DWYL pt. 1

It's been 5 weeks of daily lessons since we started our "Dont Waste Your Life" book study. This week actually marks the half way point. It's been so good that after each lesson I honestly feel that if it had ended during the previous week I'd be more than satisfied with what I'd learned. 

I would love to share all of it with you, and had planned on blogging after each week, however haven't had the time.  For now I'd like to fill you in on some things that have really struck a chord with me. Although I could write a ton about the first 5 chapters there have been 2 concepts in particular that I couldn't wait to share. In fact they're so good I'll quote right out of the book.

What does it mean to glorify God?

It may get a dangerous twist if we are not careful. Glorify is like the word beautify. But beautify usually means "make something more beautiful than it is", improve it's beauty. That is emphatically not what we mean by glorify in relation to God. God cannot be more glorious or more beautiful than he is. He cannot be improved, "nor is he served by human hands, as though h needed anything"(Acts 17:25). Glorify does not mean add more glory to God. 

It is more like the word magnify.  But here too we can go wrong. Magnify has two distinct meanings. In relation to God, one is worship and one is wickedness. You can magnify like a telescope or like a microscope. When you magnify like a microscope, you make something tiny look bigger than it is. A dust mite can look like a monster. Pretending to magnify God like that is wickedness. But when you magnify like a telescope, you make something unimaginably great look like what it really is. With the Hubble Space Telescope, pinprick galaxies in the sky are revealed for the billion-star giants that they are. Magnifying God like that is worship.

We waste our lives when we do not pray and think and dream and plan and work toward magnifying God in all spheres of life. God created us for this: to live our lives in a way that makes Him look more like the greatness and the beauty and the infinite worth that He really is. In the night sky of this world God appears to most people, if at all, like a pinprick of light in a heaven of darkness. But He created us and called us to make Him look like what He really is. This is what it means to be created in the image of God. We are meant to image forth in the world what He is really like.

All I could say after reading this was "wow". I'm completely blown away by this simple yet profound illustration of truth.  How about you? Have you always viewed glorifying/magnifying God this way? I don't think I'd thought enough about it at all, but honestly as I do so now I've definitely had my eyes opened by this contrast.

Another concept that really hit home had to do with the fact that all we are is credited to the glory of God. Even our salvation is for His glory. The author submits that for most people this isn't the best of news. They do not feel loved when they are told that God created them for His glory. They feel used. The next few pages in the book attempted to re-focus the view of those who may feel this way, by exposing the root of their distortion --- a false definition of love. And again I quote:

What is love?

For most people, to be loved is to be made much of. Almost everything in our Western culture serves this distortion of love. We are taught in a thousand ways that love means increasing someone's self-esteem. Love is helping someone feel good about themselves. Love is giving someone a mirror and helping him like what he sees.

This is not what the Bible means by the love of God. Love is doing what is best for someone. But making self the object of our highest affections is not best for us. It is, in fact, a lethal distraction. We were made to see and savor God --and savoring Him, to be supremely satisfied, and thus spread in all the world the worth of his presence. Not to show people the all-satisfying God is not to love them. To make them feel good about themselves when they were made to feel good about seeing God is like taking someone to Alps and locking them in a room full of mirrors.

The really wonderful moments of joy in this world are not the moments of self-satisfaction, but self-forgetfulness. Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and contemplating your own greatness is pathological! At such moments we are made for a magnificent joy that comes outside ourselves. And each of these rare and precious moments in life [beside the canyon, before the Alps, under the stars] is an echo of a far greater excellence, namely, the glory of God. That is why the Bible says: the heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork" (Psalm 19:1).

God made man small and the universe big to say something about Himself, not man. And he says it for us to learn and enjoy--namely, that He is infinitely great and powerful and wise and beautiful. The more The Hubble Telescope sends back to us about the unfathomable depths of space, the more we should stand in awe of God. The disproportion between us and the universe is a parable about the disproportion between us and God.

Now think what this means for God's love. How shall God love us? Mere logic could give us the answer: God loves us best by giving us the best to enjoy forever, namely Himself, for He is best. But we are not dependent on logic alone. The Bible makes this clear in John 3:16. God loves us by giving us eternal life at the cost of His Son, Jesus Christ. But what is eternal life? Is it eternal self esteem? Is it a heaven full of mirrors? Or snowboards, or golf links, or black-eyed virgins?

No. Jesus tells us what he meant: "And this is eternal life, that they know you the only one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you've sent"(John 17:3). Eternal life is to know God and his Son, Jesus Christ.  No   thing can satisfy the soul. The soul was made to stand in awe of a Person --the only person worthy of awe. All life's heroes are shadows of Christ. We love to admire their excellence. How much more will we be satisfied by the one Person who conceived all excellence and embodies all skill, all talent, all strength and brilliance and savvy and goodness. God loves us by liberating us from the bondage of self so that we can enjoy knowing and admiring Him forever.

So here is the question to test whether you have been sucked into this world's distortion of love: Would you feel more loved by God if he made much of you, or if he liberated you from the bondage of self-regard, at great cost to himself, so that you enjoy making much of him forever? When our answer is the latter then we see that in creating us for His glory, He is creating us for our highest joy. He is most satisfied in us when we are most satisfied in him.

God is the one being in the universe for whom self-exaltation is the most loving act. Anyone else who exalts himself distracts us from what we need, namely, God. But if God exalts Himself, he calls attention to the very thing we need most for our joy.

If great paintings could talk, and they saw you walking through the gallery staring at the floor, they would cry out, "Look! Look at me. I am the reason you are here." And when you look and exult in the beauty of the paintings with those around you, your joy would be full. You would not complain that the paintings should have kept quiet. They rescued you from wasting your visit. In the same way no child complains, "I am being used" when his father delights to make the child happy with his own presence.

And again I say --wow! I could write a book about how the unpacking of this truth has my heart burning within me with a passion for seeing and savoring God's glory. For now I'll take a break from the writing. I'd like to hear from you.

Leave a comment re: how these ideas have challenged or impacted you; what you think about the metaphoric comparison between the microscope and telescope, and how you feel about being created to only be satisfied by God's glory ---namely in Christ. I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

grace & peace

da' sciple