Creation Care: Can Our Planet Survive?

If you turned your thermostat down just a few degrees, your fuel consumption would go down by as much as 10 percent. If you put water-saving faucets in your house, the average family of four would save 20,000 gallons of water a year. Insulate your attic and it reduces energy loss by 20 percent.

All I'm trying to do is say these things matter. They're a part of the mandate to subdue, rule over, work and take care of our Father's world.

This is my closing thought, and it's a challenging one, I forewarn you. The poor really suffer when those of us in the developed world get careless with our energy consumption and pollution. When we consume a lot of energy, it drives prices up all over the world.

When the poor get to a point where they no longer can afford energy at the price where it comes to them, then they go outside and they cut down trees. They cut down trees not to build homes; they cut down trees for cooking and to keep themselves warm at night. If you've ever been to Haiti, almost the entire island of Haiti has been deforested. It's destroyed their country. This happens all over the world.

The poor—if they're downstream from a factory that's polluting their rivers—they just keep drinking out of the rivers because they can't afford to dig wells, and they can't afford to purify their water. So they drink this rancid water, and their kids die of diarrhea by the tens of thousands because some factory upstream is polluting the river. The factory revenues are going to some wealthy people somewhere, and the poor die.

When soil gets worn out, the poor can't afford to let it lie fallow; so they overwork it, and then they have nothing to eat.

My wife showed me a picture of a young, obviously starving, African child squatting on the ground; and in the background was a vulture watching the child. That vulture's just waiting for what it knows is going to happen, and then it's going to do what vultures do. That picture is just too much for me.

In the last several months, for the first time in my life, I've had all these dots kind of line up and get connected. I thought, "Wait a minute. I not only have a stewardship responsibility for creation care of this wonderful world that God created—I've got to take care of it because it's my Father's world—but every energy decision I make, every pollution decision I make, downstream in the developing world, affects the poor. That's had a huge impact on me. It has done more to change my behaviors and my energy consumption than anything else that's ever happened to me.

Can I ask you to take what you've heard in this service, reflect on it, and ask God how His Spirit would touch you and talk to you about what you should do?

I don't think there's any need to run out to our parking places and compare who's driving gas guzzlers. That's not the spirit of this. We don't have to visit each other's homes and check each other's thermostats. That's not the spirit of this, but it is our Father's world. It matters that we steward it, and it certainly matters to the poor.

Copyright © 2008 Willow Creek Association. Used by permission. All Scripture texts are NIV unless otherwise noted.