Bible Reading – Psalm 104
Well, let me bring you the reading on this. My last Sunday here before Megan brings us a message about the spiritual practice of time in nature. So our Bible reading is from Psalm 104, beginning at the first verse.
Praise the Lord, my soul. Lord my God, you are very great. You are clothed with splendor and majesty.
The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment. He stretches out the heavens like a tent, and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters. He makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind.
He makes winds, his messengers flames of fire. His servants. He set the earth on its foundations.
It can never be moved. You cover it with watery depths, as with a garment. The waters stood above the mountains.
But at your rebuke the waters fled. At the sound of your thunder. They took flight.
They flowed over the mountains. They went down into the valleys to the place you were signed for them. You set a boundary they cannot cross.
Never again will they cover the earth. He makes springs pour water into the ravines. It flows between the mountains.
They give water to all the beasts of the field. The wild donkeys quench their thirst. The birds of the sky nest by the waters.
They sing among the branches. He waters the mountains from his upper chambers. The land is satisfied by the fruit of his work.
He makes grass grow for the cattle and plants for people to cultivate, bringing forth food from the earth, wine that gladdens human hearts, oils to make their faces shine, and bread that sustains their hearts.
The trees of the Lord are well watered. The cedars of Lebanon that he planted there. The birds make their nests. The stork has its home in the junipers, the high monkey.
The high mountains belong to the wild goats. The crags are a refuge for the hyrax. He made the moon to mark the seasons. And the sun knows when to go down.
You bring darkness. It becomes night. And all the beasts of the forest.
Per owl. The lion's roar for their prey. And seek their food from God.
The sun rises and they steal away. They return and lie down in their dens. Then people go out to their work, to their labor until evening.
How great are your works, Lord? In wisdom you made them all. The earth is full of your creatures.
From Scripture to Sermon Theme
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. You've been sitting for a while.
I think you better stand up and give yourself a little, stretch or something. Just like to say after the sermon, there's one song and that's it. So just just keep that in mind. Yes. Good.
Truth Matters, but Life Matters More
Well, we are, as we've said, a couple of weeks out from our vision Sunday. And there's one theme that's been captivating me, for The Shape of Deep Creek in 2026. And it's this phrase truth matters, but life matters more.
I like it because it's a little bit spicy. Stirs you up a little bit. A bit controversial, maybe. I mean, how can something be more matter? More than the truth.
Now, I'll keep you in suspense because we'll look at it more in two weeks and what it might speak into 2026 for us, but it really is also at the heart of this series on spiritual living. Knowing something about God. Something. True is not the same as having a life that is shaped by that truth.
A life that bears witness to that truth, that has rhythms and practices and priorities and habits that enable the truth about God to be experienced and to be seen in our lives. As Rachel said as she began our series. As human beings, we are constantly being formed.
Our lives are being shaped and molded by our environment, our choices, our thoughts, our practices. They change us and our life, our experience. Well, it isn't just about what we think. We need to do things that lead us to be being formed by Jesus, if that is our goal.
Rather than, in Rachel's words, being deformed by the world.
Being Formed by Practices, Not Deformed by the World
And so Rachel began the series talking about behaviors of generosity, practices, habits, giving to those in need, putting off buying something for yourself so that you can save up to give to something else. Mission ministry. Something that the Lord shows you.
Being generous with the resources that you have, including your mind, the skills that you have and your money. And doing these things day to day puts life to the truth. Everything we have is from God.
Last week, Beck talked about the practice of silence and solitude shaping our lives, allowing Jesus practice of withdrawing to lonely places and praying to shape us. That rhythm in his life kept him in communion with his father, kept him on mission.
And so we are to incorporate things, practices, habits, things to do in our daily lives where we have no noise. No distraction, maybe even no agenda. Being still. Being quiet. Listening to God.
Time in Nature and the Practice of Gratitude
Today we're adding two other rhythms. Primarily one, but it leads to the other. Time in nature and the practice of gratitude.
So I want to ask you, when was the last time that you stood outside and just noticed, not noticed? What needs doing? Got to mow the lawn. Got to pull out that weed. Oh, you just walk into the church.
That's what you're noticing right now. Thank you. Spring weather, but just noticed. Not rushing to the car. Not checking your phone. Just noticed. Paying attention to the world that God has made.
If you have done that, and maybe you notice the way the morning light looked in the trees, maybe you noticed how the trees look different after so much rain. Maybe you notice that they have bright green at the top instead of dark green because they've been growing.
Maybe you heard bird song that you haven't heard before, or you saw ants scurrying around as you looked at the ground, or maybe as you looked up, you watched clouds reshape themselves across the sky. These moments, these small pauses in creation, are not pleasant diversions from our real spiritual lives.
If you take away anything, I hope you take away that they're not diversions. They're essential to our formation as followers of Jesus. Time spent in nature, time given to noticing God's created world shapes us in ways that nothing else quite can.
Wonder in Creation and the Double Book of God
My family and I have had the opportunity to travel to various countries over the last five weeks, and we prioritize time in nature. This is us in Zion National Park in the narrows, and I know a few of you have been there. I'm out of practice.
I'm going to show a few photos in the sermon because it was that or read poetry and also, it'll kind of save time if you all look at the photos at the same time and you don't have to look at my iPhone. So but I do want to say in sharing some of these photos that we are just so aware of the privilege and how grateful we were to be able to do these things, it's not our usual habit to be able to travel overseas.
Having a trip like this, which was five weeks in our long service leave, it's not something we've done before. It's not something we expect to be able to do again in the foreseeable future or bank balance. So please, you know, you might think, don't think I'm a I'm a high flyer.
Last week, Beck told us that being in nature is a great way to find solitude and stillness, and it can be. But the narrows as a walk. You're walking in a River was absolutely packed, like there were so many people's beautiful, whether you're walking in water, and it was absolutely packed with kids, families, older people, and we're all attracted to places of beauty and wildness.
And it's good for us walking through a forest versus walking through an urban environment actually results in a lower pulse rate for the human being, 15% lower stress hormones. Being in nature relaxes the eye, improves our cognitive focus. Patients in hospital with just a view of nature out their window experienced shorter hospital stays.
Kids who have daylight as the lighting in their classroom. Progress faster in school than those who have electric lights only. But nature is not just good for us as human beings. It's actually essential for us as human beings called to commune with a creator God.
Christians from all sorts of backgrounds. Puritans to Eastern Orthodox. Anglican. Everything in between. Call the Bible and nature. The double book or the two books of God's speaking. God's revelation.
The natural world, we have to know, isn't just a backdrop for our spiritual lives. It is a place where God's presence and purposes are revealed. Romans one says, through creation the things God has made, his invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature have been made known.
In job chapter 12, we're told to learn from the animals and nature. We learn about God. We learn about ourselves. So Beck had two boots in which she encouraged us to be confident that we could walk into the practice of silence and solitude.
And my two sneakers because I'm a sneaker girl. Ah, that nature. We can be confident that nature teaches and nature transforms as we walk into practices of spending time in nature.
Nature’s Rhythms, Reality, and Spiritual Formation
So the scriptures, as I said there, the double book with nature. God is the creator of all things. They bear his signature. They teach of his character and our nature, our place in his world.
But also, spiritual transformation requires that we give deep attention to Jesus. We need to be able to give deep attention to his teaching. He was incarnate in a pre-industrial time. He used lots of nature illustrations, lots of agrarian illustrations.
The Bible is full of nature illustrations, and if you don't know what that is, it's rather hard to give it deep attention if you've never seen a vine, for example, John Dean's harder. If you've never seen a seed, it's harder to understand. Time in nature, though, can also reset our attention.
It changes our brain away from the things that are quick and bright and shiny and loud, and it enables us to start to be able to give more deep attention to the things that are needed and needful. So here is me resetting my attention on the side of the Grand Canyon. It's a good one. It was really quite posed.
Phoebe was very hungry. I couldn't sit there very long, at that time. But just as in Psalm 104, as I sat in that incredible spot, all that could come from me was praise the Lord. Lord, you are very great.
What I have seen of you tells me you are clothed with splendor and majesty. You can see the psalmist as he looks at creation in that first stanza that I've extracted. He sees in the majesty, the vastness, the largeness of God's character and nature.
He wraps himself in light as with a garment. He rides on the wings of the wind. He makes winds, his messengers, flames of fire, his servants. God is so vast, so other, so majestic.
But the psalmist also learns other things. Look at, from verse 5 to 9. God set the earth on its foundations, covered it with the watery depths. At your rebuke, the waters fled. You set a boundary they cannot cross.
It's actually reminding him of Genesis. Genesis one, Genesis six and seven, the Noah story, the flood, God's promise, the rainbow. Never again will I flood the earth. But then he moves into something fascinating for us, which I want us to spend a little bit of time thinking about.
He moves into the rhythms of the natural world. You've made the moon to mark the seasons. I don't know if I put it up there, actually, did I? There I did, and the son knows when to go down. Verse 19.
So the psalmist is doing something remarkable. He's not just admiring nature's beauty. He's recognizing that creation operates according to rhythms, patterns and seasons that are outside of human control. There's an ordering to the world, a divine choreography of time and life.
Springs gush, glaciers grow and shift, grass grows. The moon marks seasons. The sun knows when to set. Everything in creation lives according to God given rhythms. Everything except perhaps us.
We live in a culture that has largely lost touch with natural time. We work under fluorescent lights that never change. We eat fruit out of season from far away. We stay up past dark, scrolling our screens, and we wake up to alarms that interrupt our sleep cycle.
We've created an artificial world where time is something we feel we can control and manage and optimize. Not something we receive as a gift and live within as creatures. But what the research on spiritual formation tells us if we want to live the life, we need to be reminded that we are creatures and not creators.
We are participants in God's world, not authors of our own reality. The time in nature and paying attention to the rhythms and the seasons reorient us to the truth of our existence. When you watch a sunset, you can't make it go faster or slower.
When you observe, the seasons change, you can't hurry spring or delay winter. When you stand underneath the stars, you're confronted with your smallness and God's vastness. Nature teaches us what we've forgotten, that we live within rhythms and a system we did not make and cannot ultimately control.
I wonder if you've ever had fish as a pet or even a lizard. Maybe, I haven't, but I understand that to keep them alive in your environment, the work you need to have to put in. That's why I've never had one. Is incredible.
You need to get the pH right and the temperature right, and you've got to put the right food, and you've got to get the right filtration. And there needs to be the right oxygen and the right to do all of these things, this system, this complicated system that we struggle to recreate and yet outside in its natural environment.
Of course, it just works. We live within rhythms and systems we did not make, and it is good for us to know that it's deeply formative, because spiritual formation is about learning to live in reality, not in illusion. It's doing things that put you in touch with reality and take you out of distraction and make believe.
Awe, Urban Life, and the Challenge to Faith
In his book The Silence of Angels, Dale Allison talks about the risk we run by not experiencing nature regularly. In a nutshell, he says, if the most amazing thing you saw this year was made by man, then you will be amazed by man.
If the most amazing thing you saw this year was made by God, then you will be amazed by God. Time in nature. Whether it be the most spectacular places on earth, that's naught cup the top of Europe. Or whether it's the intricacy of a bird or a plant in the park, or an ecosystem of insects in your garden.
These create wonder and awe in the human being. And these are essential psychological orientations that are favorable to faith. Without them, faith has to work so much harder. And I don't want that. I want whatever will make faith easier in this hard world.
You don't have to have a lot of resources to find such places. You do not have to go to the end of the world. What about the redwood forest near Warburton? The super tall eucalypts in the Dandenong, the rocks at Plenty Gorge, the cliffs at Cape Schank, the Yarra River on a day not today.
The important thing is to get outside man made world and get into nature. And Allison's argument is that it is industrialization and urbanization, not science. Like we often think, that makes faith hard. Today, science is a desire to know and explore how God's world works.
But the disconnection from nature and the increase in comfort, the predictability of urbanization, the pride, the sameness leads to a false sense of power and security that makes faith dry, makes our hearts stale. In Zion National Park, I was surprised to see significant advocacy around preventing light pollution.
Now, of course, in a national park, light pollution impacts nocturnal animals and insects and their regular habits. But their intention was also that it would be good for human beings. We actually need to be able to experience light and dark. We need to see the stars. We need to see the sunrise.
It's possible for you and I to never be in the dark, actually. Ever. And apart from what that does to our various brain chemicals, it prevents us from the wonder that light and dark, the imagination, the dependence, the clarity, the terror, the longing for the morning.
That light and dark bring, all of which were intended to form us as faithful creatures, pursuing the presence of a good God.
Jesus’ Invitation to Consider the Lilies
Well, let's start to conclude with Jesus words in Matthew six. I think you've heard them in Rachel Sermon two. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.
They neither toil nor spin. Yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field. Will he not much more clothe you?
More of you may have been to this place in Singapore. Gardens by the bay. And Jesus is doing something that you could do as you walked around a garden. He's not giving a lecture from the front.
He's inviting his disciples to consider what they see. To look closely, to pay attention. To contemplate what's right in front of them in the natural world. Consider the frangipani. Watch how they grow. Notice their beauty.
This is spiritual practice. Jesus is saying that if we actually look at creation, really look, we will learn things for our heart that are essential about God's character, God's care for us. The lilies. The frangipani.
Don't strive or worry. They receive what God provides. They flourish in beauty. They live within what God has established. And it is enough. Perhaps Jesus is asking us, can we do the same?
Nature teaches us to be receivers dependent. Nature slows us down and helps us to attend. Nature reveals God's character and gives us a chance to see that his plans and purposes are so much greater than our own.
Practicing Time in Nature and Gratitude
So just some practical things, as we conclude. Can I recommend a daily creation? Pause. Maybe if you're having a cup of tea or coffee, instead of scrolling your phone at that time, try and look out a window or step outside.
If you've got pictures of nature in your house, you can look at them, but ideally, something that is moving slightly. Doesn't have to be long. It's just to notice what you see here and smell. It's to pay attention to the sky, the trees, the weather.
You don't have to have deep thoughts. It doesn't have to be a perfect flower. God will shape you. And before you go back inside or stop looking out the window, you just name one thing you noticed and you say a thank you to God because that's what nature does.
It brings gratitude. So a daily creation pause is not just time in nature. It's actually a practice of gratitude to. One minute, three minutes, five minutes. One thing noticed and a word of thanks.
Secondly, a weekly without input walk. I love to multitask. And so listening to a book not a huge podcast person, but audiobooks on a walk. Then, you know, I feel like I'm productive.
But what about a walk or something where you don't have input, where you just have to notice and attend? If you walk the same route. Attend to the changes. What's different today and can you pray as you walk?
It's not about exercise, thank goodness. It's about spiritual practice. Thank you. Thirdly, marking the seasons with gratitude. Now, in Australia, many of us have been formed to say we have four seasons.
Our Indigenous Australians would be able to tell us that there's even more than that. Where different things start to happen, where different things flower and different creatures spawn, etc.. and marking those to know that we are creatures within a creation and sharing, maybe even with a meal or with a growth group to say this is what I'm thankful for or what God has shown me this season.
Fourthly, bringing the outside in. I'm a big believer in having pictures of or some sort of representation of nature inside plants. Cut flowers. Not just photos of the family, but photos of, a beautiful place you went to.
Great to change what you see and to notice and attend. And finally, expressing gratitude for any and all the things standing in front of nature doesn't make you just say thank you, Lord, for this apple that I get to eat. And like the psalmist, the bread that I enjoy and the oil.
Today I looked at or not today, during the week, I looked at the plant in my garden that had clearly had an amazing bloom of flowers while I'd been away, and I missed all of them. That would just brown now. And it would have looked amazing.
And I actually was grateful that it was just doing its thing apart from me. It had nothing to do with me. And its job was to bloom and to do what God intended. And I wasn't there. And good.
Maybe even as you see weeds and as you see too many rabbits, you will give thanks to God for him bringing life to all things.
Living in God’s Rhythms with Gratitude
So, as we conclude. God has given us a remedy to the disconnection that we have in this world from the earth, from our bodies, from God Himself. And it's as close as our own back door.
Step outside. Pay attention. Receive the world as a gift and let creation teach you about God's character and care, and as you do. Let gratitude well up in you, not as an obligation, but as a natural response of a creature who has noticed how much they've been given.
So we're going to sing our final song, which happens to be gratitude. And I encourage you to make this a commitment prayer that you will see God's great world live in his rhythms and trust in his provision and care.
