If you turned your back, they'd die in a minute — Take back your Spirit and they die, revert to original mud; Send out your Spirit and they spring to life — the whole countryside in bloom and blossom. (MSG)

To understand this verse, we need to quickly run through the rest of the chapter. David is writing about the beautiful nature he sees; he starts in the heavens and works his way down to the depths of the sea. In my head, I see David sitting in a field, just watching nature.  

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What comes to mind is one of my favorite places, Prince William Sound. Picture this: you are sitting out on the back of a boat. It’s a bluebird, sunny day, and you can feel the warmth cut through you right to your bones. It’s almost too warm, but the slight ocean breeze keeps you more comfortable than you have been in a long time. The sun is dancing on the bluest water you have ever seen. The islands all around shoot up from the dazzling blue with lush green forest, frosted with blazing white snowcaps.  

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I completely get where David is coming from. A.W Tozer said this: “God dwells in His creation and is everywhere indivisibly present in all his works. He is transcendent above all his works even while he is immanent within them.” When you sit in nature, you see the nature of God.

And Davis sees all the creation, all the beauty, and he sees how it all emanates from the Spirit. David is basically saying look at all this stuff, look at the rhythms of nature, look at how harmonious this is, and without the Spirit flowing through it, it all perishes.

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When I’m out in nature I can feel the Spirit, too. Just like sitting on the back of the boat floating in the Prince William Sounds’ wilderness, I feel his presence. The Spirit breathes life throughout nature. Yet somehow, what we feel and see in God's creation, we forget holds true for us.  

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David spends all the time painting the picture, like the image of the Price William Sound, showing beauty and God’s nature. But somehow, we often don’t see it.  A.W Tozer says, “Because we have shut out the Holy Spirit in so many ways, we are stumbling along as though we are spiritually blindfolded.” We stumble through our lives missing the beautiful, powerful nature of the Holy Spirit.  

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Our sinful nature pushes against the Spirit. I find myself doing this very thing, even when I’m immersed in his presence. Mankind looks for any way to do life on our own, and we can blind ourselves to the power the Spirit brings. I say that we, like David, need to be intentional about looking for where he is moving, to sit in God’s nature and just experience the power of the Spirit.

Abba, fill us with your life-giving Spirit; give us eyes to see where you are moving. Make it blatantly obvious where your Spirit is moving today. Amen.