It's God's world...and everything in it
‘All praises to the one who made it all and finds it beautiful’.
We live in an amazing, wondrous and beautiful place. When we walk around the places we live, work or study we don’t very often grasp this. Most of our life is average, ordinary and mundane, at least on the surface of it. But maybe we need to rewire or retune our approach to life to rediscover this sense of awe and wonder, even when we go about our ordinary, everyday lives.
We are made for relationship
The God we worship is first and foremost a relational God. We are made for relationship and God has made the world in such a way. We relate to God, to others and to his created world, and each of these relationships really matter. God is also about restoration and this includes the restoration of the world he loves and created (Colossians 1:15-21). God wants to renew all things. Not only the plants, trees and animals, but all things, including our relationships. This includes our relationship with how and what we consume, and how that relates to the world we inhabit. The exciting reality is that God is calling us to play a part in outworking this in our ordinary everyday living as part of our discipleship, as an act of worship (Romans 12: 1-2). NT Wright puts it like this in his excellent book, Surprised by Hope:‘What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbour as yourself—will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether. They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.’
If we love God, we should care for his creation
God has entrusted us with his beautiful creation and we are called to care for it. Even though it groans and even though we might groan at times at the state of this world in its present form, we are called to look for and work for signs of hope (Romans 8:19-21). Here’s a question to to consider: If we say we don’t care about the changing climate, are we actually saying we don’t care about the world God created and therefore the people God made in his image? If we claim to love God and love our neighbour then we should care about playing our part to tackle climate change as it’s having a huge impact upon our global neighbours (Luke 10:27).