How Great Thou Art: Recovering an Appreciation for Nature

Good afternoon. If you forgive me, I am struggling a little bit with a sore throat.

And the last time I had this problem, and I lost my voice, was actually when I was with Dr. Russell Fuller before.

So I blamed him, and I said, every time I'm with you, I get a sore throat for some reason. I don't know, I'm just choked up.

But I have, there's a lot of things going on right now in our culture, and it just seems like the news cycles are moving at faster paces, and there's more things that are clamoring for our attention all the time.

And I feel this a lot, I guess, just because I focus so much on the news cycle, what's going on, especially in evangelicalism.

And I realize all of us are going through this right now. And originally, since I was the one who came up with the topics for the conference, you know,

I'm the organizer, so I'm able to tell myself, I guess, what I should speak on. And I wanted to talk about resisting, right?

We're going to be strong, we're going to resist the social justice movement, and here are some ways to do it, and I started preparing for it.

And the more I did, I thought, you know, in my own life, where I live, where you live, the biggest problem for me isn't, we need to be involved in politics, but the biggest problem

I'm facing is this. Stuff like this. This is the biggest problem that I'm facing.

Now, it's not this, it's sin, right? But it's the distraction of the day -to -day. It's the forgetting that my creator actually has a plan, and I'm part of it, and he expects things of me.

And for me, I don't know about you, but for me, getting out into nature, into God's creation, seeing his work there, puts things in perspective.

I look at the stars and I think, that's why I'm here. That's why things matter. I don't have to understand it all.

And so I was drawn more to talk about that. So I've changed the topic for myself, and I can do that, since I organized the conference.

And this is the title I have, I gave myself, is How Great Thou Art, Recovering and Appreciation for Nature.

And my goals in bringing this to you, there's really a few of them, I suppose. One is just for you to gain a further understanding and appreciation for God's creation, and what he expects us to glean from it.

I think we've lost a lot of this. The other thing is just to help you, to cultivate habits in your own life, to motivate you to do that, that will strengthen you.

Jesus had to get away to pray, and he's the son of God, right? He was on this earth in an agrarian society, and he didn't have cell phones, and yet he had to get away to the wilderness, to be away from it, to be with God.

And so I want to talk about a little bit what's happened in the past few centuries, and how we can regain this in our lives.

And I think when we do, a lot of other things will fall into place. So I want to give you a quote.

This is from John Calvin. He said this in his commentary on Genesis. He said, We see indeed the world with our eyes.

We tread the earth with our feet. We touch innumerable kinds of God's works with our hands.

We inhale a sweet and pleasant fragrance from herbs and flowers. We enjoy boundless benefits, but in those very things of which we attain some knowledge, there dwells an immensity of divine power, goodness, and wisdom, as absorbs all our senses.

If we are to recover an understanding and an appreciation for the natural order that God has set up, which is challenged right now, even with men being girls and girls being guys,

I mean, this is a challenge to God's creation, his natural order. We need to spend,

I think, more time in that world, in that natural order. Most of our ancestors who lived in agrarian societies spent far more of their time outdoors.

A 2017 study showed that most American adults were satisfied spending five hours or less in nature per week.

Now contrast this with the fact that the average American spends one -third of their waking hours on a mobile device and almost seven hours of their day online.

That's the average American. This new sedentary lifestyle impacts more than just our physical health.

Digital tycoons promise to give people the limitless ability to control their lives. Instead, they deliver them into what for many is a meaningless world of addiction and exploitation.

Global advertisers now spend almost three -quarters of their advertising budgets on digital platforms.

The number of pornography, video game, and binge -watching addicts, of course, is increasing. Online users exacerbate cyberbullying and cancel culture by putting more stock in digital footprint than intimate experience.

I remember when the Internet first, well, it didn't come out, I guess, but it was when people started getting on social media.

I remember thinking this is the fake world, and everyone knew it was the fake world. We can say whatever we want. There's no consequences. Well, you better believe there are now.

As technology advances, virtue retreats. And unfortunately, we often,

I think, misunderstand the level at which these things operate. Believers often conceive of digital age problems strictly in terms of vice and choice.

People use digital devices to fulfill sinful desires that they have. Spiritual advisors rightly encourage

Christians engaged in such activities to repent, seek accountability, get some discipline, memorize some scripture.

And those are all important things. We need to do that. However, there is an often neglected metaphysical dimension to this, meaning of a deeper philosophy of what is the nature of reality, what kinds of things exist in reality.

We're missing, I think, something that's bigger going on here. Minds that stay indoors and online are capable of immersing themselves into a kind of artificial reality.

It is easy for them to believe that they can create a better world than the one that actually exists, one that God made.

And, you know, I need to probably say this up front. I'm not saying, obviously, I have a phone. I'm not saying you shouldn't go on the

Internet. I'm saying, though, we need to realize the impact that these tools can have when they're misused.

So changing the world is no longer achieved through overcoming real challenges through work and discipline.

That used to be the way you changed the world. Now a click of the mouse can do it. It is by drawing a new blueprint for reality itself.

Technology makes the stream seem possible. People have pleasurable experiences without the responsibilities that naturally accompany them.

For example, sex without intimacy, friendship without obligation, adventure without risk.

Internet natives, the people who grew up with technology, tend to impose this manufactured idea onto reality itself.

Debates surrounding public accommodations for people who think of themselves as transgender or in one case in Colorado, Jefferson County, someone who thought that they were a cat and wanted public accommodations in the school for that.

These are increasing. And members of a generation who grew up immersed in a world of online avatars, virtual reality, and social media are blurring the lines between the limitless experience facilitated through technology and the experience of the real world.

And they demand that the communities they live in recognize these things. So it affects their metaphysical outlet.

It affects what they think is possible, what is in reality. In the minds of many, reality is not fixed anymore.

People can edit existence with a swipe of a finger, choosing what pictures of themselves to show, erasing previous partners after breakups, and curating a community that reinforces their interests and decisions.

I don't know if anyone here is country music fans. There's a Brad Paisley song about this called Online. It talks about how he's so much cooler online.

If you look at his profile, and of course he's not anything like the way he portrays himself there.

Things as basic as identity in this fluid existence are socially generated and legitimized within a matrix of other public experiences.

This outlook is amplified by the way urban dwellers started to think during the Industrial Revolution.

Or I should say it's an amplified version of the way urban dwellers started to think during the Industrial Revolution. As people came from the cities, or the country to the cities, and there was this urbanization sprawl.

There were people at the time, we're talking 100 years ago or more, that noticed that this was going to be a problem.

Many of them, I happen to have read a lot of the southern agrarian thinkers like Richard Weaver, Lyle Lanier, Hermans Clarence Nixon, Donald Davidson.

Some of you might have heard of some of those names, some of you maybe not. But these guys were very concerned that the urbanization that was taking place during their lifetime was going to create shallow friendships, deep social divides, and a welfare state.

It's almost like prophecy, right? They were writing, this is from the New Deal era in the World War II era, really.

That they were writing these things and they were saying this is where we're heading. This is before cell phones. Richard Weaver summarized the agrarian's concerns as a conspiracy against civilization to substitute sensation for reflection.

He argued that technology made urban living and mass communication possible on a scale previously unrealized.

Cities existed since the time of Cain, but not metropolitan areas of the Industrial Age. In 1800, the population of New York City was 60 ,000.

That's it, that was the big city. Compare that to 1930, 10 million.

It's unheard of. We don't think in these terms, but the cities of the ancient world and the cities of even the medieval world, they were much smaller.

This new arrangement fostered a spoiled child mentality that detached people from lasting connections to land and relationships.

Weaver observed that city dwellers lived with immediate access to man -made comforts and limitless information.

Media outlets gained success by infusing people's dull mechanical lives with sensational or obscene content.

This constituted an attack on privacy. Political candidates consolidated power by appeasing immediate desires.

This short -circuited the relationship between effort and reward. Urbanites began to believe that there was nothing they could not know and nothing they could not have.

This continual state of stimulation in the present erased reminders of human frailty and obligation to the past or future.

The world was simply a machine existing for the purpose of supplying people with comfort. As people depended more on this complicated system of human exchange, they became forgetful of the overriding mystery of creation.

Weaver wrote, and this is in 1949, I believe, or in 1947, Weaver wrote that an artificial environment causes people to lose sight of the great system not subject to man's control.

Religion, which helped man realize the presence of something greater than self, was the only hope that urban dwellers had of conserving anything of lasting value.

Weaver's reflections are more potent now than they were in 1948, not 47, when he originally made them.

So if you read, a lot of these were taken from Ideas Have Consequences, one of his books, written in 1948.

If you read his observations at that point, you think you're reading, you're reading present, about present issues.

He's writing back then. What did he know? What did he see? Now people carry the megalopolis in their pocket.

You don't even have to be in the city anymore, right? You can be in a very rural area and you have unlimited access to information.

You have something that can notify you and distract you at all times.

For previous generations, it was necessary to consider and contend with creation for survival. Couldn't escape it.

Today, it's just a matter of choice. Rejecting constant stimulation and the rewards associated with it, like dopamine hits, entertainment, and distraction from the problems of life, is difficult.

It is especially hard if it's all someone knows, but it is necessary. And hear me when

I say this, it is necessary for healthy, productive, and honest living. And it is possible.

You can do this. If we are to return to a sense of divine purpose, we will need to step into creation.

It is here we most naturally conform our will to our creators. It is here unnatural notions are most easily extinguished in the light of the sublime and the beautiful.

Now I want to talk a little bit about the nature of creation and the natural world. The beauty that you see, the feeling that you get.

This isn't something I'm used to hearing from a lot of Christians, but we have actually a rich Christian history on these things.

And I think this will help you understand what's that sensation you get when you look at the stars.

You're by a big mountain or you see a beautiful field of flowers. What's going on?

And you just want to worship. Anyone ever had that? You just want to worship right there. My dad actually did this once.

We were at, where were we? It was a national park. I want to say Grand Tetons, beautiful Grand Teton Mountains.

And there's a chapel there and it overlooks the mountains. And I remember, I was a kid at the time,

I was like, Dad. He comes in the chapel and we're just touring this thing. And there's other tourists. And he just starts singing

How Great Thou Art. And I was a little kid. I'm like, what are you doing? There's people here. National parks guys didn't care.

But he just couldn't help himself. He was like, this is so beautiful. What is that? Why do we react that way?

Why is that important to cultivate that into our daily lives? Edmund Burke, the 18th century

Irish statesman and pioneer of modern conservative thought, emphasized the importance of experiencing the sublime and the beautiful in his famous pre -romantic work on aesthetics.

Now, some of you might not know who Edmund Burke is, but you will know the famous quote that the only thing necessary for evil to exist is for good men to do nothing, right?

That's Edmund Burke and that's a standard quote from him. Well, he wrote this whole book on aesthetics. And aesthetics meaning like the nature of beauty and valuing beauty and sublimity.

And so he says in his book that the sublime dwelled on great and terrible objects while beauty dwelled on small and pleasing ones.

Now, later critics thought that Burke was contrasting gender differences, that there's certain things that are female, certain things that are male, and this even comes into our creation experiences.

He didn't say that. But sublimity included qualities like ruggedness, vastness, magnificence, and power, while beauty with its qualities of smoothness, gradualness, delicacy, and grace, right?

And we have these two experiences when we're in the natural world. Consider Solomon's description of the shepherd bride in chapter four of the

Song of Songs. Her eyes are like doves. I'm sure all the husbands, you read this to your wives, right?

Your eyes are like doves. Your hair's like a flock of goats. Her neck, it says, is an ornate tower.

Her breasts fawns among lilies. He also describes more than what is seen by praising the smell of her fragrance and the taste of her lips.

Such flowing, soft, elegant, tender, and sweet descriptions inspire the young suitor's heart to beat faster, it says.

This is a good illustration of Burke's conception of beauty. Another example is found in David's surroundings in the 23rd

Psalm. David states, he makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters.

The result comes in the next verse. He restores my soul. For centuries, people cherished these beautiful words as reminders that life was worthwhile, even in the midst of suffering.

The degraded art and literature of today does little to produce these effects because there's little beauty in it.

That's why you watch a show and you think, this sounds like it might be a good show. And you're left feeling empty and dull and like, why did

I do that? I'm not the only one, right? And there's nothing beautiful about it.

The problem is that modern media, instead of lifting people to a higher order, seeks to emancipate them from it.

In the words of Sir Roger Scruton, they attempt to recreate the world as though love were not part of it. Burke believed beauty inspired love, which compelled people to give themselves to something they found to be precious.

This is quite the opposite of lust, which takes and uses. In modern art, things are often reduced to animalistic function.

People focus entirely on themselves and miss the world beyond them. The world is no longer their home, but an absurd, dangerous place they must survive while extracting any pleasure that they can from it.

And a good example of this is pornography. Pornography assumes a freedom to cross natural boundaries that, when attempted in reality, leads to pain and chaos.

Pleasure comes purely from mechanical actions detached from obligation and security. The world is a machine with no higher purpose than the present.

One of Burke's contemporaries, the French revolutionary Marquis de Sade, from where we get the term sadism, pioneered this philosophy.

He encouraged young people to abandon religion, embrace atheism, and sacrifice everything to their own pleasure.

This was the only way for the poor creatures, he says, who goes under the name of man to sow a smattering of roses atop the thorny path of life.

One easily sees his resentment toward God and anyone who might represent him in his writings. Instead of God, Marquis de

Sade assumed he was obeying the voice of nature by fulfilling his perverted tastes. But in reality, he was trampling on nature by gratifying his own lusts.

Sade spent 32 years of his life in prison for crimes related to kidnapping, rape, and violence.

Contrary to Sade, things are not beautiful just because they are useful to us. Beauty expresses design and purpose.

It is not found in function but in form. The pleasure derived from it does not terminate in physical objects but infuses our experience with ultimate value.

When we view a breathtaking scene, we forget ourselves and focus on what surrounds us instead.

We put our interests on hold and take in the moment. Our enjoyment comes from being part of something bigger than us.

Our appreciation is not arbitrary. Rather, it is connected to something objective that can be appreciated by others in similar ways.

Beauty shares some of these qualities with sublimity, but they are distinct. In both experiences, we begin to cooperate with something outside ourselves.

Beauty charms us to do so while sublimity commands us to do so. For example, people respond to flowers differently than they respond to volcanoes.

Beauty inspires love. Sublimity, admiration. Burke thought of the sublime as a great commanding conception beyond our comprehension.

Standing in the presence of an important king or experiencing an irresistible force such as a dark storm or a rugged mountain evoke a sense of awe and perhaps dread.

People feel small when their minds are filled with thoughts of eternity, grandeur, and mystery.

Burke observed, we submit to what we admire. Two good examples of this are found in the end of Job and in Psalm 139.

The central question of the book of Job concerns why God allows the righteous to suffer. Instead of answering the question directly,

God reminds man of his own limitations. Speaking to Job from the whirlwind, God asks things like, have you entered into the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep?

Burke particularly highlighted God's description of certain animals like Leviathan. They resisted domestication.

Can you draw out Leviathan with a fish hook or press down his tongue with a cord?

Can you put a rope in his nose, pierce his jaw with a hook? Will he make many supplications to you or will he speak to you soft words?

Will he make a covenant with you? Will you take him for a servant forever? Of course, the answer is obvious, no.

Leviathan's a dinosaur and Leviathan's not going to bend a man. These overwhelming descriptions reminded

Job of his own insignificance. Consequently, he abandoned attempts to understand and instead surrendered to God's mysterious plan.

Similarly, Burke wrote of King David that when he contemplated the wonders of wisdom and the power which are displayed in the economy of man, he seemed to be struck with the sort of divine horror and cries out fearfully and wonderfully, am

I made? This feeling of smallness that Job and David experienced was once encouraged every

Sunday. When Christians gained the ability to finance places of worship, they built breathtaking cathedrals and magnificent churches.

Features like large domes, ornate arches, and tall steeples reminded them of God's greatness. Many walked past the graves of their ancestors, on their way inside where a symphony of heavenly music greeted them.

Together they listened to God's voice from scripture and bound themselves to follow it. Burke noticed that all religions incorporated a sense of dread, power, and fear, but Christianity also expressed a sense of love.

Unfortunately, this is now the only quality and in a somewhat shriveled form that many

Christians are encouraged towards. Modern churches often succumb to modernity by purposely ignoring the sublime in the pursuit of love, specifically love of self.

Theologian David Wells believes that churches in the 20th century shifted focus toward activities intended to meet felt needs.

Smiling people, happy music, professional speakers produced sentimentality, but so did organizations that were not religious at all.

Anyone ever seen a TED Talk? Or, you know, I sometimes look at TED Talks and stuff, but a lot of these things are, you can't tell the difference sometimes between that and a typical, like, megachurch evangelical worship service.

Without theology at the center, Christianity lost its distinctiveness. Many churches intentionally did this by giving the impression they were not churches at all.

They used corporate -sounding names, replaced crosses with logos, and designed buildings to look like businesses.

Steeples, graveyards, and hymns became things of the past. Gradually, Christian outlets that once contained theological content now published self -help and pop culture material.

Christianity became less sublime, and as a result, less religious. Some movements, like the

Emergent Church, if anyone's heard of that, Brian McLaren and Doug Pagin and Rob Bell, those guys, they tried to reinstate a sense of transcendence by replacing traditional belief with things like social activism and practices associated with the

New Age movement. People confused connection to the world with connection to the divine. As a result, man's power increased and God's decreased.

There was no longer a reason to fear God or conform one's life to his will.

And in many places, I'll just say this, we are met with two options, almost. If you want that sublimity, if you want to have an encounter with God in a place that encourages it, you often almost have to choose between some kind of a more mystical, almost

Eastern -like experience and then the other alternative is like a rock show, right?

In many communities, this is what I hear. And thank God the people in this church, you don't have that problem, but this is what's going on out there.

And I'm suggesting that it's because we've lost something that was universal, that all churches had at one time, sublimity and beauty.

People can lose themselves in all kinds of activities, from drug trips to contemplative prayer, but if they are not made to think of themselves as distinct and fragile creatures in the face of overwhelming majesty and power, they will not gain a sense of the sublime.

And today, it is clear that these necessary reminders are not automatic. We must choose to deliberately integrate sublimity into our lives.

Nature is and has always been the place where people go to experience this most directly.

Edmund Burke described the passion caused by the great and sublime in nature in vivid terms.

Astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended with some degree of horror.

In this case, the mind is so entirely filled with its object that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.

Hence, our reasonings and hurries us on by an irresistible force.

Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree. The inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect.

So when you hear someone who's older, somebody says, why don't the kids respect anymore? You hear that a lot. Where's the respect gone?

It's gone out with this. There's nothing worthy of respect. There is no natural order. We create our own universe.

There's numerous examples throughout the Psalms where people respond to God's creative works in nature with this attitude. Psalm 33,

David recounts how God made the heavens and oceans commanding the response, let all the earth fear the

Lord. Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him. Psalm 36, he says, your righteousness is like the mountains of God.

Your judgments are like a great deep. See that vastness, right? That immensity.

David asks God to keep him from his pride and the consequences of it. He said, the wicked ignore what should be obvious because there is no fear of God before their eyes.

In Psalm 97, he refers to the way lightning makes the people of the earth tremble. Truly the heavens are telling of the glory of God and their expanse is declaring the work of his hands.

Now it is obvious that this admiration, reverence, and respect are significantly diminished in our world as is the fear of God that produces such qualities.

In this sense, if this sense cannot be found in most churches, we surely cannot expect it to show up in places of education, enterprise, or entertainment.

This is why we must go outside. From God instructing

Moses in the wilderness to remove his sandals because he stood on holy ground to Jesus crying out in the garden, not my will but yours be done.

There is a long tradition of what are sometimes called mountaintop experiences.

Natural settings are not required to communicate with God but often it is in these settings, frequently on mountains, that God reveals himself in profound ways.

God wrestled with Jacob in a secluded place. He revealed his law to Moses on Mount Sinai.

He first appeared to David on Mount Moriah and communed with his people there who gathered at Solomon's Temple, which is where it was built.

He miraculously answered Elijah's prayer on Mount Carmel, sending fire from heaven.

He transfigured himself before Peter, James, and John at the Mount of Transfiguration. Jesus set the ultimate example for Christians by frequently slipping away to pray in the wilderness during his earthly ministry.

If Jesus needed time alone with God in nature, in an agrarian context, how much more do

Christians surrounded by modern technology? While preachers often use our Lord's actions to demonstrate the importance of prayer, they sometimes neglect where he chose to pray, often hiking up mountains to enjoy the solitude of nature.

When all other voices are drowned out, the voice of God remains. Theodore Kuehler, a

Presbyterian pastor in Brooklyn during the Industrial Revolution, expressed the need for Christians to plan these kind of mountaintop experiences for themselves in the light of city life.

He asked, can Christian dwellers in the cities and the towns discover no time or places for meditation, for prayer, for spiritual reading, for their

Bibles, or for heart converse with their Savior? He concluded, yes, they may, if they will resolutely determine so.

Then he gave examples of businessmen with busy schedules who managed to infuse this contemplation rhythm into their busy lives.

And this is the challenge I think Christians today must continue to solve as technology changes and distraction increases.

19th century American painter Thomas Cole spent much time contemplating the

American landscape from his home in New York between the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains. This is actually not far from where I live.

Progress made its mark, though, during his life. Lumberjacks, tanners, and railroad workers penetrated the

Hudson Valley, motivating him to preserve nature's sublimity in its pure form through art. Christianity appears in many of his writings and paintings.

In a famous lecture on American scenery, Cole stated, it has not been in vain the good, the enlightened of all ages and nations have found pleasure and consolation in the beauty of the rural earth.

Prophets of old retired into the solitudes of nature to wait the inspiration of heaven.

It was on Mount Horeb that Elijah witnessed the mighty wind, the earthquake, and the fire and heard the still small voice.

That voice is yet heard among the mountains. St. John preached in the desert. The wilderness is yet a fitting place to speak to God.

Cole sensed a connection to God in nature and it frustrated him when others devalued this experience.

To pursue trivial entertainment in a scenic area was to Cole a desecration of the place where nature offered a feast of holier, higher enjoyment.

To appreciate a painting is to appreciate the painter who made it. Cole is considered one of the first American conservationists.

He knew human progress was necessary, but he did not want to see it destroy the sublimity of the wilderness.

Behind this were not musings of transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau to whom nature was an abstract utopia capable of emancipating man from oppressive social attachment.

Cole believed people, including himself, were sinners in need of grace and took his responsibility to family, friends, and society seriously.

For those who haven't read Thoreau, I'll just briefly say Henry David Thoreau, he wrote a number of things.

Walden Pond was one of them. He had this idea that if you got out into nature and you couldn't see the government anymore, that the government didn't have any effect, that he had no obligations to society.

He didn't have to pay his taxes. He went to jail for it. Nothing's changed in that regard. This was his attraction to nature.

We can get away from society. He didn't realize he was born into a society with obligations, a family with obligations.

Nature did not free man from obligations. Rather, it helped him honor his obligations more freely.

Let me say that again. Nature did not free man from obligations. Rather, it helped him honor his obligations more freely.

The lessons of nature said something about God, not man. Nature pointed to a higher eternal existence beyond the temporal world of suffering and pain.

Cole wrote in his journal that every great artist works to God, forgetful of the whims, caprices, prejudices, and even the desires of men.

He labors to gratify his soul's devotion to the beautiful and true, which are centered in God.

Experiencing the sublime and beautiful in nature was in a certain way experiencing the hand of a good and powerful

God. Cole testified that those scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted affect the mind with a more deep -toned emotion than ought which the hand of man has touched.

Amid them, the consequent associations are of God the creator. They are his undefiled works, and the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.

Immersing ourselves in nature will not solve all of our problems. One only needs to consider primitive pagan societies.

According to scripture, they suppress what they know about God and worship his creation instead. Environmentalism commits the same kind of error.

They fail to approach creation with what John Calvin called a sober, docile mind and humble spirit.

Yet if the testimony of scripture is correct, that creation says to us something about our creator, then we would do well to put ourselves in places where we can listen to its voice.

When we walk into nature with eyes to see and ears to hear, our hearts are filled with the presence of something beyond us.

Something that reminds us of how small we are, but comforts us at the same time.

We realize the artificial world mediated through flat screens and earphones is nothing like the real world before us, and we are relieved.

We startle at the terror of thunder and sigh at the refreshment of a gentle breeze. Whether the sublime or the beautiful surrounds us, we know we are not alone.

There is a plan for nature, and there is a plan for us. Finally, our minds are set on the things above.

It is then we can sing in agreement with the lyrics of the old Swedish hymn, when through the woods and forest glades

I wander and hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees. When I look down from lofty mountain grandeur and see the brook and feel the gentle breeze, then sings my soul, my savior

God to thee, how great thou art, how great thou art. Thank you very much.