Sermon Discussion Questions:
1. Since listening to the sermon, have there been any moments where you have seen beauty or felt wonder that you normally take for granted?
2. What often seems to deaden or dull your experience of enjoying God in everything? How do we grow in our delight of God in everything?
3. How does "worshipping Christ above all" provide the fuel for our missions and church unity?
4. "The essence of beauty is harmony and balance, unity in diversity." Do you agree? What are some examples of this in what we find beautiful?
5. "For as God is infinitely the greatest Being, so he is allowed to be infinitely the most beautiful and excellent: and all the beauty to be found throughout the whole creation is but the reflection of the diffused beams of that Being who hath an infinite fullness of brightness and glory; God...is the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty," (Jonathan Edwards). What does that mean? How would you explain it to someone? And what does that do to help us "chase the sunbeam back up to the sun"?
So, here we are, on the cusp of a New Year. We can look back over the last year and kind of evaluate how it went. Did you spend 2023 how you hoped you would? If not, then now is the time to look ahead to the next year. What do you want 2024 to look like? If the Lord permits us to live another year, what would you like to see happen in your life? Keep the garage organized? Become more disciplined with your time? Maybe you have some goals in mind already, but let me re-read a quote I gave last week in the sermon from the missionary Jim Elliot:
“Oh, the fullness, pleasure, sheer excitement of knowing God on earth. I care not if I never raise my voice again for Him, if only I may love Him, please Him,” (The Journals of Jim Elliot).
My guess is that if you could, you would like to see that kind of delight in God grow over the next year. Do you feel a sense of fullness, pleasure, and sheer excitement when you think about God? If not, how do you get there?
Our church’s mission statement is “Creating a covenant community that worships Christ above all.” That mission statement has three major parts to it: we want to create, which points us outward to those who do not yet know Christ or who claim to but are not walking obedience towards Him. We want to go to them and obey Christ’s command to make disciples of them. But as we invite someone into a relationship with Christ, what we are bringing them into? A covenant community. To be united to Christ is to be united to others who are also united to Christ, is to walk in meaningful fellowship with other believers who covenant together in a local church. But what is the point of the covenant community of a local church? To worship Christ above all.
We worship Christ above all other competitors and we worship Christ as supreme in everything we do. From what you do on a Sunday morning, to how you conduct yourself at work, to eating your dinner, to watching a TV show—we worship Jesus Christ in and through everything. But how do you do that? Charles Simeon, the 18th century Anglican preacher, wrote: “There are but two lessons for the Christian to learn: the one is, to enjoy God in everything; the other is, to enjoy everything in God.” That is how you worship Christ above all. If enjoying something and worshipping sound like two different things to you, well, then that is the whole point of this sermon.
I want to see our church grow over the next year in our outward emphasis on creating a covenant community, growing in our hospitality, evangelism, and love of neighbor.
But the only way we can do that without feeling like we are being pressured into doing something we don’t want to do is for us to have a bigger vision, a more satisfying vision of what it means to worship Christ above all.
4 Therefore, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that “an idol has no real existence,” and that “there is no God but one.” 5 For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”— 6 yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. – 1 Cor 8:4-6
Seeing Beauty
…yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. (1 Cor 8:6)
In the beginning, when God creates the heavens and the earth, we are repeatedly told that what God makes is “good”, in fact it is “very good” (Gen 1:31). The Hebrew word for “good” is tov, which can also mean “beautiful,” as in “…the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive (tov),” (Gen 6:2). One aspect of God’s pronouncement of the earth being “good” is that it is beautiful. God doesn’t merely make a functional evaluation (“it works”), but an aesthetic one (beautiful).
What is beauty? Beauty is comprised of harmony and balance; of unity amidst diversity. So, if you take a variety of different colors, shapes, and lines (diversity) and work them together into a cohesive picture (unity), you have a beautiful piece of art. The same is true with music, architecture, food, language, and society. As we read Genesis one we see this harmony and balance arise out of the diverse aspects of creation: light that shines amidst darkness is beautifully good (Gen 1:4); dry land separated from ocean waters is beautifully good (Gen 1:10); the vast plant life spreading across the land is beautifully good (Gen 1:12); the sun, moon, and stars shining in the sky is beautifully good (Gen 1:18); birds like the mighty eagle flying in the sky and great sea creatures like Leviathan swarming in the waters is beautifully good (Gen 1:21); the proud lion and mighty ox and creeping beetle roaming the land is beautifully good (Gen 1:25); and lastly, the pinnacle of creation: man and woman, the image bearers of God, are exceedingly beautifully good (Gen 1:31).
But, of course, the greatest display of unity and diversity, of harmony and balance, comes from God Himself. In God’s pronouncement of the creation of mankind He says: “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” (Gen 1:26). Which, upon first glance, doesn’t sound that strange…there must be a plurality of gods, right? But, the rest of the Bible affirms that there is indeed only one God. Paul himself touches on this in our passage where he affirms: “yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist,” (1 Cor 8:6). Here, Paul equates the Lord Jesus Christ with God the Father, while maintaining their distinct persons. If the Father creates all things through the Son, that must then mean that the Son is Himself not created. But to be not created is to then be eternal, to be God. God the Father created all things, and He did so through the Son, and by the Spirit (Gen 1:2). This is the classic doctrine of the trinity, which blows our minds as we think about it, but one underappreciated dimension of this display of unity amidst diversity is beauty.
Three-in-one, one-in-three, perfectly united, harmonized, and balanced. No exploitation, no subordination, no snubbing, no cold-heartedness. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit, have a full and complete delight in each other, a full and complete self-giving love and admiration for one another that makes the most rapturous of all relationships on earth look paltry in comparison. Here is what one theologian writes: “This divine relational diversity existing in harmonious unity is the core and genesis of all beauty,” (Steve DeWitt, Enjoying God in Everything, p. 20).
All beauty? All beauty. The reason that good stories, and roses, and sunsets, and poems, and sex, and a symphony is beautiful is because they all are the scattered reflections of the source of beauty, the triune Creator who has made this world good. He is the fountain, the foundation, the headwaters of all the beauty, all the joy in this world. “Splendor and majesty are before him; strength and beauty are in his sanctuary,” (Ps 96:5).
And as those made in God’s image, we too want to look around at the beauty of the created world and say: good! Beautiful! Just like God.
Ecclesiastes tells us: “[God] has made everything beautiful in its time,” (Eccl 3:11). Do you see this beauty? I wonder if evangelicals, like ourselves, can sometimes be suspicious of beauty. Aren’t we supposed to be living lives of self-denial, and austerity? Larry Norman asked us in the 70’s, “Why should the devil have all the good music?” We may ask a similar question: why should the world have all the good food, all the good art, all the good institutions, all the best experiences of beauty? What if the church was known for cultivating the most beautiful of all experiences? What if our delight and verve and joy in life was itself a kind of apologetic argument for the gospel? What if our parties were the best and our meals the best?
Are your God-given senses open to behold the beauty of God revealed in this world? Do you taste the goodness of God in your cup of morning coffee? Do you smell the goodness of God in a bouquet of flowers? Do you hear the goodness of God in the morning chirp of birds? Do feel the goodness of God in climbing into a warm, freshly made bed? Do you see the goodness of God in a sunrise or face of a child?
One of Satan’s most effective tools in deadening our delight in God is to make us blind to the glory and beauty of what is there. St. Augustine said, “Heaven and earth and everything in them on all sides tell me to love you, [God],” (Confessions).
“I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what Lewis calls their “divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic” existence.” (Clyde Kilby)
Feeling Wonder
Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory! (Isa 6:3)
The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. (Ps 19:1)
How does the glory of God fill the earth? There are several places in the Bible where the glory of God covering the earth is a request, as in, “God, please fill the earth with your glory!” (Ps 72:19; Hab 2:14). And we are often told to give glory to God in the Bible (Ps 29:2). So how can David in the psalms and the angels in Isaiah say that the sky above and the earth below already are full of God’s glory if it is something that we ask God for (“fill the earth with your glory”) and something we must do (“ascribe to God the glory due his name”)?
What is glory? Glory is the radiance of God’s beauty, value, and perfection. What a sunbeam is to the sun, glory is to God. A sunbeam is an emanation of the nature of the sun, so glory is an emanation of the nature of God. Actually, God’s glory is often revealed as a kind of luminescence, a dazzling light in the Bible (Luke 9:28-36). God’s glory is brilliant, dazzling, stunning, beautiful…because that is who God is. Now, when the seraphim in Isaiah cry out that the whole earth is full of the glory of God and David says that the heavens declare the glory of God they are proclaiming that the created world is a reflection of God’s beauty, value, power, and honor. It is there.
The problem: we don’t see it. That’s why we are commanded to give glory to God and the Bible looks forward to a day when everyone will. We are like people who don’t realize that the pebble we keep kicking on the street is actually a priceless diamond, like sleepy travelers who don’t realize the hillside we are reclining against is actually the side of a giant. There are countless opportunities for us to behold the glory of God in the world around us, but we just trudge along unaware of the wonders and glories before us.
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. (Rom 1:19-21)
The created world reveals God’s power and His nature. Do you enjoy this created world like an atheist? Do you drink wine, cook dinner, and take a hot shower as if all of these things do not reveal to you the goodness of God? Do you stare up at the night sky and see its beauty…and then let your mind stop there? The whole of the created world, according to Paul, is never meant to be an end in itself: it is showing you what God is like! Let’s just take the night sky for instance. There are estimated to be around 200 billion galaxies in the universe. An average galaxy contains about two hundred billion stars. The total number of stars in all of the observable galaxies is a staggering forty to fifty billion trillion. A mind boggling number. “A helpful illustration is that if each star were a dime, the pile of dimes would be as tall as a 110-story skyscraper and cover the entire North American continent. Wow. The universe is big. Why? To say something to us about the God who made it—He is bigger,” (Steve Dewitt, Enjoying God in Everything, p. 36).
I recently saw a video that explained how scientists are using a complicated series of lasers to replicate the forces of pressure we find at the core of the earth. They put some speck of a material sandwiched between two diamond plates, and when the laser hits the diamond there is a chemical reaction that creates a shockwave of pressure that is so powerful that it can create enough force to cause nuclear fusion, the same source of energy that powers the sun. If it can be improved, then we have solved the problem of renewable energy. But here is what I thought of as I saw that: “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out,” (Prov 25:2). God knows how nuclear fusion works. He has done it 200 billion times 200 billion throughout the universe. The infinitely perfect knowledge of God makes all of the top scientists and Nobel laureates and professors look like pre-schoolers. But, it is also astonishing that God as made human beings with the capacities for inquiry, for experimentation, for science to search out what God has hidden in the creation. If human beings can do this, and we are made in God’s image, then what must God be like?
“Gratitude exclaims, very properly, ‘How good of God to give me this.’ Adoration says, ‘What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!’ One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun,” (C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcom).
Giving Worship
“…yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist,” (1 Cor 8:6)
“In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God,” (2 Cor 4:4)
Satan is actively at work to blind us from the fountain of all beauty: Jesus Christ. We are made in God’s image; Jesus is God’s image. Jesus Christ is the perfect disclosure of God’s character and nature. And Satan does not want you to see Him, so he blinds you. You don’t see the power of God revealed in creation, you don’t hear the beauty of Christ in the preaching of the gospel. What is the gospel? The Son of God has come down and given Himself up, died for our sins, and abolished death through His resurrection so that now by faith we can be reconciled to God. But, because of the deadening work of Satan, that’s just noise. But then, God overcomes Satan’s blinding work:
“For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ,” (2 Cor 4:6). At some point in your life, God turned a light on, and what you saw, even if you struggled to articulate what it was, was the beauty of Jesus Christ given for you.
Commune with God
“One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple,” (Ps 27:4)
“Give me a man in love; he knows what I mean. Give me a man who yearns. Give me one who is hungry. Give me one far away in the desert, who is thirsty and sighs for the spring of the eternal country. Give me that sort of man. He knows what I mean about sovereign joy. But if I speak to a cold man, he just does not know what I am talking about,” (Augustine).
The man in love does anything to see His beloved. A hungry man does whatever it takes to get food. What if you are the cold man? Pray, pray, pray. Feast on God’s Word, put yourself under the waterfall of God’s means of grace, and ask God to reveal Himself to you. “Spiritual disciplines are not about you making yourself more precious to God, they are about making God more precious to you,” (Matt Smethurst).
Our pleasure and our duty
Though opposite before
Once we have seen His beauty
Are joined to part no more.
- John Newton
Enjoy God in Everything
Let’s say that you do a quiet time regularly, let’s say for 20 minutes a day. Let’s say that you also come to church each week, and even come to discipleship class, and even attend a small group once a week. Add all of that up and you have about 8 hours a week of overt spiritual intake. But if you follow the more typical American pattern for church attendance and Bible reading, then those 8 hours drop down to just less than an hour a week.
Now, let’s do some more math. Let’s say that you are a typical American in other content consumption patterns. That would mean that every week you consume…
27 hours of music
17.5 hours of television (either cable or streaming)
17.5 hours of social media
9 hours of listening to podcasts
5.3 hours of watching YouTube
4 hours of video games
2.3 hours of reading
So, if you are getting about 7 hours of sleep a night, then for the remaining 119 waking hours you have in a week, you are spending 82.5 of those hours consuming content.
So, even if you are at the high end of the 8 hours a week scale, it just pales in comparison to the 82.5. Now, if that seems way off for you, then maybe do some math yourself and think about what your own patterns look like. But, more than likely, most of us would admit that our balance of the kind of content we are intaking is not lopsided towards being too spiritual. So what are we to do?
Does God intend for us to just read our Bibles and listen to sermons for 80+ hours a week? No, I don’t think so.
Here is the question we have to ask: Can I enjoy God in this? Can I see glimmers of God’s beauty shining through this?
This is my father’s world / He shines in all that’s fair
Let me give you real life example: On Christmas day, our family went and saw the new Willy Wonka movie. It was the first time we took our youngest to a movie and we weren’t sure how it was going to go. He kind of puttered around the theater for a bit and after he attempted to eat popcorn off the floor I went and bought a bag of popcorn and he sat on my lap for the rest of the movie. And as I sat there, here were the waves of gratitude that came over me: This is a great movie, great music, great story. God, thank you for making people with the creativity and talent to create something like this. This is a comfortable chair with a good view. God thank you for giving our city a movie theater like this, thank you for giving my family the means to go out to a movie. This is a wonderful child cuddling next to me, munching popcorn. He won’t always be able to sit on my lap, he likely won’t always want to hang out with me. God, thank you for this time, thank you for my family, thank you for my wife. And God, if these temporal gifts are this good…what will eternity be like with you, the fountain of joy which these lesser joys point to?
I walked out of that theater with my heart just full to the brim in joy and delight in what God has given. I didn’t do a Bible study or go home and write a theological analysis of the worldview behind the movie. I just received from God’s hand the gift He had given, and followed the sunbeam back up to the sun.
