to live our lives day in and day out knowing the architect, being connected to the architect, and joining the architect in what he is creating. That gives me a lot of peace and a lot of hope. In the beginning, God created.
Then we go through chapter one. The first day, let there be light, and there was light. The second day, let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water. The third day, let the water under the sky be gathered to one place and let the dry ground appear. God called the dry ground land and the gathered waters seas, and God saw that it was good. Then the land produced vegetation, seed-bearing plants and trees, each according to its kind, and it was so. The fourth day, let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times and days and years, and let them give light on the earth. He creates stars and planets on the fourth day. The fifth day, let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky. God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing that moves in the water, and every winged bird according to its kind, and God saw that it was good. The sixth day, let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds, the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind, and it was so, and God saw that it was good.
Then God gets to this point and says, let us, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Godhead, let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals and all the creatures that move along the ground. So God created mankind in his own image. In the image of God he created them. Male and female he created them. And God blessed them and said, be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it, rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground. Then God said, I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground, everything that has the breath of life in it, I give every green plant for food. And it was so. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day.
That’s chapter one of Genesis, the first chapter of the Bible. In chapter two, we get the seventh day, where God rested, giving us an image of the balance and rhythm between work and rest. The rest of chapter two is a more detailed breakdown of how he created humanity.
This is really important to know. If I’m a human being, and the Bible is telling me how we got here, then God made everything. He made the seas and the skies and the planets. He made the animals that fly, that swim, that run. He made it all. And then he got to this point and said, okay, we’re going to do this one a little differently. I’m going to make human beings in my own image.
What does that give us as human beings? Here’s the second point of the sermon, if you’re taking notes. In the beginning, we were created in the image of God. First, it gives us a spiritual and moral resemblance. Being created in the image of God means we’ve been given the ability to love, to choose between good and evil, and to form relationships. We are uniquely capable of understanding and pursuing morality, justice, and righteousness, because they come from the core of God’s being. It’s why it’s not immoral for a lion to eat a zebra, but it would be for you to eat your neighbor. If we’re just all animals, all the same, then there’s no difference between us. But go try to eat your neighbor this week and see if you don’t spend the rest of your life in jail. When anyone hears the story of someone trying to eat their neighbor, that feeling you have inside, something deeper than your thoughts, something at the depths of your essence, calls out and says, that’s wrong.
I love wildlife videos. People were on a safari, riding in the open Jeeps, and there were lions that had killed something and were going after it. Then some hyenas showed up. Then a huge crocodile came up, and the lions and hyenas backed off and let it have the kill. In the commentary, I didn’t hear the hyenas asking the crocodile, why are you killing things and eating them? They just did what they did as animals. But you are a human being, created in the image of God. When you sense that in your soul, it should be a clue that there’s something unique about you, that you bear within your soul the imago Dei, the image of God.
It also means you have relational and intellectual capacity. You can think, make decisions, problem-solve, create art, build societies, and engage in complex communication. God’s wisdom and creativity are within you. That’s why, when I teach in corporate settings, I do all I can to say everything the Bible says, but in such a way that they don’t realize it’s coming from the Bible. Even if they don’t believe in Jesus, what happens as I speak is their soul says, that’s right, and I don’t know why. Then my goal is to be there for the next conversation, when they want to know why.
I ask people, what do human beings create uniquely over any other creation? Usually their first answer is other human beings. Incorrect. Horses make horses, dogs make dogs, birds make birds. Reproducing your own kind is not unique. Here’s what human beings uniquely create. The future. Take all the human beings out and leave the planet to the animals, and in a thousand years you don’t have societies, art, communication, or a future. Every story that fills the pages of every history book ever written was created by humans. Why? Because God gave us the capacity to design and create. We are made in the image of God.
We also have a relational nature. God said, let us make man in our own image. I say it like this. You were created for and by love. It’s the great mystery of God that he is three and yet he is one, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, all there from the beginning. The reason you are drawn to relationship the way you are is because that is a reflection of the essence of God within you.
You are created to have dominion and stewardship over creation. There is a responsibility we have as humans to take care of this earth. We’ve lost some of this, because we’ve gotten preoccupied with certain interpretations of the last pages that say we’re just going to get raptured in a moment and God is going to burn all this earth anyway, so who cares how we treat it. But that dismisses the very first thing God told us to do. He put care, concern, beauty, and majesty into how he created this earth, and he needs those created in his image to steward it and take care of it as we co-create together.
We are given creativity and co-creation from the beginning. In chapter two of Genesis, God invites Adam into the process and says, hey Adam, all the animals don’t have names, why don’t you and I partner up and name everything? As a human being, you are invited to be a co-creator with God in the future that is currently under his design. What an amazing privilege you have every day you wake up alive, because you are created in the image of God.
Lastly, we have dignity, value, and worth. Every single human being you meet, regardless of their financial situation, race, or anything else, is an image bearer of God. It is our privilege and our responsibility to give them the value, dignity, and love that God built into them, just as he did with us.
But here’s the problem. Right now, we’re looking through a broken reflection. When God started everything, the mirror was perfect. We were created and we could see ourselves in God’s image, perfectly, put together. I could see myself, I could see you, I could see what creation does, and it all made sense. Anytime I needed to, I could come back and say, that’s right, I’m created in the image of God, I love, I’m relational, I’m creative. I had no questions about my purpose, because all I had to do was look at the perfect reflection I was created within.
Next week, Ken is going to talk about chapter three of the Bible, which breaks down what we call the fall, where brokenness and sin and separation from God entered the equation. Here’s the problem now. This is the world we live in. It’s broken, fragmented, with missing pieces from the reflection. You look at it and think, I didn’t know I had that many dimensions to my face. Do I have a shoulder? What is a shoulder? I’ve never seen this part of my body. I think I have a knee, but I don’t know how these legs move, because whole parts are missing. Then I try to get a handle on creation, and people say it was beautiful and wonderfully made, but I just can’t see it.
First Corinthians thirteen says it this way. Now we see only a reflection as in a mirror, then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
Here’s the Bible story. In the beginning, God created, and it was perfect. Then it became broken. And from chapter three through the entirety of the Bible is the story of God putting these pieces back together again, until one day it will be perfect again. Why is it important to read the Bible? Because as you engage the word of God, you begin to fill in the missing pieces you don’t understand. If you can’t see the picture clearly, read and study the book of Genesis, and God will restore your understanding of what it is. If you don’t understand how you’re forgiven, how you can have peace with God, then read and study Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They are the story of Jesus’s life and ministry and teaching, and they will unlock and bring clarity to how you’re forgiven and what God is doing.
Here’s how we betray ourselves in this process. The way we often read the Bible today, we take one little shard of glass, what we call our morning devotions, a verse or two completely out of the context of the book it’s in and what the author was saying. We take that little shard and say, oh, that was cool for today. Do you know how it fits into what God was doing? No. What about how this fits into the message God was bringing to specific people who had a specific problem to be specifically fixed? No idea, but it was helpful. And I’m thinking about getting a bumper sticker. TLDR. God, I know what you wanted was to help me see you, and me, and my mission in this life with clarity. But I’m sorry, this is too long. I’ll just take my chances, wasting my life through the broken mirror.
What we’re trying to do this year is put some pieces back together. 2025, the year of the word. Five minutes a day. In the next twelve months, you will have read the entire bottom half of the mirror, at least for the first time in your life. All of a sudden there will be pieces that come together. You’ll say, oh, I have knees, and they actually help me live my life and move. And what you’ll begin to see is a clearer picture of the beauty, the love, and the genius of God, whose image you bear.
Heavenly Father, we thank you for this truth. God, I thank you for your grace, that you understand it is intimidating and tough for us to understand, and I thank you that you’re so compassionate in this process with us. God, I pray for us as a church, that we would take this seriously, not because we feel guilty, but because you would stir within us a desire to know you, to know ourselves, to know our world, and to know what you want us to do with this precious life you’ve given us. As we get into the word of God this year, may we meet you in it, and meet ourselves in it. We love you. You’re the best. In Jesus’s name, amen.