40acts: Ready to ActSample

Act 10: Litterbug

Every cigarette butt casually discarded, every sweet wrapper or takeaway container soon adds up to a big problem on our streets. Let’s care for the planet God gave us. Find a bin. It’s win-win.

God gave us the planet to care for with bold, creative steps – not a small thing, and not a job to be done timidly. This is the mandate of Genesis 2:15: he has made the risky-seeming decision of handing the care of our environments, our land, our sea, our skies, our animals over to us. 

‘The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.’ Maybe we’ve taken our duty too lightly – ‘care’ sounds like too light a word, like we’re just to check in on its health every now and again. But God’s Genesis-1-and-2 vision is expansive in scale, and our original assignment stays with us today. 

So, despite the massive challenge of climate change, we can still take up our God-given mandate to partner with him and care for the world. He hasn’t checked out; God didn’t wind the world up like a clock and then walk away. We know that’s true for our personal lives, but sometimes it escapes us when we think about the planet we live on. Even one sparrow falling to the ground doesn’t escape his notice. 

Our worship of God doesn’t end after the music stops on a Sunday morning. As we see our whole lives wrapped up in our relationship with him, we see that our relationship with the planet is caught up in our worship. We can’t look at the planet and think that God just gave it to us to do whatever we want with. There is a call built in to the beginning of the Bible: the Lord gave us the garden to keep it.