We had a giant python at our church for our safari series.  We were learning lessons God had for those who looked for Him in His creation.

Sparrows Know God Watches Over Them.

Matthew 6: 24 “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. 25 “Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on.  Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?

God has placed incredible care and concern over the animals…   God knows if even one sparrow falls to the ground.  God attends the funerals of birds.  Jesus tells us that our biggest issues with worry, are actually a lack of knowing what the birds know… They know God watches over them.

Now, you may not even know if you believe God made the world.  Years of Evolutionary teaching in college or medical school may have taught you that God didn’t take care of the origins, let alone the present.   Dr Jobe Martin felt that way.  He was a biology major, and Dentist who got out of the air force and even worked aboard  Air Force where he was the dentist for the Presidential flight crew of Air Force One, he established a private dental practice at NASA in Houston.   He began his scientific career as a dentist, and a believer in Darwinian evolution, as he had been taught in numerous courses in high school, undergraduate school, and dental school.  Some of his Christian students at the Baylor College of Dentistry challenged him to prove to them that evolution was a correct, complete and accurate explanation for the origin of the earth and all of its abundance of unique life forms.  As he began to relook at the evidence and question this assumption, he began to see many things that challenged his belief that God was not necessary for life (then and now)

Everyone talks to themselves.  We play out worst case scenarios, or we hope for the best. We have fantasy conversations where we say such and such to a person we are mad at, then they say such and such, and then we say…   On and on, we worry, we talk to ourselves, we try to control the future, the unknown with worry.   But the birds know something we don’t… God made them and watches over them.       Another person who went through this journey of understanding how God is in control, despite her questions was Anne Rice.

Anne Rice wrote the Vampire Chronicles like “INterview with a Vampire”.  Her Erotic Vampire movies became legendary and made her a billionaire , but she had questions.  Wonderings about God and the Bible, and Jesus… She was an investigative journalist and researcher and began to explore the Bible and it’s claims….  Many had told her that the Bible was written years, many hundreds of years after the events which is why so many wild stories had crept in… She read the Gospels and noted that none of them even mentioned the destruction of the temple in 70 AD.  How could they not mention this… Unless they had been written before it happened…. This placed them between 33 and 70 AD, well within the timeframe of the eyewitnesses.    Her intellectual journey brought her to Christ and eventually even overwhelmed her questions…  She had many questions, doubts, and things in the world she was living for… but  came to a moment of living for someone else…  She wrote in her confessions” “In the moment of surrender, I let go of all the theological or social questions which had kept me from Him for countless years. I simply let them go. There was the sense, profound and wordless, that if He knew everything I did not have to know everything, and that, in seeking to know everything, I’d been, all of my life, missing the entire point. No social paradox, no historic disaster, no hideous record of injustice or misery should keep me from Him. No question of Scriptural integrity, no torment over the fate of this or that atheist or gay friend, no worry for those condemned and ostracized by my church or any other church should stand between me and Him….I didn’t have to know how He was going to save the unlettered and the unbaptized, or how He would redeem the conscientious heathen who had never spoken His name. I didn’t have to know how my gay friends would find their way to Redemption or how my hardworking secular humanist friends could or would receive the power of His Saving Grace. I didn’t have to know why good people suffered agony or died in pain. He knew. And it was his knowing that overwhelmed me…”

 Anne Rice, Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession

I love that line, “It was his knowing that overwhelmed me.”  That’s what happens to worry and doubt as we understand God is in control.

For more information, check out www.godonomics.com