Comfort Through Creation: Birds and Flowers

This post is the seventh in a series deriving from the “Comfort Through Creation” seminar that took place at Rocky Creek in March 2025. If you’d like to receive the PDF and audio version of that seminar, you may email allen@rockycreek.church.

We’ve been looking at how Scripture and the world around us give evidence of God’s care to us via his creation. If you’ve followed each step of the way, we’ve looked at astronomy, biographies, literature, biblical metaphor, the Psalms, and Old Testament temple imagery as our means of deepening our ability to use our five senses to engage with our Maker. This post will look at another example from the Bible in which creation is leveraged to reveal God’s good character and care for his people.

I’m referring to part of the Sermon on the Mount, spoken by Jesus himself. Matthew 6:25-34 records perhaps the most beloved portion of this sermon, in which Jesus utilizes everyday realities–birds and lilies–to drive home the wonder of the Father’s care. Jesus is eager to make this glorious news as real and tangible as possible. Andrew Wilson helps us more richly pick up on what Jesus is doing:

“Consider the lilies, [Jesus] says. Think about them. Stare at them. Smell them. Get their pollen on your shirt if needed. Now, what do you notice? They don’t do much, do they? They just sit there, unstressed and unhurried, without toiling or spinning. Their beauty is incomparable, but it isn’t earned, it is given. They don’t even last very long….If God dresses them like that, as temporary and disposable as they are, then he’ll dress you too.”

John Piper piles on by saying, “[T]hese processes of providence in the earth’s plant life is not only for the purpose of marveling, or for aesthetic comparisons…but it is also for the purpose of buttressing our faith in the providential care of our heavenly Father….God intends for us to look at flowers and be encouraged and strengthened….” In other words, the birds and the flowers (shorthand for the created order all around us) are not only aesthetically pleasing–true as that is–but also, more importantly, become the tactile and perceivable reminders we need that our God cares for his world and for us.

Ask yourself, “What am I prone to worry about? What tends to rob me of joy?” Then look at some flowers, and consider that the God who tenderly cares for them cares far more for you. This isn’t meant to make anxiety go away, per se, but flowers can be God’s kind, gentle, and tangible way of reminding you of his care for you in the midst of your anxiety.

One more quote offers us more of the spiritual ammunition and defense we need to shift our gaze from life’s troubles to God’s creation and ultimately to God himself:

“Jesus again shows the way to experience the world under the continual care of the Father. His teaching pulsates with observations about his Father’s attentiveness to his created world. When we open our eyes to the birds who don’t sow or reap or gather into barns because our Father feeds them (Jesus knew Psalm 104!), not a single one falling to the ground apart from his oversight, we can trust that he cares for us far more (Matt. 6:26; 10:29, 31). When we see that the lilies of the field neither toil nor spin, yet are clothed in splendor, we can trust that our Father will provide for our needs without fail (Matt. 6:28-30). When we daily watch the sun rise and the rain fall on the evil and the good, we are reminded that our Father is merciful and we should join him in this way of mercy (Matt. 5:45). Jesus witnesses divine goodness in vines and mustard seeds and leaven and sheep and pearls and wind and water and bread and wine.”