Care of Creation - 2 - How To Care

So last week we started a new series called ‘Care of creation’ and we looked at why it is important for us to care for our world.

We saw that caring for God’s creation should be important to us, because it is important to God. We saw in Colossians 1 verse 16 that is said that everything has been created ‘through him and for him’. Here we see that we and all of his creation exist for his pleasure and for his glory.

This week we are going to take a more active approach and look at some of the practical ways that we can care for our creation.

Not just in Genesis, but throughout the Bible we see that God is the creator and designer of the Universe, and that all of creation is designed to live in unity with God. Let’s take a look at Psalm 104, which is a prayer by King David about the wonder of the world that God has made.

This passage is filled with a lot of imagery about both creation itself, and its relationship between it and God. Take a look through it again, and pick a verse from it that stands out to you, and then draw what it represents to you.

This relationship with creation also relies on us treating it with the respect that it deserves. As we saw last week, there is a brokenness and separation in our world, caused by the world no longer allowing Jesus to be the central part of creation that hold it all together (as you can read in Colossians 1 : 17) and the impact that this has on our world.

We have spoken about the damage to the world that we see through pollution, over-exploitation of our natural resources, and harm to the natural world.

In order to reduce our impact on the world there are three key areas that we can focus on:

• What and how much we consume
• What we throw away
• How our stuff is made in the first place

Let’s split into groups and have a think about our own buying and throwing away habits.

We are now going to play ‘the rubbish quiz’ let’s see who can get closest to the correct answers.

The modern world is much more complex than we might realise. Many more companies and people are involved with the production of many of the things that we use every day.

Let’s take an example that many of you have sitting in your pocket. You might think that an iPhone has one manufacturer, Apple but in fact there is a whole host of other companies and suppliers involved with making your phone. Have a guess at how many companies are involved with making a single iPhone. Then have a guess of how many different countries this represents.

Having an awareness of this complexity, and the difficulty this creates with having a clear accountable picture of how our stuff is made helps us to ask questions about what we are buying. This isn’t just limited to technology, our food, clothing and cosmetics are also commonly produced through complex chains of different companies that span across the world.

So let’s think about the ways that we could make a difference in these three areas.

Even making one little change, such as switching the lights off when you leave a room, or choosing not to have a straw with your milkshake can help to bring about a positive change for the creation that we all share. It might not seem like much but if we all try and play our part we can make a difference.