Welcome to lesson five in our Bible study! We've been exploring how our faith in Jesus Christ affects the way we live our daily lives. We've seen that Christian ethics is really like an expanding circle. It begins with our special relationship with God - He loved us enough to send His only Son to rescue us from our sins, so we respond with our own love, with our praise, with our worship. But God's love in Jesus Christ also affects the way we treat our own bodies and minds. We take care of ourselves so that we will be better able to serve God and to serve others. Our families and loved ones also notice the changes God's love makes in us. We reflect God's love in the way we respect them, the way we share our lives with them. Then we reach out even farther to touch the lives of all our neighbors with God's great love. They know we are Christians because we help them to prosper in life; we respect their good names, property and physical wellbeing.

Now we want to expand that circle of love just one more step. Because God loves us, He has given us a marvelous and fascinating world full of gifts. We enjoy the sunshine and rain, flowers and trees, the animals, birds and fish. We use the soil to grow our food, we breathe the air to sustain our lives, and we refresh ourselves with the coolness of the water. You could spend a lifetime and not have enough time to learn of all God's rich and beautiful gifts to us.

But along with all those gifts comes responsibility! If we just take those gifts, use them, abuse them and throw them away, soon we'll have none. We will no longer be able to care for ourselves and our children and their children. We need to care for the air, land and water. To respect the other creatures that share God's world with us, to wisely manage all the gifts that God has given us. The call for us to carefully tend our environment comes at us from every side. We hear it from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, from private groups, from teachers in our schools, from our friends and neighbors. And that call becomes ever more urgent! NOW we must make some decisions about the forests and seas, protecting our rivers and lakes, preventing our soil from washing away and eroding into uselessness.

As Christians, we are quick to respond to that call. Our New Life in Christ includes a deep and lasting commitment to God's creation. We know, through our faith in Jesus, that this is God's world, and that we have been trusted to watch over it, protect it and help it produce its many wonderful gifts.

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