Celebrate God’s good gifts to us in the natural world with your whole family, from youngest to oldest.

5 Scriptures to Reflect on When Anxiety Strikes

5 Bible Characters We Can Identify With

On Easter Sunday, my church was charged with excitement about Christ’s resurrection. “Christ is risen!” was frequently answered with “He is risen, indeed!” Even my nonliturgical Baptist congregation enjoys that call and response one Sunday each year. When we celebrate Christ’s resurrection (which we do every Sunday), we celebrate the multifaceted result of a eucatastrophe. Most significantly, Christ’s resurrection reveals that his sacrifice for our sins was accepted so that we, by grace through faith, can be united with him. It points forward to our future resurrection, when we exchange these dusty bodies for glorified ones that will last for eternity. Christ’s resurrection also reminds us that all creation will one day be renewed. Many people are deeply anxious about the earth’s fate. The prevailing cultural narrative about the environment anticipates inexorable decline. Because of Christ’s resurrection, Christians have a much better story to tell about sin’s influence on this world and our hope for God’s creation. Thorns Infest the Ground God designed this world for seamless partnership between humanity and the rest of creation. Human work was integral to creation’s fruitfulness (Gen. 2:5). Adam was placed into the garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it (v. 15). God designed this world for seamless partnership between humanity and the rest of creation. When the primal couple sinned, the goodness of creation was distorted. Thorns and thistles infested the ground. Work became tedious (3:18–19). Despite sin’s expanding effects in creation, humanity retained the responsibility to exercise dominion over the created order (9:1–7). Yet sin distorts the relationship between humanity and the rest of creation. When we recount this theme of Scripture’s grand narrative, we generally focus on what sin’s distortion of creation does to us. Children get cancer. Natural disasters kill people. The pain that sin causes has led many people to doubt the existence and goodness of God, as if he’s no longer in control or suffering has no purpose. Yet sin’s effects on creation are no accident. The ground was cursed for our sake (3:17). The distortions of sin remind us of our need for a Savior. Natural evil reminds us of our need to repent (Luke 13:4–5). God is at work even in our pain. Creation groans in bondage to sin. That groaning reminds us this isn’t the way it was meant to be. But we know it won’t always be this way. When we celebrate Christ’s resurrection, we’re rejoicing in our redemption. But we’re also celebrating the redemption of all creation from the stain of sin. Christ’s resurrection is for creation too. Let Earth Receive Her King Many environmentalists focus on reducing human-caused harm to the environment. That’s not a bad thing. In fact, it’s good for Christians to think about how humans can responsibly steward creation. Yet we must also remember that this world won’t be made whole through mere human effort. Creation’s final restoration from sin’s curse requires divine intervention. When Christ reconciled everything in heaven and earth to God through his blood on the cross, he set in motion the renewal of all heaven and earth (Col. 1:20). Yet the final restoration of creation won’t be realized until we’re glorified. There’s an inseparable link between our resurrection and creation’s renewal. God so loved the cosmos, John tells us, that he sent Christ to redeem human sinners from every tribe and tongue and nation (see John 3:16–18). Despite the effects of sin, the Creator delights in his creation (Ps. 104:31–32). That’s why one day we’re going to see everything renewed even as we’re raised in glorified flesh (Rev. 21:1). Christians shouldn’t work to free nature from the burden of humanity. Instead, live in anticipation of creation’s future freedom from sin’s curse. Every act of environmental stewardship Christians perform between now and Jesus’s return is a symbol of our hope in Christ’s resurrection. Heaven and Nature Sing The way Christians frame their concern for creation (or any other social good) matters. Our stewardship of God’s creation is an act of worship because we recognize it’s still good and God’s not done with it. As Al Wolters quipped in his seminal book, Creation Regained, “God does not make junk, and he does not junk what he made.” Every act of environmental stewardship Christians perform between now and Jesus’s return is a symbol of our hope in Christ’s resurrection. Though sin will be purged from the earth with fire, the fate of creation isn’t a cosmic garbage dump. At the end of history, Christ will renew and restore the heavens and the earth. We point forward to that restoration when we treat creation with integrity. It’s a sign of our hope in an age of despair. Many young people around the world are anxious about climate change. As one climate counselor reports, “I’ve heard of a number of children waking in the night screaming in terror imagining that they’re going to die next week. . . . We’re talking about a deeply held despair and horror and loss and sense of abandonment.” Whether or not we agree with popular assessments of the problem, Christians have an important message of hope about creation’s fate. We have the gospel hope that God will never leave us nor forsake us (Heb. 13:5). We also know, as Paul wrote, “that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21, NIV). No wonder the rocks will cry out in praise of Christ (Luke 19:40). The resurrection is good news for believers and it’s good news for God’s nonhuman creation too. On Easter Sunday, we proclaimed, “Christ is risen!” That message offers hope for the weary sinner in need of redemption. As we live every day, we declare Christ’s resurrection to the world, because it’s the source of hope for all creation. Indeed, one day the rocks will respond to their Creator’s shout by crying, “He is risen indeed!”

Six years ago, in the midst of COVID-19, I realized I needed a mentor. As the world around me was alternately shutting down and catching fire, I needed someone who could speak wisely into my life and pastoral ministry. I reached out to someone I had a hunch could help me. I didn’t reach out to someone across town, and I didn’t reach out over the phone to someone across the country. I reached out across the centuries to a local church pastor ministering in Roman Africa in his own troubled times. In Augustine of Hippo, I found the mentor I was looking for. Since those dark days of COVID-19, I’ve been an apprentice to Augustine: reading his works, studying his biographies, understanding his thought and his times. Yes, there are dangers to having a long-dead mentor who can’t speak personally to your heart or directly to your current situation. But there are also real benefits in looking to the past for wisdom on faithful ministry today. Wisdom That Transcends the Moment Each year, I read newly published books with great benefit—books about important cultural trends and new directions in biblical studies. I’m grateful for these books, but I have little expectation they’ll still be read a century from now. Most will come and go, useful for a season before drifting into obscurity. There are real benefits in looking to the past for wisdom on faithful ministry today. But some books last. They’re read generation after generation, age after age. Why? Because they possess a timelessness along with the timeliness that occasioned their composition. There’s a wisdom within their pages that transcends their moment. No one can read Augustine’s reflections in Confessions and deny there’s a profundity and a familiarity with the ways of the human heart that speaks to every reader. We can say the same about Calvin’s Institutes, Owen’s The Mortification of Sin, Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, and many others. We return to these books because we suspect we’ll gain from them what centuries of readers have gained: timeless wisdom for whatever our situation may be. Weightiness That Withstands Cultural Pressures When we’re formed solely by contemporary voices, we can become reactive. We’re “tossed to and fro” (Eph. 4:14) by whatever cultural winds are blowing at the moment or whatever trending topics are buzzing. But when we look to the past for guidance, we drop an anchor down through the centuries to find purchase on enduring truth. Alan Jacobs, in his exhortation to read old books, calls this acquiring “personal density.” A mentor from the past can help us obtain the kind of interior solidity that allows us to cope with the dizzying, disorienting array of challenges we face today. Amid the tumult of the last few years, I read Augustine’s City of God. I encountered a pastor who wasn’t reactively racing around putting out congregational fires but rather was irenically shepherding his people through calamity. As I apprenticed myself to his pastoral posture, I found firmer footing for myself and thus for my people. Strangeness That Fosters Humility L. P. Hartley once said, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” When we listen to voices outside our own times, we’ll often be surprised at what they say. Things taken for granted at one point in history may seem strange to us today. But the converse is also true. Many things we assume today would be seen as bizarre by generations past. Received correctly, this reality cultivates humility in us. When we see how confidently the great minds and souls of the past believed things strange to us today, we should be more humble about our convictions and aware of the blind spots of our age. As C. S. Lewis wrote in a famous essay on the necessity of old books, mentors from the past “will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us.” I chuckled in disbelief when I read, in City of God, Augustine marveling at how certain people can make various incredible noises with their body parts. But I also read soberly Augustine’s meditations on suffering as he pastored women and men who had experienced the Sack of Rome in AD 410. And I was astonished to discover how much Augustine reflected on angels—a theological topic that in our own times rarely reserves serious dogmatic attention. What seems odd from the past should remind us that future generations will also see many of our present preoccupations as strange. Every age has blind spots that only future generations will see. Remembering this can keep us humble. Every Pastor Needs a Mentor Augustine has proved a reliable mentor in my life and work as a pastor. Don’t hear me suggesting a living mentor isn’t also vital for pastoral ministry. I’d encourage every pastor to find an older brother or father in the faith who can mentor him face-to-face, in real time. But I’d encourage every pastor to also find mentors from Christian history, as I did with Augustine. Every age has blind spots that only future generations will see. Remembering this can keep us humble. Too much is at stake in pastoral ministry to try to go it alone. When we preach, teach, counsel, and shepherd the flocks entrusted to us, we need more than our own resources, our own exegesis of Scripture, our own wisdom, our own pastoral instincts. We need mentors who will challenge us, who will help us see our own limitations, and who will give us what we can’t of ourselves give to our people. I found such a mentor in Augustine of Hippo. He’s been a voice of wisdom who, conveniently, is only as far away as my bookshelf, passing on to me the time-tested wisdom of ages past.