Glimpses Of Beauty - The One Year Salt and Light Devotional

Ecclesiastes 3:11-13

God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end. (Ecclesiastes 3:11)

TODAY’S THEOLOGIANS ARE masters of splitting hairs and parsing doctrine, creating something of a line-item theology that could rival any accountant’s ledger for specificity. Many see Scripture as a fence around a small plot of orthodoxy rather than a gateway into a wide-open field of meaning. But Scripture shows Jesus being not nearly so precise in his statements, which are often intentionally ambiguous. They point to larger things, ideas and beliefs that are bigger than the human mind and can only be evoked, not explained. In other words, they are beautiful.

That is an aspect of Christian thought that is so often missing today. From the trilogy of truth, love, and beauty, we have pursued truth above all, given lip service to love, and neglected beauty far too often. But theology and history should be told with some sense of artistry. There is ugliness in the human story, to be sure, but there are threads of meaning, too. We ought to have enough insight to bring them out, and to bring them out beautifully—just as God has done in Scripture and in revealing himself to human beings throughout history. He is far less interested in defining theology for his people than he is in captivating their hearts with his works.

Never reduce your faith to a set of propositions. It is so much more. It is a fascinatingly complex web of meaning woven throughout the human story. It is the artistry of a Creator who cannot be contained in finite minds. It is an echo of eternal and infinite things that you will never grasp fully but can nevertheless represent truly. Your beliefs do not define creation or salvation; they offer only a partial picture of both. Express yourself with that awareness; live with that humility; and always, always point toward the uncontainable majesty and artistry of your God.

{Lord, captivate me with the beauty of your work. Break me of the ways I have tried to define you too narrowly. Expand my vision so I can see how small it actually is, and let my words, heart, and life reflect your artistry. Amen.