Articles/Bulletins
"The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man." - Acts 17:24
The conservationist John Muir wrote "the hills were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the further off and dimmer seems the Lord." There is a danger both in the disassociation of man with nature, and in the attempt to confine God to man-made structures. As much as we might try, God refuses to be enclosed in the edifices we erect. Yes, God will meet us wherever and whenever our hearts are right, but the temples he delights to inhabit are the temples he has made with his own hands. I can, and have, worshipped in lavish temples built by the wisdom and skill of gifted men, but my most intense personal encounters with God have always occurred in the natural world. With my feet standing on the rocks God has laid with his own hands, and the chorus of wind in my ears, with my eyes focused on the intricacies of his creation and my heart filled with the glory that surrounds me, I enter his temple knowing full well who I am and who he is. I am humbled and he is exalted. Life is simpler, more focused, more aligned, when I meet my Lord in his temple. If there ever comes a day when we have tamed nature, when we have forced nature to conform to our our own standards, when we have stripped nature of the glory given it by its Maker, then we will have distanced ourselves so far from God that we will have forgotten what it means to truly worship. We will have succeeded in making God in our own image. Then there will remain nothing left to worship but ourselves. Creation exists to redirect our worship away from ourselves. Allow nature to do its job. - John
