After watching the BBC/Discovery produced Planet Earth series on TV a few years ago, Heather and I just started watching the follow-up Life on blu-ray through Netflix last night.  The series contains some of the most unique and astonishing wildlife footage I’ve ever seen in breathtaking high-definition.  Having finished the first disc yesterday, I don’t see how one could spend much time watching the show without coming away in worshipful awe at the creativity of God displayed in the world he has made.  Here’s a peek at the series.

Here’s a shot I took while boating and swimming on North Carolina’s Lake James at sunset one night last week.  This ought to explain why I wasn’t doing much blogging.

Check out this hard-hitting post from Biloxi, MS native Russ Moore, who after visiting his hometown over the weekend says that he can never view environmental issues the same way again.  The article is as well-written as all Moore’s stuff, and it serves as a powerful call to Christians that viewing environmental issues as a silly endeavor of the fringe left simply isn’t an option for responsible believers.

HT: Denny Burk

A few days ago, I posted on some thoughs by Doug Wilson about our enjoyment of the gifts God gives us.  His thinking has been tremendously helpful to me in this area, and I encourage you to check the new post out.  It may be even better than the first.  An excerpt…

“Given my finite limitations, I have to think about the gifts God gives to me a lot. I have to think about the fact that my feet are not cold anymore, that it is time for dinner, that one of my shoulder blades itches, and so on. To use Lewis’ conceit from the toolshed, I have to spend a lot of time looking at the sunbeams, and a fraction of my time is set aside for direct worship of God, looking along the sunbeam. The temptation we have is that of treating all this as a zero-sum game, assuming that any time spent on the gifts is necessarily time away from the Giver. But though this sometimes happens, it does not need to happen. Rightly handled, a gift is never detached from the one who gave it. Wrongly handled, a gift can be the occasion of selfishness, which is a common problem. But it can also be the occasion of a higher form of selfishness, one which pretends to be above the whole tawdry field of “gifts in themselves.”

Picture a particularly “pious” little child who was impossible to give gifts to, because he would always unwrap it, abandon it immediately, and run up to his parent and say, “But what really counts is my relationship with you!” A selfish child playing with a toy ungratefully is forgetting the giver. This pious form of selfishness is refusing to let the giver even be a giver.

We should not assume that in the resurrection, when we have finally learned how to look along that beam, in pure worship, that our bodies will then be superfluous. God will not have given us eternal and everlasting bodies because we finally got to such a point of spiritual maturity that we are able to ignore them. In the resurrection, we will have learned something we currently struggle with, which is how to live integrated lives. If God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being, it should not be necessary, in order to glorify God, to drop everything. We shouldn’t have to keep these things in separate compartments.

Incidentally, this kind of integration will prevent dislocations from arising in families that are sold out to the glory of God. Integration will keep our neighbor (or wife, or husband, or kids) from feeling like a means to an end. There is a delicate balance here, but God is most glorified in me when I love what He has given to me, for its own sake. This is teleologically related to the macro-point of God’s glory being over all, of course, but we still have to enjoy what He gives, flat out, period, stop. Otherwise, in the resurrection, God will be looking at all the billions of His resurrected saints, standing there contentedly, looking at Him, and He will say, “You know, you people are impossible to shop for.” Which is, of course, absurd and impossible. In the resurrection, it will be possible for us to be absorbed by God’s gifts in ways that are impossible to conceive of now.”

An excerpt from a recent post by Doug Wilson on the grace of God in “unspiritual” pleasures…

“By the nature of the case, we cannot present an exhaustive list, but the ramifications would include beer, mowing the lawn, sex with your wife or husband, brown gravy, sitting on the front porch, listening to a good poem, making movies, getting out the guitar, going to church, and getting a foot rub. There are two sacraments, true, but there is only one sacramental. The world is a sacramental, and everything in it. Grace is everywhere, and gets into everything. Faith can dig it out of anything. The grandeur of God can flame out from anything, like shining from shook foil.

If understood, this results in mediated grace for everyone who is responding to God in true faith. God does grant immediate grace in various ways, true. When He converts a soul, when He visits someone with direct blessing, when He receives our worship, the grace can be immediate. But this immediate grace is supposed to be a radiant grace, spreading out through everything else, affecting everything else, causing everything else to become a mirror that reflects the glory of God.

If we don’t get this, we will start to think of ourselves as deep sea divers, who have a grace hose running from our helmet up to Heaven, and the only way we can get grace is through that hose. But God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). We are living in the presence of God where it is actually possible to offer thanks for all things (Eph. 5:20).

May I flip around an illustration of Van Til? That okay? Van Til once said that if there were one place on creation’s radio dial where nonbelievers could tune in and not hear God, that is where everybody would have their radio set, all the time. His point was of course that God broadcasts, all the time, on every channel. But often, believers make a similar mistake, that of thinking that God broadcasts on only one channel, and then they do their level pious best to keep their radio tuned to that one channel. But then the time comes when the rest of your family and friends tire of hearing the Haven of Rest Quartet 24-7, and so life elsewhere begins to wither and dry up. And sanctifying the rest of the channels does not consist of making them into “religious broadcasting.”

The problem is that the apostle Paul says that whatever we eat, down to the last French fry, we should do to the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31). But if we think that this means that we need to be sitting in the corner of the fast food joint, having visions like we were John of Damascus or somebody, we will rapidly become tiresome. And if we think that the only way to avoid becoming tiresome in this way is by treating the French fry as if it were a neutral, a non-combatant in the great spiritual war that swirls around us all, then we are in the process of going over to the other side. We have become compromised.”

We were actually talking about this a little bit last night in my community group.  When I am seeking and following God, it is as if the whole world, all of life, just seems to light up a little bit brighter.  I see grace at every corner, even in the seemingly mundane things like driving down my street, which I’ve driven down hundreds of times, and seeing the beauty of God’s world.  Family is a picture of God’s fatherly love for us.  Even “trivial” recreation like movies and video games are echoes of the creativity of the father, bringing joy to the heart.  The moment that we cede the “secular” as such is the moment that we begin to lose much of the abundant life, joy and wonder that God has given.  That wonder does not stop at the church doors.  I highly recommend you check out Wilson’s full post.

“Do you really live on a ball spinning in circles through the stars? Does the heat from the closest star really make trees and grass and moss out of the carbon dioxide in the air? Have our wizards really pulled black ooze up from beneath the earth’s skin, mixed it in their lairs into something that explodes, and made us magical metal boxes than can race around on roads, riding on those explosions? Are you bored with that, yawning in your seat belt? Is lightning real? Tornados? Does the big spinning ball beneath us always suck us down, and are we really talented enough to constantly balance on our feet? What kind of creatures are we?

Sit Moses and Beowulf down, and listen to their stories. Sit Bilbo down and listen to his. Do you disbelieve their tales? Are they made up? Are they fantasy? Now tell them your stories. Have you flown through the sky in a giant metal tube? Do we have boats that can sail to the very bottom of the sea? Have we thrown men all the way to the moon?

A hobbit would laugh at you. To him, your world could not be real. Your stories would be fun to read, beneath a blanket on a rainy day. He might look out of his window and sigh, wishing for a more magical world of his own.

In my stories, this world is a magical place, and not because I wish it was. Because it is.”

- N.D. Wilson