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My backyard opens up into a small wooded area—there’s just enough greenery that if I look at it from the right angle, I feel like I’m in a forest. As spring has settled in, my yard has gradually transformed from a sparse brown to a lush green. I’ve lost hours watching the progress of the leaves and marveling at the squirrels at work. When I moved in back in October, I wished the backyard was a little bit bigger and didn’t have so much “wasted” space on the hill. Now I can’t imagine what this place would be like without it.

When it comes to appreciating creation, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees, so to speak. We’re skilled at finding ways to tame and utilize nature, but we sometimes forget that when God made the world he declared it good and beautiful. This post from Wonders of Creation explores what it means to view creation as a beautiful thing made in God’s image:

In this passage beauty comes before utility (usefulness). Now it’s risky to draw set theological principles merely from order of appearance, so I’d be reluctant to say that the Bible indicates that the beauty of God’s creation is more important than its usefulness. After all, if the created things were not useful, Adam would not have survived! But just the fact that the concept of beauty comes right in on the heels of God’s declaring the creation “very good” (Genesis 1:31) means to me that as creatures made in God’s image, something resonates within our souls when we come into the presence of something beautiful. So for a one attuned to God, the first experience of Yosemite or Yellowstone would likely cause us to pause and reflect, “This is awesomely beautiful,” and not muse, “Wow, think of how much energy we could generate by putting a dam here or building some geothermal power plants here.”

There’s a sense in which the counter-play between beauty and utility seems to reflect our human spiritual and material natures. We have both natures and we need to be sensitive to both. And guiding us in our sensitivity is the reality that the material things we must use are also the handiwork of God and they have inherent goodness. Maintaining the goodness and beauty of material things as we use them ought to be one of our principle aims as His stewards. Think of a lovingly prepared and beautifully presented Thanksgiving meal in comparison to a chicken bucket from Colonel Sanders!

Read the rest of the devotional at WonderofCreation.org.

When have you been astounded by the beauty of creation? How does creation bring you closer to God?

What if a lifeguard let someone drown because they jumped into the deep end before they knew how to swim? What if a firefighter ignored a fire because it was sparked by someone who fell asleep near their fireplace?

Thankfully, rescue professionals don’t stop to make value judgments on our personal character before rescuing us. They are trained and ready to rescue people in need regardless of how they got themselves into that position.

Philip Yancey writes about how God offers us spiritual rescue in this Our Daily Bread devotional. He compares our spiritual plight to that of a stranded hiker:

The central message of the Bible is one of rescue. Paul points out that none of us “deserve” God’s mercy and none of us can save ourselves. Like a stranded hiker, all we can do is call for help. Quoting the psalmist, he says, “There is none righteous, no, not one; there is none who understands; there is none who seeks after God” (Rom. 3:10-11; Ps. 14:1-3).

The good news of the gospel is that in spite of our state, God seeks after us and responds to every plea for help. You might say that God is in the rescue business.

Read the rest of the devotional at odb.org.

How has God rescued you from unrighteousness?

Today is Earth Day. Even just a decade ago, many evangelicals would have shied away from commemorating this date, due to its perceived association with extremist activism and politics.

But today, the significance of “creation care” is something that Christians of all stripes recognize. Christians, after all, have a unique understanding of creation—one that has nothing to do with partisan politics or extremist ideologies. We believe that God has given us stewardship over the Earth and its resources, and that as stewards, we have both authority over and responsibility for the flora and fauna around us.

A ThinkChristian post from a few years ago offers a good look at the steadily growing engagement of environmental issues by Christians individuals and organizations, as well as many links to Christian stewardship organizations. Of particular interest to Christians should be the social justice aspect of environmental care, since it is often the case that the people most directly affected by environmental problems are those living in the poorest and least developed parts of the world.

Is your church marking Earth Day this week? Whether or not your church community commemorates Earth Day, do you have any stories about how you or your church have acted out the role of “creation steward”?

Today is Administrative Professional’s Day. According to the U.S. Labor Department there are about 4.1 million secretaries and administrative assistants working today. I think that we can all agree that without them, very little would get done. You can read more about the day at the IAAP’s website.

Today is thus a perfect time to take a minute to personally thank the administrative professional(s) at your churches for everything they do.

Church secretaries have an intimate connection to the life of the church. They know the people, the ministries and the events that make up local church life. And they’re the people who know how to get things done—it’s not just answering phones and printing the bulletin (although it sometimes includes that)!

Have you thanked your church secretary lately? Any fun stories about a secretary who went above and beyond the call of duty to serve the church?

There’s nothing quite so uplifting as receiving an unexpected compliment or a kind word in the midst of a hectic day. And on the flip side, we’ve all had a day ruined by a careless or cruel remark. Words have tremendous power to encourage or to hurt. That’s the message of this devotional from Daily Encounter, which challenges us to offer encouragement to someone today:

Every one of us—young and old alike—needs encouragement. To encourage someone is to put courage into them. To discourage is to take courage out of them. It costs nothing to put courage into another… to speak a kind word… to let them know you appreciate them… to tell them you believe in them… that you admire them… to thank them and so on.

So, today, make a point of putting courage into your spouse… your children… your boss… your employees… and the clerk at the local store. Go out of your way to do it. And in blessing others you will be blessed yourself.

Read the full devotional at Acts International.

Offering encouragement is one of the simplest but most effective ways you can reflect Christ’s love to others. Take a look around you, whether you’re sitting in an office cubicle, your living room, or an airport terminal. Who do you see who could use an encouraging word? Why not take a moment to say something kind?

Marvin Williams of Our Daily Journey writes that there are two kinds of wisdom outlined in James 3: godly and spiritual, and ungodly and unspiritual. Do you know how to discern between the two?

According to verses 14-16, being bitterly jealous and selfish is the epitome of being unwise. James’ readers would have understood what his words meant: Having ill will toward others, creating cliques, measuring yourself by your own standards, and denying what God says about you are all characteristics of an ungodly and a devil-motivated wisdom.

In verses 17-18, James presents some characteristics of godly wisdom: walking in integrity with God and others (purity); refusing to awaken and incite anger in other people (peace loving, planting seeds of peace); valuing and accepting other people’s feelings, opinions, and suggestions (gentle, yielding to others); forgiving others’ mistakes and sins (merciful); and being transparent about my weaknesses (sincerity).

Read the entire devotional at OurDailyJourney.org

What steps are you taking to build godly spiritual wisdom into your life? How do you avoid ungodly, unspiritual wisdom?

I stumbled across a thread on Reddit.com last week in which someone had asked the question, “What in your life is awesome right now?” To my surprise, there were quite a few thoughtful and meaningful responses like “celebrating 6 months of sobriety” and “my daughter was born today.”

We’re inundated with bad news every day, whether it be economic, societal, political or personal. It can sometimes be an overwhelming task just to get through the day, let alone find something to be thankful for. However, despite our earthly woes, we all have quite a bit to be thankful for in this life.

So what about you? What’s great about your life right now?

Share your thoughts!

Is it possible to exhaust God’s patience? What would it take to make God wash his hands of us completely? In this devotional from Lifetime Guarantee Ministries, Anabel Gillham looks at Biblical examples of people who put God’s patience to the test… only to find that God’s love for us is greater yet:

Can we disappoint God to the degree that He will finally say, “That’s it!” and just give up on us? I don’t think so. The children of Israel did a lot of things that disappointed God and He disciplined them for their folly but He never disowned them. David, although we sing his praises and consider him to be one of the Bible “greats,” really got into an awful mess with Bathsheba and God still called David, “A man after God’s own heart.” Peter denied the Lord but the Lord gave him another chance—which Peter took. I love the picture of Peter throwing his tunic on to cover himself then jumping into the water and running to see Jesus (John 21:6-7). It’s pretty difficult to find a well-known Biblical character that has a perfect record.

And we analyze ourselves and remember all the wrong steps we have taken’and ask, “Does His patience never, ever give out?” Yes, but losing His patience with us will never ever result in our being separated from Him. That just won’t happen. Most of us have had children who disappointed us, but we never ceased to be their parent. His patience doesn’t wane because of our errant ways, our sinful lifestyle, or our poor performance.

Read the full devotional at Lifetime Guarantee Ministries.

Our sins can frustrate, anger, and disappoint God. But the one thing they cannot do is negate His desire to see us redeemed and restored through Jesus Christ.

Do you ever worry that your sin or rebellion has caused God to completely abandon you? Have you experienced God’s forgiveness even after you were sure He had given up on you?

Earlier today, Chris highlighted a devotional about the Golden Rule: “Do to others what you would have them do to you.” That idea is closely related to one of Jesus’ two “great commandments”: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Nobody would disagree with these commands, right? Then why is this ideal so rarely on display in human history?

Gene Fant reflects on this contrast between ideal and reality in a post at Evangel about his visit to the Nazi work camp at Flossenburg. He compares the dismal horror of Flossenburg (where Dietrich Bonhoeffer and 30,000 others were murdered) to the fairy-tale Schloss Neuschwanstein, the gorgeous castle built by Ludwig II.

But the contrast Fant observes isn’t the one that might spring most immediately to mind. He compares the instinctive reaction that people experience upon visiting each site:

Visitors from around the world gasped with every turn of a corner on our tour [of Schloss Neuschwanstein], each of us having the same thought in our native languages: “What if I ruled this castle?”

Flossenburg, by contrast, sits on a dead-end road. It has no gift shop. It was not crowded. There were no thoughts of, “What if I were a prisoner in this camp?”

This, then, is the basic impulse of the human experience: we self-identify with kings and queens rather than the downtrodden and the oppressed. We amble through a concentration camp and imagine that those “poor people” were not quite as human as we are, even as we walk through a palace and imagine ourselves to be royalty. We forget that the prisoners were husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers like me, or wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers.

It’s hard to “love your neighbor as yourself” when you’ve mentally excluded certain people—people who might look, think, or behave differently than you—from the circle of those you consider “your neighbor.” When we can’t empathize with somebody as sharing our own basic humanity, it’s alarmingly easy to tell ourselves that Christ’s command simply doesn’t apply.

In the case of Nazi Germany, this impulse had unspeakably evil results. We rightly look back in horror at such atrocities. But in much less dramatic ways, we too fail to obey Jesus’ “great commandments.” Are there people you treat with less than perfect grace—perhaps nearly unconsciously—because on some level, you don’t consider them your “neighbor”?

It’s a sobering reflection, but worth reading.

[The image above shows a close-up view of Schloss Neuschwanstein.]

At the heart of the Golden Rule is reciprocity: when we do good, others will do good back to us. In a perfect world, we’d all be falling over ourselves trying to out-serve one another, but the reality is that many people are simply uninterested in doing good to each other. It’s enough to harden even the softest of hearts.

Have you ever tried to practice the Golden Rule on someone who isn’t interested in doing the same? They ignore or berate you for your friendly gestures and acts of service. It’s sometimes all you can do to not do anything negative, let alone something good.

Pastor Henning of Lutheran Hour Ministries writes in this devotional about the Golden Rule from God’s perspective. Even on our “good” days, we’re still sinful people deserving of punishment. Despite this, God offers us unending grace. While we might snap at someone for slightly inconveniencing us, God patiently endures even our worst sins. We should be thankful that he does:

When commenting on a number of the commandments, Martin Luther explains that we should treat others as we want to be treated, be it our brother or sister, father or mother, our co-worker, our neighbor, or our pastor. Now while this is a useful guide for how sinful human beings should reciprocate toward one another, it doesn’t quite capture the way a perfectly just God deals with us.

If God’s response to us was in keeping with our conduct toward Him — even on our best behavior — we wouldn’t stand a chance. His justice is beyond human comparison; it is perfect, absolute, and incapable of being satisfied by our efforts or best intentions. When we treat God with disrespect, or neglect Him and His Word, He is still patient with us. When we go out of our way to sin and scorn the very relationship we have with Him, He is still forgiving — ever ready and willing to draw us back into a genuine and healthy fellowship with Himself.

Rather than retribution, God offers grace — the unending and undeserved fount of love and forgiveness shown to mankind through the sacrificial offering of His Son, Jesus Christ, upon the cross. “For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ, who gave Himself as a ransom for all men …” (1 Timothy 2:5-6a).

Read the rest of the devotional at Lutheran Hour Ministries.

How do you enact the Golden Rule in your life? What does it mean to you to accept God’s gift of grace?