For the last few years, my sister and I have been sewing reusable wrapping. We buy lovely cotton cloth in Christmas prints, hem the material, tie with ribbon, and reuse the fabrics every year. They look beautiful under the tree — and it feels good to celebrate Christmas in a way that doesn’t add to the planet’s waste.
But did you know that Christmas itself is the ultimate reason to care for the earth? Not the commercial one, with glitter and excess, but the real one... “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1v14).
God's creation is good, and powerfully declares His glory. The earth is breathtakingly beautiful... but also painfully broken. It suffers from disease, decay and violence. Humans exploit and harm each other — and even nature itself can be cruel, as any David Attenborough documentary shows.
According to the Bible, the world went wrong when humans turned away from the Creator. Our rebellion fractured everything.
The American environmental lawyer Gus Speth once put it like this: “I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that 30 years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and we need a spiritual and cultural transformation to deal with them.”
That’s exactly what Christmas is about. When the Word became flesh, God didn’t stand apart from a world poisoned by human greed. He came to transform it — starting with the human heart.
Jesus' resurrection was the beginning of a new creation, the promise that God will one day restore everything — not abandon the earth, but renew it. As Colossians 1v20 says, God’s purpose is “to reconcile to himself all things.”
Our forever home, then, is not a distant, disembodied place. It’s the world remade: no decay, no destruction, no death. The resurrection is the blueprint of that future.
The ultimate reason to care
The Christmas story calls for a response. The world’s brokenness began with human rebellion — and healing begins when we turn back to God.
Each of us must decide: will we continue in selfishness and apathy, or trust the One who came to restore everything?
At Christmas, the Creator became flesh and blood to heal his broken world. And that means our hope — for people, for the planet, and for eternity — begins in Bethlehem.
Explore further
- Romans 8v18–21
- Colossians 1v15–23
- Recommended reading: Creation Care: A Biblical Theology of the Natural World by Douglas J. Moo and Jonathan A. Moo (Zondervan, 2018)
A national briefing
The tail-end of last year saw over 1,200 politicians and leaders from business, faith, culture, sport and the media gather …