My Devotionals

In this short series, we’ve seen that God works and called us to work on his behalf. But why? To what end? How exactly does our work matter to God?

There are many answers to that question. Our work is part of how God sanctifies us, how he meets the needs of others, and one of the primary ways we win the respect of non-believers. But perhaps most foundationally, our work matters because it is part of how we show the world what God is like.

As we saw last week, God created us in his “image” (see Genesis 1:26). And what’s the point of an image? “The point of an image is to image,” John Piper says bluntly. “Images are erected to display the original. Point to the original. Glorify the original. God made humans in his image so that the world would be filled with reflectors of God. Images of God. Seven billion statues of...

After the first six days of creation, the earth was still largely empty. As I say in my new children’s book, The Creator in You, “while in six days God created a lot, there are so many things that He simply did not— like bridges and baseballs, sandcastles and s’mores. God asked us to create and fill the planet with more.”

That’s what we see in today’s passage. God never intended for Eden to remain a garden. He commissioned human beings to “rule” over it. To “fill the earth and subdue it.” To work the garden and turn it into something far more.

There’s a beautiful detail in the second chapter of Scripture that helps make this clear. Genesis 2:10-12...

As we’ve seen over the past two weeks, we worship a God who works! And next week, we’ll see that God has created us to work in partnership with him. 

But before we look too closely at God’s call for us to create, we need to remember this: Before God calls us to do a single thing, he calls us to be his child. 1 John 3:1 says, “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!”

Before we were given a task, we were given an identity—children created “in the image of God” (see Genesis 1:27)—a scene wonderfully reimagined by Jonathan David, the illustrator of The Creator in You.

And there was clearly a relationship between God and human beings before he put them to work in the Garden of Eden. There was love and...

Last week, we worshiped God for the fact that he works. But now we must make one thing clear: God works in ways that are totally unlike the way you and I work today.

We worship the God who simply “calls into being things that were not” (Romans 4:17). As I say in my children’s book, The Creator in You, “With just a few words, He made creatures appear, like polar bears, penguins, alpacas, and deer.”

My kids love pretending to create animals and magical snow with their words, but so far, their play hasn’t turned into reality. You know why? Because only God can create out of nothing (see...

I begin my new children’s book by saying, “In the very beginning, a long time ago, God created the world so that we would all know that He Himself is a working God, though you might think that sounds just a little bit odd.”

Why is it odd to think of God “working”? After all, Jesus worked and made it clear that the “Father is always at his work to this very day” (see John 5:17). 

I think it sounds odd because we rarely if ever preach or sing about God’s working character. We talk so much about God’s love, holiness, and mercy, that we forget that the first thing he wanted us to know about him is that he is a God who creates—a God who makes things (see Genesis 1:1)!

This is unique in the history of world religions. Every other origin story says the...