Do you ever stop and marvel at God’s creation? Are you in wonder at what he has made? Too often we take God’s masterful creations for granted, instead of seeing them as pointers back to God’s ingenuity, generosity, and artistry. Although we can’t always take time out to praise God for plums, palm trees, and panthers, when we can it’s helpful to meditate on his handiwork.
Here’s the video from this message that shows the relative sizes of our solar system’s planets and sun with other much bigger stars:
Here are a couple of praise songs that tap into the proper sense of wonder we should experience because of God’s works:
Notes
Psalm 19.1-6 The heavens declare God’s glory
Psalm 104.1-35 The psalmist works through creation, marveling at God’s manifold artistry and brilliance.
Psalm 8.1-9 Even though God is so powerful, so transcendent, so majestic, he still cares about us puny humans.
C. S. Lewis’ attention to God’s every-day marvels:
Lewis’s keen, penetrating sense of his own heart’s aching for Joy, combined with his utter amazement at the sheer, objective realness of things other than himself, has over and over awakened me from the slumbers of self-absorption to see and savor the world and through the world, the Maker of the world…
Lewis gave me, and continues to give me, an intense sense of the astonishing “realness” of things. He had the ability to see and feel what most of us see and do not see. He had what Alan Jacobs called “omnivorous attentiveness” (Alan Jacobs, The Narnian, p. xxi.) I love that phrase. What this has done for me is hard to communicate. To wake up in the morning and to be aware of the firmness of the mattress, the warmth of the sun’s rays, the sound of the clock ticking, the coldness of the wooden floor, the wetness of the water in the sink, the sheer being of things (quiddity as he called it). And not just to be aware but to wonder. To be amazed that the water is wet. It did not have to be wet. If there were no such thing as water, and one day someone showed it to you, you would simply be astonished.
He helped me become alive to life. To look at the sunrise and say with an amazed smile, “God did it again!” He helped me to see what is there in the world — things which if we didn’t have them, we would pay a million dollars to have, but having them, ignore. He convicts me of my callous inability to enjoy God’s daily gifts. He helps me to awaken my dazed soul so that the realities of life and of God and heaven and hell are seen and felt. I could go on about the good effect of this on preaching and the power of communication. But it has been precious mainly just for living.
John Piper, “Lessons from an Inconsolable Soul,” Feb. 2, 2010, Desiring God Conference for Pastors
—— Links ——
- This message was inspired by Jerry Wierwille’s phenomenal sharing, “God — Our Spectacular Creator,” presented at Revive 2016.
- Check out Podcast 53: Does God Exist? for more examples of God’s creation pointing to him
- more sermons by Sean Finnegan
- see also John Cortright’s sermon, “The Living God“
- Intro music: Jazzy Frenchy by bensound.com. Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License