January 24, 2024 • 48 mins
Join Pastor Dan Sinkhorn and Adrienne Tarullo in this riveting episode of the Echo Podcast, as they delve into the transcendent beauty of God's essence. They draw from Isaac's enlightening vision, challenging listeners to contemplate the experiences and emotions within God's realm. Savour Pastor Dan's insights on our encounters with God and reflect on the paradox of comprehending Jesus' boundless love amid our sins and brokenness.
Embark on a transformative journey exploring the symbolism of Isaiah's redemption and the magnificence of heaven's unmatched glory. Contemplate the divine purpose laid out by Frank Viola and the extraordinary love God has for His Son. Let the narrative of Adam's creation, conceived to be the perfect companion for Christ, inspire you with a renewed perspective of our spiritual beauty in God's eyes.
Embrace the mystery and captivating allure that encompasses God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Grasp an understanding of God's foresight and His grand orchestration of redemption, centered around the Son of Man. Conclusively, ruminate on the biblical interpretation of 'beauty', leading towards the affirmation of Christ’s profound and powerful love.
The podcast delves into the understanding of beauty from a Christian perspective, ranging from societal norms to spiritual values. The conversation touches base on aspects like physical allure, ancient civilizations, surgeries, and societal vanity that distort our perceptions of beauty. It highlights the Judeo-Christian worldview that redefines beauty, encompassing wisdom, humility, old age, and vulnerabilities.
The episode wraps up with an in-depth look at the pivotal role beauty plays in our lives, its perceptions, and the impact on our relationship with God. Joined by our guest, who shares the actions of the Holy Spirit in his church, the conversation prompts you to surrender self-will, care for the underprivileged, and lean on God's grace.
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Episode Transcript
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Music.
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Welcome to the Echo Podcast, where we discuss how our hearts and minds can be
an echo of God's heart and mind and what that even means in this world.
We're Pastor Dan Sinkhorn and Adrienne Tarullo from Shiloh Church of Jasper, Indiana.
And in last week's sermon, Pastor Dan, you,
talked about several things, but I think the main thing that stood out to me
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was just thinking about the true essence and the true beauty of who God is.
And so, we heard this story from Isaiah where Isaiah basically gets this insider's
view of God and heavenly hosts or angels,
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and he just has this really enlightening, really beautiful experience.
And so, I think before we kind of dive right in, And I'd like for the listeners
to think about whenever you are in God's realm, or say, if you are to enter into God's realm,
what do you think it would be like?
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What do you think it would look like? How do you think you would feel?
What would be going on in your mind? Would you be totally awestruck?
Would you walk around thinking, well, finally?
What would that be like for
you and then pastor dan i want
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you to tell me the story of how it went for isaiah and i
think we'll start there yeah well so i was just thinking about what you said
and the question that you posed to the listeners and i will tell about isaiah
but i think that that I can't help responding in just one small way to that scenario.
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Whatever you think you'll do when you're in the presence of God, it won't happen.
It won't be like anything you can imagine.
I mean, that's the wonderful Mercy Me song, right? I can only imagine. Yeah. It's beautiful.
Absolutely beautiful song. and what he's saying is i can only imagine what it
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will be like and i'm pretty sure,
that that's not informed well enough to imagine accurately it's not a discredit
to the song it's just a way of saying you know i'm pretty sure i i will tell
you that whenever i think about such things personally. I'm talking about myself here.
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By the way, I'm looking at this picture on the other side of you there that I've loved for years.
It's a person coming into Jesus' throne room, and he's walked the red carpet to the master's throne,
and the master has fallen to the floor to meet him and hug all over him,
and he's got a crown and a robe.
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There's broken chains. It's one of those things you could just look at it indefinitely
and just study it forever.
And it's called Safely Home, and it's by Dan Diaccini, I think his name is.
I'm probably saying his name wrong because I'm going from memory.
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But anyway, he makes these beautiful paintings like that.
And see, we can only imagine. But I get the distinct feeling from the Lord that
he's saying, it's all right, go ahead.
It won't matter whether you got it right or wrong, because just imagining it is fine.
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So just go ahead, listen, or imagine like Adrian asked you to.
For me, I always get weepy when I think about being in the presence of Jesus.
It doesn't matter what it looks like. Like, it's just the idea of,
like, when I start thinking about him looking me in the eye, and it's just he and me.
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He can do that. I don't know how he does it, but he can do that.
And I can imagine it. And you know from being
in my office where we record this that I have a
handful of pictures of Jesus around the room because I like thinking about being
with him and embracing him and feeling the entirety of his love without all
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my sin and all my brokenness and all my history.
Because one of the things that's really going to come out in this next week's
message, which is kind of part two from the one we're talking about is that
not only is the Lord beautiful,
but he makes you beautiful in his eyes.
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And most of us just can't accept that. We can't see ourselves the way he sees us. And,
To imagine him seeing us the way we really are and maybe revealing what we really
are like in his eyes could be,
well, if you weren't already outside this weak human shell that we live in, you'd die.
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If you weren't already dead, you'd die because you couldn't handle it.
You know, and I think that for some of us, seeing the person that we have the
potential to be will be very hard.
And in a way, that's a form of judgment.
And the Bible tells us that. See, I also believe, I'm doing it now,
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I guess, that thing I always do.
I also believe that when the Bible speaks of certain things,
we have a tendency to imagine too much and blow them into a proportion that
isn't suited to what we're reading.
In other words, if the Bible tells us that certain things are inevitable,
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we have a tendency to overthink them and try to humanize them and secularize them.
One that I spent years studying was a passage that said that the sins of the
Father would be visited on the third and fourth generation. And I thought, well, that's not fair.
But then the older I got, the more I realized, well, he's just saying how things generally work.
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It isn't necessarily a curse. It's just a statement of the way things are.
If a father's really screwed up, then it's probably going to take three or four
generations of effort to undo the damage and to start a new paradigm.
And when I realized that some 35 years ago, I started praying for that to happen.
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I said, Lord, then let it be me. And I didn't even have children then.
I just said, when I'm a father, let it be me.
Let me be the last of my generation or that generation's seed, you know?
So, getting back to heaven and Jesus and the throne room of God,
because you asked me what happened to Isaiah, but I went off on a tangent as I want to do.
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Because I just started imagining myself fulfilling the assignment you just gave.
And the thing is, I've been doing that assignment a long time.
I have stories I wrote from my creative writing class when I was a junior in
high school that imagined such things.
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That was a little while ago. Yeah. 45 years I was just thinking,
just this afternoon, I was a junior in high school.
That's kind of inconceivable to me.
I'm not that old. Surely I'm not that old.
So Isaiah writes that he is experiencing the throne room of God,
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and he's describing everything And the train of his robe fills the temple with glory.
And it's just, this scene is so brilliant with glory and light and inconceivable beauty.
And he notices that even the angels are covering their mouths and their eyes
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and things as if they have to filter the glory of God in order to withstand it.
And then he says, oh, my goodness, I am not supposed to be here.
If the angels are being cautious, then surely I should be cautious.
And then one of the angels comes to him and says, hey, hold it.
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There's a simple solution for
your problem. Of course, you can't solve the problem, but the Lord can.
And so he takes this burning coal from the altar.
And in this instance, and you don't have to stretch your imagination much to
understand the meaning,
this is a wonderful sort of prophetic image of what Christ is going to do,
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because Christ is the sacrifice on the altar that takes away our sin, right?
And altars are symbolic of that and a sign of his sacrifice for our sake.
And so the altar bears a hot, burning cold that when the angel touches it,
and maybe it wasn't an angel at all.
Maybe it was the sun, you know, and he touches it to Isaiah's lips and he says,
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now you are holy enough to be here.
And so it's a real clear picture of how Isaiah recognizes how completely unworthy he is to be there.
And then he recognizes that the only thing that makes him worthy to be in God's
throne room, gazing upon the glory of God.
And I don't know how to say that even and give it justice.
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These are incredible images, and there's no parallel that I can give to, you know.
If you've seen something that was so glorious and beautiful that you were all
struck into silence, it was prettier than that.
I told the story in church on Sunday about how I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains
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with my friend back in the 1980s. And we were walking high in the Cascades, I mean really high.
And we were on the Pacific Crest Trail, and we'd walk for several hours from our car.
Down because we'd gone to a pass to park and and
up in the pass well you're going to go down one way or
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down the other there's no higher to go
than pass and so apart from climbing a mountain and so we got on the trail that
this pass and we started down into the forest and these forests are the pacific
northwest forest man there there are millions of trees and they're all trees
that that are averaging about 20 feet in diameter and 200 feet tall.
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And when the wind blows in the tops of these trees, it roars. It's just incredible.
And then you get down along a stream bed, and there's these cold mountain rivers
flowing down through the cracks and the rocks, and they're roaring.
And it's just an overwhelming sensation. And
then we finally come out of the darkness of this relative
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darkness of this this deep forest
and we step into a meadow on the side of
the mountain and i'm looking at purple flowers
and yellow flowers it's early spring there's still
old snow that's gathered in places where avalanches have once gone down and
there's there's this brilliant blue sky and puffy white clouds and there's white
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peaks up above me on one side and purple literally purple mountains across the valley on my other side.
And I'm looking at all of this and I'm just standing there with my chin laying
on my chest, just, ah, just overwhelmed by the magnificent beauty of all of this.
And my friend, who's just kind of a smart aleck by nature, I don't know why
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I would hang around with people like that.
Because it takes one to know one. My friend says after a few minutes, it's not that pretty.
Yes, it was. Yeah. It was that pretty. And you know what?
The glory of God, I still can't conceive of.
I've been gifted to see some of the most magnificent beauty this world has to
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offer. I really have. I've been so blessed.
I have been so blessed in my life to see some of the most beautiful things in
creation, but they're all tainted by sin.
You know, I joked on Sunday because our mutual friend is an airline pilot,
and he's a member of our congregation, and I said, and the scene was perfect
until Dave flew over in his Delta jet.
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Well, maybe not literally in that moment, but it would have happened eventually.
And I'm sure even when we climbed the mountain the next day and took in the
view from around 5,000 feet, I remember seeing airplanes, you know,
and it's like, it doesn't matter where you go.
The world is tainted with sin and there's dirt in the snow that came from the
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sky and it was probably exhaust dirt from those airplanes.
And it's just like, no matter how beautiful anything is in this world,
it doesn't even come close to the glory of God, to the beauty of God's throne
room, to the beauty of God's Son.
You see, I look at my children and I see beauty. And there are so many things
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I didn't understand about God until I became a father.
Until I became a dad, I did not understand how much you could love another person
to the point where it hurts.
I never could have grasped how much.
No matter what happens, when I look at them, I am in love with them, and they're beautiful.
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And it gives me just the slightest hint of what it must be like to be loved by God.
And I can't even imagine how much God loves the Son.
And so, Frank Viola's premise in not only the Insurgents book,
but in several of his his books.
He has this kind of theme that he writes about in all of his books.
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They're all built around this one thing he calls the divine purpose, right?
God's divine purpose. And God's divine purpose, as Frank defines it,
by the way, I recommend pretty much everything he wrote, but this particular
theme touched me deeply in a book called God's Favorite Place on earth.
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And his divine purpose is outlined by Frank as a desire, because of his incredible love for his son,
to create a perfect companion people for his son.
And the son returns the love so much much that their love creates and saves us.
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Like, like, so, so the premise that Frank gets at is that God loves the son
so much that he creates amidst the dark chaos that is the world ruled by Satan and his ilk.
He creates this island in the middle called Eden, and he creates in that place,
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Adam's race, and Adam's race is for Jesus, for Christ the Son.
He doesn't have a name at this point. You know, he's Christ the Son.
He's God's Son. And God loves the Son so much.
That he wants to create this perfect bride or companion for Christ, the Son.
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And then the Son has to reconcile the relationship between God and the descendants
of Adam because the descendants of Adam taint themselves with sin.
They were as beautiful as the mountains before the dirt, before the pollution.
They were more beautiful than that, and they sin. And so because of their sin,
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they're no longer worthy to
be in God's presence, and their unworthiness could be their destruction.
And God, at times, throughout the Bible, talks, especially in the Old Testament,
about how maybe it'd be better to just let them be destroyed and start over.
And maybe this time make them a little more sin-proof, and then someone.
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One, and we don't really know who, but it's like God's better nature,
as if God can have a better nature.
God's Son probably says, don't, Dad.
They'll be better because they'll choose to right themselves in your eyes.
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They'll be better because they'll decide.
That they want you, even if it costs them their sense of life and liberty and their flesh,
that they might actually come
out better because they had to embrace the solution to the problem of sin.
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And it's just a fascinating idea.
And it all comes back to the fact that there is this This heavenly Father who
is so passionately in love with the Son and with the highest order of beings in God's realm,
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which is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
And there's this love between them that is a community, and yet it's all in
one, and we don't understand how to explain it.
It's a beautiful mystery. You know, written mysteries aren't always a bad thing.
You know, mysteries are simply things we can't explain, but we know are true.
I don't know what the sun is made of.
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The scientists have speculated that it's a lot of hydrogen and stuff,
and they have tests that they can do to check their theories.
But, you know, until someone figures out how to go to get a little sample of
the sun and bring it back and put it under a microscope, no one's going to know
for sure. So it's a mystery.
And there are lots of mysteries in the world, and that's not bad,
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because mystery gives us room for God.
Mystery says that God can be a mystery, too, and that God could be the mystery
being who created all of this.
And to what end? Why did God create all of this?
And what was God thinking when God allowed the gates of Eden to be opened so
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that the enemy could come in and tempt the people?
Well, we can only guess at what God's thinking is, but what we do know is that
before the sin had really settled—,
God already announced that there would be a plan to destroy this consequence
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of sin in a way of redemption,
and it would be through the Son of Man, which is a figurative statement that
means God's Son born of the flesh.
And so it's like right there in Genesis, he's already telling you what the rest
of this book is going to reveal.
You know, like any good author, God has given you all the instruments,
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to implement all the elements that you need, that's what I mean to say,
at the beginning of the book so you can understand how the rest of this is going
to go and you can watch it unfold.
And the reason I'm just telling this story like this is because it's like,
you can't see the beauty without telling the story.
If you stand in the presence of God someday, and I hope you will,
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hope I will in good time, and not understand in whose presence you stand,
then you won't appreciate the magnificent grace and beauty.
So that was pretty much what the whole message was about Sunday.
It was just like, try, if you will, to wrap your mind around the real beauty of God,
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and then particularly to wrap your mind around the Son who takes all of his
radiant beauty and sort of puts it in a box called the body of a human being.
And it's as though that radiance and we have tons of, you know,
CGI special effects and everything.
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And we've had lots of movies and TV shows where we've attempted to,
to illustrate such things.
And, you know, I remember when I was a teenager, just in my late teens,
and a movie came out called Cocoon.
It was a good movie. It was a cool movie.
Well, basically, these aliens were these beautiful glowing creatures that glowed
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brilliantly, but they were wearing human skins.
And so they look like everybody else until a guy just happens to look through
a hole in the wall, you know, to watch one of them and watch is just in time
to see this alien unzip her human skin.
And suddenly it was glowing like light and brilliance and everything.
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And so we've experimented with these ideas in our imaginations for as long as
people have been around.
And, you know, the idea that contained within our shell is this incredible glory
that if we could release it from the flesh, it would be incalculably beautiful.
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And it's this, C.S. Lewis deals with it in one of my all-time favorite books
that I reference frequently on this radio program of ours.
I love The Great Divorce, and it's a book that kind of gives you a picture of
how people become way too comfortable in their skin, and they don't really want
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to try to imagine life outside of it.
And and of course it's a rhetorical question
it's it's about using your imagination to see if
you can figure out what being like christ
would be like and one of the things you figure out is is
that he's way more than his body can contain and we get a taste of that after
the resurrection because we begin to see him doing and being things that he
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didn't have the capacity for when he was confined to the flesh and bearing the weight of our sin.
And yet, even with that, he was able to do miracles. And he said,
if he wanted to, he could call down a legion of angels.
So, he had limitations when he was prior to his death and resurrection,
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but after his resurrection, the limitations are gone.
And so, we have in him a glimpse of what we can be.
And part of what we can be is beautiful.
Part of what we can be is beautiful, and it's inconceivable.
The question you have to ask yourself is, what is beauty? And that's what we're
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going to really deal with in the next week's message, is that beauty is something
to behold, like Isaiah saw in the throne room.
He's looking at this presence of God, and he's seeing this glorious beauty.
And when John visits the same throne room in his visit to heaven in the book
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of Revelation, He describes as best he can what the floors are like and what the furniture is like.
And it's all glory that he tries to equate with human things so that people
might read what he's writing and say, oh, so like the most beautifully jewel-encrusted throne.
Yeah, on steroids and plugged into the wall so that it glows all the time.
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And even then it's not enough.
And, you know, it's like that. that. So there's a sense of an outer beauty,
but what really makes Christ beautiful, even in his suffering,
is the extraordinary love, the incredible love.
It's like I say things to people that I think ought to knock them out of their seats.
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And I don't mean that in a judgmental way, but when I say to people,
do you understand that when Jesus was hanging on the cross, he was was thinking of you, Adrian,
he was thinking of you, that ought to make people, now once you've got that
and you've really embraced that, obviously it's not as shocking as it was the
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first time it really dawned on you.
But still, there are certain things that we glean from Scripture that just,
they ought to knock our socks off every single time. I'll give you an example.
People will say, you know, well, I don't know, I'm setting this up wrong.
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I often find myself telling people like your kids in the youth group,
I'll say, you know, do you understand that God is outside of time and space,
that God is, some theologians would say he's the holy other,
you know, but what it really boils down to is if God created all of us,
then God is the creator and there's only one, and it means that whatever we
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are, are, he's more than that because he's the creator.
Whatever we are after he creates us, he was that and more before he created us.
So we get told that we're made in his image, but what does that even mean?
Well, it obviously doesn't mean that everybody's white or brown or purple or whatever.
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Obviously, it doesn't mean that you're made in his image unless you're a a woman.
It's amazing how many idiot people in the name of the Bible have used the Bible
to abuse other people when God clearly should not be taken on those terms.
I think the devil must have a pretty easy time with a lot of people,
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because he can go, well, you know, if God made people in this image,
then he must have made women inferior. Are you kidding me?
But people believed such things. They really did.
There's a real good probability that Jesus had a pretty good tan back in the
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day because of where he lived and everything.
And who's to say that he didn't have a different kind of pigmentation because
of the people from whom he descended?
Now, there are people out there that go off on a tangent and they say things
like, well, he was an Arab. No, he wasn't.
The Bible tells you that. He wasn't an Arab.
And that's neither here nor there. I'm just saying that you can't go too far
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with these things because you got to take the Bible at its word and what it
says and what it doesn't say.
And there's plenty of information in there about his lineage and about his descendancy.
So, you know, you can't really say that. But the point is, he's not some white
European dude like the Renaissance painters is mating.
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He's not this frail, skinny, white guy on a painting or a fresco in Europe somewhere.
They painted Jesus in their image.
Hint, not right.
It's like we can't make Jesus in our own image. What we're trying to do is to be like him.
And obviously, being like him isn't limited to gender or race or anything.
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It has to be more about being like him in his character.
But he invites us to be like him not only in character, which is sort of a code
of ethics that we choose to live by.
You know, character is something that you learn and you perfect over time,
and some Some people are born a little more predisposed to good character than
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others, but at the end of the day, character's about the decisions you make
and the choices you live by.
And so we try to be like him in character, but when we're born again,
we're actually like him in being.
You know, now all of a sudden we're getting a soul makeover.
And so that radiant, beautiful being that he is is planted inside us when we're born again.
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And then that radiant being that he is, is striving to take over this whole
entire person that we are.
And so we're like the alien trying to get out of the human skin.
My microphone is actually slowly descending. There we go. So, you know, we have a...
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We have this inner part of us that's been made over by God,
and I've told people in the past that
it seems to me like God has rewired our DNA so that we are no longer wired or
genetically predisposed to be like the ancestors that we see in our lineage
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as much as we are now carrying the DNA of the Holy Spirit,
and therefore we have the capacity to be entirely like the Father,
our Heavenly Father, because that's what he becomes when Jesus adopts us into
the family through his act of redemption. So, okay.
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LESLIE KENDRICK I was over here thinking that I was glad that you mentioned,
excuse me, about Jesus's lineage and his descendants,
because it prompted me to tell of a really cool Holy Spirit moment that happened on Sunday.
So in youth group, we're reading the Bible in a whole year.
Well, we're reading the whole Bible in a year. There we go. And we just finished Genesis.
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And in Genesis, of course, we're reading through the stories of Abraham and
Esau and Jacob and Jacob's sons, the 12 tribes of Israel.
And we got to the the reading Sunday morning in youth group where Jacob is blessing Judah.
And Judah is the one who gets preeminence, even though he was the fourth born.
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And he says, Judah, may you have all these blessings upon you.
May you be like a lion and all of these things.
And so then you flip to Matthew chapter one, and it has all the descendants
of Jesus, and there's Judah.
And so when we say that that Jesus is the lion of Judah, that came full circle back to Genesis for us.
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And you mentioned the lion of Judah in the revelation, um.
Reading that you said. So, John is describing his experience up in heaven.
It's heaven, right? Right. Yeah. And he describes the Lion of Judah,
and the angels are saying it, I think, is what happened. Yes. Yes.
And so then I literally looked behind me to see if any of my youth group kids
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had their mouths open like I had my mouth open, because, I mean,
it just came so full circle for me.
Here's the the beginning of the entire Bible.
And it's saying, it's making a reference that Jesus is the Lion of Judah.
And then you're at the very end of the Bible at Revelation saying the same thing.
And it was just a really, really cool moment for us.
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And I came up to two of the kids after church and we were just talking and I
said, did you guys catch that?
And they said, oh yeah, you planned that, right? Like you guys coordinated that,
right? And I'm like, no, not at all.
That was was totally the Holy Spirit. And they were just blown away by that.
And it just reminded me of a comment that you've said to me before about how
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when Christians are living in the Spirit together, the Spirit will lead and
there will be signs just like that, that the Spirit is leading you in the right direction.
And so I so much feel that at Shiloh right now.
And it's so encouraging and so exciting to be moving because of the Spirit and
to be moving with the Spirit.
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It's beautiful Like you said, Christ is beautiful.
And I think as Christians, we're called to shine that beauty to others.
But beauty is not vanity and sanity, right?
It's not like, oh, I have to go get a facial and all of these things and make
sure I'm perfectly healthy.
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But it's, like you said right before we went on the air, beauty is humility.
Yeah. Beauty is grace. Beauty is Christ.
And so we can spew all day that we're a Christian and we love our church and all of these things.
But if we're not walking the walk, the gospel is not going to grow.
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It's not going to spread.
People are not going to want to figure out what's going on in this whole Christian realm.
We're tasked to share the beauty of Christ. And so it's really important to
talk about these things and read about these passages because we are learning
a little bit about what that beauty actually looks like.
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So. Yeah, I love what you're saying.
And it's like, I was thinking about it.
It's something I said several weeks ago that is not original to me.
I actually got it from a Jewish rabbi that we really need to understand that
there are two kind of distinctive worldviews that come out of ancient civilization.
(34:15):
And one is generally you could refer to as the Greek worldview,
and the other is the kind of Judeo-Christian worldview.
And really, if you look at ancient societies and the literature they left behind,
whether we're talking about Mesopotamians or whether we're talking about the
East Asian cultures, whatever,
(34:37):
they all celebrate human beauty in the flesh.
They all celebrate the perfect body, the perfect face, the perfect physical
traits, the Adonis, the human male that is so perfect.
And, you know, that's why they were infatuated with making carvings of naked
(34:58):
men and women, you know, because they wanted to permanently preserve the ideal
beauty that they saw in certain people.
Because you know what happens to all of us?
Gravity takes over as we get older and our flesh gets less firm and gravity
starts making things hang and sag and everything else.
And like it or not, we just can't stay pretty for very long. It's very short.
(35:23):
And yet people will spend their lives fighting this.
And what that does is that proves that you want to be in control of things you
can't really be in control of.
And it makes sense that that is, in effect, the essence of sin.
Because the one who created, you know, like sin wasn't invented,
(35:44):
but sin as a problem for God.
Starts with the rebellion of God's heavenly hosts and the ones that are,
you know, the one that was considered the most beautiful of all the angels is
the one that ends up leading the rebellion against God and then is cast out of heaven.
(36:05):
The bright morning star, the beautiful one, is cast out, this Lucifer.
And what's amazing is that there's a sense of beauty in the natural created
sense, like the flesh, right?
And what this problem of sin is all about is that this Lucifer wants to be in
(36:28):
charge, wants to control things, wants to say to the Creator God,
I know that you are superior to me because you created me and you existed before
anything else ever was, but still I think that I'm prettier than you.
I think you made me better than you. Okay?
(36:48):
And I suppose it could be argued, you know, because I like thinking that my
children are better people than I was at their age, but I didn't make them better than me.
They aspired to be better than me, and before God or the law,
for that matter, they're not.
You know, when it gets right down to it, nobody's really better than anybody else.
(37:11):
Because we all stand before a holy God who determines what good is and what
bad is and what the judgment for such things should be.
And that's the point. And somehow Lucifer thought he could take over God's role.
And it's like God says, you want to take control of things you can't control.
And what is the person who keeps having physical surgeries to offset the weaknesses
(37:36):
they see in their flesh? You know, and then they end up looking like an abomination.
You know, we've all seen pictures of these people. It's usually women, but men do it too.
And they look like these absurd, weird abominations, like something you take
out of a Play-Doh jar or something.
And this is what this person looks like. And they've lost sight of themselves.
(37:57):
They've completely lost their humanity to this weird, distorted view of flesh
and blood. And all of this to say that this Greek worldview celebrates the physicality
and the things we can control.
And so we build monuments to people who control things.
We build, we paint and preserve and photograph and art the best of us in our beauty.
(38:23):
And then when we no longer possess the physical traits that the world admires,
we begin to feel bad about ourselves.
We begin to feel, and then if you just happen to have the dumb luck of being
born incapable of having the physical traits that the world admires,
you go through your life feeling inferior.
So that's a real nice thing that the world of the flesh does for other people of the flesh.
(38:48):
It basically categorizes them according to how pretty they are.
And you can overcome ugliness by having particular charisma or being particularly
strong or something. But sooner or later, the body or the flesh is the thing the world values.
And this is what we roughly, loosely call the Greek worldview.
(39:09):
But then you have the Judeo-Christian worldview, and it defines beauty in an
entirely different way.
It sees old age as more beautiful than youth.
It sees a woman with wide hips because she's had eight strong children as beautiful, right?
You know what I mean? Like the Bible sees the things that God loves.
(39:34):
God sees. See, who does Jesus, you know, how many times does the Bible tell
us that he looked at somebody and had compassion on them.
He sees beauty in their weakness, you know?
What an old man with a long gray beard says to the Lord is, is you have lived.
And you have scars on your body because you have lived, you know?
(39:56):
He sees the faithfulness of that old man's long life of relationship with God, hopefully.
I mean, that's, but God views us in an entirely different way.
One thing I love about going to Israel is that with my gray beard,
I fit right in with those old rabbis that walk around there,
and everybody tips their hat to them and treats them with respect, and it's kind of nice.
(40:19):
It's kind of nice to be seen as somebody whose relative age and the gray beard
says something about them that is admired in that culture, you know, where in our culture,
I worry all the time that sooner or later the church won't grow with younger
people because the younger people will say, well, why don't we have a younger
(40:40):
pastor? I mean, look at that old guy.
But in the Judeo-Christian sense, the Bible is telling us that the best pastors
ought to be old gray-haired dudes.
The best teachers ought to be people who have been around, and they have the
wisdom, and they have the presence of the Lord.
They've walked with God for many, many years, and so they carry that long walk
(41:03):
with God with with them everywhere they go and with whomever they talk to.
And it's just a whole different view of beauty.
And so, the point is, if you want to understand how beautiful the Lord is,
you have to understand what He considers beautiful.
And He considers the people who give up their self-will beautiful.
(41:27):
He considers the people who are already predisposed.
He sees my handicapped daughter and son as much more beautiful than the pretty
people People who walk fast, walk past them in their makeup and their fancy
clothes and, you know, in their slim waists and their broad chests.
And, you know, they walk past my handicapped children and say, oh, that's pathetic.
(41:52):
You know, that's just, you know, boy, do I feel sorry for their parents or whatever.
And actually, and I don't mean this, this is the truth, Adrienne. This is it. I'm lying.
I'm dying, as they say, right? I consider it an awesome privilege to be the
parent of those two handicapped children.
The Lord looks at them and loves them and sees the beauty and loves their beauty,
(42:20):
and he loves me for being willing to do everything and anything I can to care for them in his name.
And I thank him for the privilege because he trusted me to take care of them,
me and my bride, you know, and to think that he gave us this gift of responsibility.
(42:40):
And then there are these vain, self-important people who are always trying to
control how they look and how they're perceived by other vain,
self-important people.
And they go through their lives living in this vanity and sanity.
And, you know, that's just another word for chaos.
And, You know, who is the one behind all the chaos?
(43:01):
And so my whole concept of beauty is different because of the Lord.
And to understand that the older I get and the less physically attractive I
am, the less strength I have, the more beautiful I am in his eyes.
Because whatever vanity I had because I thought I could take care of everything
myself is slowly fading away. And that makes me even more like the kind of person
(43:27):
he wants me to be, dependent on him.
Yeah. So, here's a question, listener, for the next week.
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder and God is the beholder,
how beautiful are you? Something to think about.
(43:48):
Friends, it's in the sermon notes, and I'm going to try to end with it on Sunday,
but I'll give you a preview.
He loves you. He adores you.
He thinks you are the most beautiful you there ever was or ever will be.
He sees you without the filth of sin, without the history that has wounded you,
(44:11):
without the images that were forced upon you.
He sees your mind cleansed of all the ugly things you've seen and heard and said and done.
He sees you pure.
He sees you the the way he saw Adam before Adam sinned. They were naked.
You know, that's figurative, don't you? It may have been absolutely literally true also,
(44:37):
but the reason that they were afraid because they were naked was because they
realized that they had sinned and they couldn't hide that from God.
And so, God's solution is to wash you clean in the blood of Christ.
It's a metaphor, for, but he washes you clean through his son's sacrifice,
(44:58):
and he washes you clean so that you're no longer filthy in his sight,
and you don't have to be embarrassed because he sees all of you and knows everything
about you because he sees it cleansed.
I talked about that last Sunday.
I said, you know, there's something about the glory of God that kind of burns
away our ugliness, and it's as though we're standing in one of those, you know.
(45:26):
Exfoliating baths or whatever, you know, where they take off a layer of your
skin to get down to a fresh, clean layer.
And it's like God has glory enough to exfoliate you into the cleanest version
of you that you can be, and he sees you.
And I mean, like, you can't see yourself. south
(45:49):
and he looks forward to
the day when your flesh and all of its burdens all
these you know what a sea anchor is most ships especially back in the old days
of the sailing ships drifted long heavy chains with anchors on them behind the
(46:09):
boat in order to keep it from tipping and turning too much in the gales and, and,
uh, the sea anchors made the ship more steady,
but they also slowed it down and they also dragged it down, you know?
And, and so we, we are, we are carrying around these anchors,
you know, we're pulling these chains full of dead weight behind us.
(46:33):
And part of it's because we need the stability that, that they give and we're
afraid of what it would be like to be completely set free, and He sees you free.
The Lord sees you the way you would have been in the Garden of Eden had sin not crept in.
(46:54):
He sees you beautiful, no matter your sin.
All right, stay tuned. Until next week, bye. Bye, beautiful.
Music.
Music.
(00:16):
Welcome to the Echo Podcast, where we discuss how our hearts and minds can be
an echo of God's heart and mind and what that even means in this world.
We're Pastor Dan Sinkhorn and Adrienne Tarullo from Shiloh Church of Jasper, Indiana.
And in last week's sermon, Pastor Dan, you,
talked about several things, but I think the main thing that stood out to me
(00:38):
was just thinking about the true essence and the true beauty of who God is.
And so, we heard this story from Isaiah where Isaiah basically gets this insider's
view of God and heavenly hosts or angels,
(00:58):
and he just has this really enlightening, really beautiful experience.
And so, I think before we kind of dive right in, And I'd like for the listeners
to think about whenever you are in God's realm, or say, if you are to enter into God's realm,
what do you think it would be like?
(01:21):
What do you think it would look like? How do you think you would feel?
What would be going on in your mind? Would you be totally awestruck?
Would you walk around thinking, well, finally?
What would that be like for
you and then pastor dan i want
(01:41):
you to tell me the story of how it went for isaiah and i
think we'll start there yeah well so i was just thinking about what you said
and the question that you posed to the listeners and i will tell about isaiah
but i think that that I can't help responding in just one small way to that scenario.
(02:04):
Whatever you think you'll do when you're in the presence of God, it won't happen.
It won't be like anything you can imagine.
I mean, that's the wonderful Mercy Me song, right? I can only imagine. Yeah. It's beautiful.
Absolutely beautiful song. and what he's saying is i can only imagine what it
(02:31):
will be like and i'm pretty sure,
that that's not informed well enough to imagine accurately it's not a discredit
to the song it's just a way of saying you know i'm pretty sure i i will tell
you that whenever i think about such things personally. I'm talking about myself here.
(02:53):
By the way, I'm looking at this picture on the other side of you there that I've loved for years.
It's a person coming into Jesus' throne room, and he's walked the red carpet to the master's throne,
and the master has fallen to the floor to meet him and hug all over him,
and he's got a crown and a robe.
(03:16):
There's broken chains. It's one of those things you could just look at it indefinitely
and just study it forever.
And it's called Safely Home, and it's by Dan Diaccini, I think his name is.
I'm probably saying his name wrong because I'm going from memory.
(03:38):
But anyway, he makes these beautiful paintings like that.
And see, we can only imagine. But I get the distinct feeling from the Lord that
he's saying, it's all right, go ahead.
It won't matter whether you got it right or wrong, because just imagining it is fine.
(03:58):
So just go ahead, listen, or imagine like Adrian asked you to.
For me, I always get weepy when I think about being in the presence of Jesus.
It doesn't matter what it looks like. Like, it's just the idea of,
like, when I start thinking about him looking me in the eye, and it's just he and me.
(04:22):
He can do that. I don't know how he does it, but he can do that.
And I can imagine it. And you know from being
in my office where we record this that I have a
handful of pictures of Jesus around the room because I like thinking about being
with him and embracing him and feeling the entirety of his love without all
(04:46):
my sin and all my brokenness and all my history.
Because one of the things that's really going to come out in this next week's
message, which is kind of part two from the one we're talking about is that
not only is the Lord beautiful,
but he makes you beautiful in his eyes.
(05:08):
And most of us just can't accept that. We can't see ourselves the way he sees us. And,
To imagine him seeing us the way we really are and maybe revealing what we really
are like in his eyes could be,
well, if you weren't already outside this weak human shell that we live in, you'd die.
(05:35):
If you weren't already dead, you'd die because you couldn't handle it.
You know, and I think that for some of us, seeing the person that we have the
potential to be will be very hard.
And in a way, that's a form of judgment.
And the Bible tells us that. See, I also believe, I'm doing it now,
(05:59):
I guess, that thing I always do.
I also believe that when the Bible speaks of certain things,
we have a tendency to imagine too much and blow them into a proportion that
isn't suited to what we're reading.
In other words, if the Bible tells us that certain things are inevitable,
(06:24):
we have a tendency to overthink them and try to humanize them and secularize them.
One that I spent years studying was a passage that said that the sins of the
Father would be visited on the third and fourth generation. And I thought, well, that's not fair.
But then the older I got, the more I realized, well, he's just saying how things generally work.
(06:48):
It isn't necessarily a curse. It's just a statement of the way things are.
If a father's really screwed up, then it's probably going to take three or four
generations of effort to undo the damage and to start a new paradigm.
And when I realized that some 35 years ago, I started praying for that to happen.
(07:14):
I said, Lord, then let it be me. And I didn't even have children then.
I just said, when I'm a father, let it be me.
Let me be the last of my generation or that generation's seed, you know?
So, getting back to heaven and Jesus and the throne room of God,
because you asked me what happened to Isaiah, but I went off on a tangent as I want to do.
(07:37):
Because I just started imagining myself fulfilling the assignment you just gave.
And the thing is, I've been doing that assignment a long time.
I have stories I wrote from my creative writing class when I was a junior in
high school that imagined such things.
(07:58):
That was a little while ago. Yeah. 45 years I was just thinking,
just this afternoon, I was a junior in high school.
That's kind of inconceivable to me.
I'm not that old. Surely I'm not that old.
So Isaiah writes that he is experiencing the throne room of God,
(08:23):
and he's describing everything And the train of his robe fills the temple with glory.
And it's just, this scene is so brilliant with glory and light and inconceivable beauty.
And he notices that even the angels are covering their mouths and their eyes
(08:46):
and things as if they have to filter the glory of God in order to withstand it.
And then he says, oh, my goodness, I am not supposed to be here.
If the angels are being cautious, then surely I should be cautious.
And then one of the angels comes to him and says, hey, hold it.
(09:10):
There's a simple solution for
your problem. Of course, you can't solve the problem, but the Lord can.
And so he takes this burning coal from the altar.
And in this instance, and you don't have to stretch your imagination much to
understand the meaning,
this is a wonderful sort of prophetic image of what Christ is going to do,
(09:33):
because Christ is the sacrifice on the altar that takes away our sin, right?
And altars are symbolic of that and a sign of his sacrifice for our sake.
And so the altar bears a hot, burning cold that when the angel touches it,
and maybe it wasn't an angel at all.
Maybe it was the sun, you know, and he touches it to Isaiah's lips and he says,
(10:00):
now you are holy enough to be here.
And so it's a real clear picture of how Isaiah recognizes how completely unworthy he is to be there.
And then he recognizes that the only thing that makes him worthy to be in God's
throne room, gazing upon the glory of God.
And I don't know how to say that even and give it justice.
(10:25):
These are incredible images, and there's no parallel that I can give to, you know.
If you've seen something that was so glorious and beautiful that you were all
struck into silence, it was prettier than that.
I told the story in church on Sunday about how I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains
(10:47):
with my friend back in the 1980s. And we were walking high in the Cascades, I mean really high.
And we were on the Pacific Crest Trail, and we'd walk for several hours from our car.
Down because we'd gone to a pass to park and and
up in the pass well you're going to go down one way or
(11:07):
down the other there's no higher to go
than pass and so apart from climbing a mountain and so we got on the trail that
this pass and we started down into the forest and these forests are the pacific
northwest forest man there there are millions of trees and they're all trees
that that are averaging about 20 feet in diameter and 200 feet tall.
(11:29):
And when the wind blows in the tops of these trees, it roars. It's just incredible.
And then you get down along a stream bed, and there's these cold mountain rivers
flowing down through the cracks and the rocks, and they're roaring.
And it's just an overwhelming sensation. And
then we finally come out of the darkness of this relative
(11:51):
darkness of this this deep forest
and we step into a meadow on the side of
the mountain and i'm looking at purple flowers
and yellow flowers it's early spring there's still
old snow that's gathered in places where avalanches have once gone down and
there's there's this brilliant blue sky and puffy white clouds and there's white
(12:15):
peaks up above me on one side and purple literally purple mountains across the valley on my other side.
And I'm looking at all of this and I'm just standing there with my chin laying
on my chest, just, ah, just overwhelmed by the magnificent beauty of all of this.
And my friend, who's just kind of a smart aleck by nature, I don't know why
(12:38):
I would hang around with people like that.
Because it takes one to know one. My friend says after a few minutes, it's not that pretty.
Yes, it was. Yeah. It was that pretty. And you know what?
The glory of God, I still can't conceive of.
I've been gifted to see some of the most magnificent beauty this world has to
(13:02):
offer. I really have. I've been so blessed.
I have been so blessed in my life to see some of the most beautiful things in
creation, but they're all tainted by sin.
You know, I joked on Sunday because our mutual friend is an airline pilot,
and he's a member of our congregation, and I said, and the scene was perfect
until Dave flew over in his Delta jet.
(13:26):
Well, maybe not literally in that moment, but it would have happened eventually.
And I'm sure even when we climbed the mountain the next day and took in the
view from around 5,000 feet, I remember seeing airplanes, you know,
and it's like, it doesn't matter where you go.
The world is tainted with sin and there's dirt in the snow that came from the
(13:48):
sky and it was probably exhaust dirt from those airplanes.
And it's just like, no matter how beautiful anything is in this world,
it doesn't even come close to the glory of God, to the beauty of God's throne
room, to the beauty of God's Son.
You see, I look at my children and I see beauty. And there are so many things
(14:10):
I didn't understand about God until I became a father.
Until I became a dad, I did not understand how much you could love another person
to the point where it hurts.
I never could have grasped how much.
No matter what happens, when I look at them, I am in love with them, and they're beautiful.
(14:33):
And it gives me just the slightest hint of what it must be like to be loved by God.
And I can't even imagine how much God loves the Son.
And so, Frank Viola's premise in not only the Insurgents book,
but in several of his his books.
He has this kind of theme that he writes about in all of his books.
(14:57):
They're all built around this one thing he calls the divine purpose, right?
God's divine purpose. And God's divine purpose, as Frank defines it,
by the way, I recommend pretty much everything he wrote, but this particular
theme touched me deeply in a book called God's Favorite Place on earth.
(15:17):
And his divine purpose is outlined by Frank as a desire, because of his incredible love for his son,
to create a perfect companion people for his son.
And the son returns the love so much much that their love creates and saves us.
(15:45):
Like, like, so, so the premise that Frank gets at is that God loves the son
so much that he creates amidst the dark chaos that is the world ruled by Satan and his ilk.
He creates this island in the middle called Eden, and he creates in that place,
(16:05):
Adam's race, and Adam's race is for Jesus, for Christ the Son.
He doesn't have a name at this point. You know, he's Christ the Son.
He's God's Son. And God loves the Son so much.
That he wants to create this perfect bride or companion for Christ, the Son.
(16:30):
And then the Son has to reconcile the relationship between God and the descendants
of Adam because the descendants of Adam taint themselves with sin.
They were as beautiful as the mountains before the dirt, before the pollution.
They were more beautiful than that, and they sin. And so because of their sin,
(16:54):
they're no longer worthy to
be in God's presence, and their unworthiness could be their destruction.
And God, at times, throughout the Bible, talks, especially in the Old Testament,
about how maybe it'd be better to just let them be destroyed and start over.
And maybe this time make them a little more sin-proof, and then someone.
(17:15):
One, and we don't really know who, but it's like God's better nature,
as if God can have a better nature.
God's Son probably says, don't, Dad.
They'll be better because they'll choose to right themselves in your eyes.
(17:37):
They'll be better because they'll decide.
That they want you, even if it costs them their sense of life and liberty and their flesh,
that they might actually come
out better because they had to embrace the solution to the problem of sin.
(17:58):
And it's just a fascinating idea.
And it all comes back to the fact that there is this This heavenly Father who
is so passionately in love with the Son and with the highest order of beings in God's realm,
(18:20):
which is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
And there's this love between them that is a community, and yet it's all in
one, and we don't understand how to explain it.
It's a beautiful mystery. You know, written mysteries aren't always a bad thing.
You know, mysteries are simply things we can't explain, but we know are true.
I don't know what the sun is made of.
(18:43):
The scientists have speculated that it's a lot of hydrogen and stuff,
and they have tests that they can do to check their theories.
But, you know, until someone figures out how to go to get a little sample of
the sun and bring it back and put it under a microscope, no one's going to know
for sure. So it's a mystery.
And there are lots of mysteries in the world, and that's not bad,
(19:05):
because mystery gives us room for God.
Mystery says that God can be a mystery, too, and that God could be the mystery
being who created all of this.
And to what end? Why did God create all of this?
And what was God thinking when God allowed the gates of Eden to be opened so
(19:27):
that the enemy could come in and tempt the people?
Well, we can only guess at what God's thinking is, but what we do know is that
before the sin had really settled—,
God already announced that there would be a plan to destroy this consequence
(19:47):
of sin in a way of redemption,
and it would be through the Son of Man, which is a figurative statement that
means God's Son born of the flesh.
And so it's like right there in Genesis, he's already telling you what the rest
of this book is going to reveal.
You know, like any good author, God has given you all the instruments,
(20:07):
to implement all the elements that you need, that's what I mean to say,
at the beginning of the book so you can understand how the rest of this is going
to go and you can watch it unfold.
And the reason I'm just telling this story like this is because it's like,
you can't see the beauty without telling the story.
If you stand in the presence of God someday, and I hope you will,
(20:31):
hope I will in good time, and not understand in whose presence you stand,
then you won't appreciate the magnificent grace and beauty.
So that was pretty much what the whole message was about Sunday.
It was just like, try, if you will, to wrap your mind around the real beauty of God,
(20:55):
and then particularly to wrap your mind around the Son who takes all of his
radiant beauty and sort of puts it in a box called the body of a human being.
And it's as though that radiance and we have tons of, you know,
CGI special effects and everything.
(21:16):
And we've had lots of movies and TV shows where we've attempted to,
to illustrate such things.
And, you know, I remember when I was a teenager, just in my late teens,
and a movie came out called Cocoon.
It was a good movie. It was a cool movie.
Well, basically, these aliens were these beautiful glowing creatures that glowed
(21:41):
brilliantly, but they were wearing human skins.
And so they look like everybody else until a guy just happens to look through
a hole in the wall, you know, to watch one of them and watch is just in time
to see this alien unzip her human skin.
And suddenly it was glowing like light and brilliance and everything.
(22:02):
And so we've experimented with these ideas in our imaginations for as long as
people have been around.
And, you know, the idea that contained within our shell is this incredible glory
that if we could release it from the flesh, it would be incalculably beautiful.
(22:24):
And it's this, C.S. Lewis deals with it in one of my all-time favorite books
that I reference frequently on this radio program of ours.
I love The Great Divorce, and it's a book that kind of gives you a picture of
how people become way too comfortable in their skin, and they don't really want
(22:44):
to try to imagine life outside of it.
And and of course it's a rhetorical question
it's it's about using your imagination to see if
you can figure out what being like christ
would be like and one of the things you figure out is is
that he's way more than his body can contain and we get a taste of that after
the resurrection because we begin to see him doing and being things that he
(23:08):
didn't have the capacity for when he was confined to the flesh and bearing the weight of our sin.
And yet, even with that, he was able to do miracles. And he said,
if he wanted to, he could call down a legion of angels.
So, he had limitations when he was prior to his death and resurrection,
(23:31):
but after his resurrection, the limitations are gone.
And so, we have in him a glimpse of what we can be.
And part of what we can be is beautiful.
Part of what we can be is beautiful, and it's inconceivable.
The question you have to ask yourself is, what is beauty? And that's what we're
(23:54):
going to really deal with in the next week's message, is that beauty is something
to behold, like Isaiah saw in the throne room.
He's looking at this presence of God, and he's seeing this glorious beauty.
And when John visits the same throne room in his visit to heaven in the book
(24:14):
of Revelation, He describes as best he can what the floors are like and what the furniture is like.
And it's all glory that he tries to equate with human things so that people
might read what he's writing and say, oh, so like the most beautifully jewel-encrusted throne.
Yeah, on steroids and plugged into the wall so that it glows all the time.
(24:38):
And even then it's not enough.
And, you know, it's like that. that. So there's a sense of an outer beauty,
but what really makes Christ beautiful, even in his suffering,
is the extraordinary love, the incredible love.
It's like I say things to people that I think ought to knock them out of their seats.
(25:01):
And I don't mean that in a judgmental way, but when I say to people,
do you understand that when Jesus was hanging on the cross, he was was thinking of you, Adrian,
he was thinking of you, that ought to make people, now once you've got that
and you've really embraced that, obviously it's not as shocking as it was the
(25:23):
first time it really dawned on you.
But still, there are certain things that we glean from Scripture that just,
they ought to knock our socks off every single time. I'll give you an example.
People will say, you know, well, I don't know, I'm setting this up wrong.
(25:44):
I often find myself telling people like your kids in the youth group,
I'll say, you know, do you understand that God is outside of time and space,
that God is, some theologians would say he's the holy other,
you know, but what it really boils down to is if God created all of us,
then God is the creator and there's only one, and it means that whatever we
(26:07):
are, are, he's more than that because he's the creator.
Whatever we are after he creates us, he was that and more before he created us.
So we get told that we're made in his image, but what does that even mean?
Well, it obviously doesn't mean that everybody's white or brown or purple or whatever.
(26:28):
Obviously, it doesn't mean that you're made in his image unless you're a a woman.
It's amazing how many idiot people in the name of the Bible have used the Bible
to abuse other people when God clearly should not be taken on those terms.
I think the devil must have a pretty easy time with a lot of people,
(26:52):
because he can go, well, you know, if God made people in this image,
then he must have made women inferior. Are you kidding me?
But people believed such things. They really did.
There's a real good probability that Jesus had a pretty good tan back in the
(27:13):
day because of where he lived and everything.
And who's to say that he didn't have a different kind of pigmentation because
of the people from whom he descended?
Now, there are people out there that go off on a tangent and they say things
like, well, he was an Arab. No, he wasn't.
The Bible tells you that. He wasn't an Arab.
And that's neither here nor there. I'm just saying that you can't go too far
(27:37):
with these things because you got to take the Bible at its word and what it
says and what it doesn't say.
And there's plenty of information in there about his lineage and about his descendancy.
So, you know, you can't really say that. But the point is, he's not some white
European dude like the Renaissance painters is mating.
(27:57):
He's not this frail, skinny, white guy on a painting or a fresco in Europe somewhere.
They painted Jesus in their image.
Hint, not right.
It's like we can't make Jesus in our own image. What we're trying to do is to be like him.
And obviously, being like him isn't limited to gender or race or anything.
(28:21):
It has to be more about being like him in his character.
But he invites us to be like him not only in character, which is sort of a code
of ethics that we choose to live by.
You know, character is something that you learn and you perfect over time,
and some Some people are born a little more predisposed to good character than
(28:42):
others, but at the end of the day, character's about the decisions you make
and the choices you live by.
And so we try to be like him in character, but when we're born again,
we're actually like him in being.
You know, now all of a sudden we're getting a soul makeover.
And so that radiant, beautiful being that he is is planted inside us when we're born again.
(29:03):
And then that radiant being that he is, is striving to take over this whole
entire person that we are.
And so we're like the alien trying to get out of the human skin.
My microphone is actually slowly descending. There we go. So, you know, we have a...
(29:27):
We have this inner part of us that's been made over by God,
and I've told people in the past that
it seems to me like God has rewired our DNA so that we are no longer wired or
genetically predisposed to be like the ancestors that we see in our lineage
(29:50):
as much as we are now carrying the DNA of the Holy Spirit,
and therefore we have the capacity to be entirely like the Father,
our Heavenly Father, because that's what he becomes when Jesus adopts us into
the family through his act of redemption. So, okay.
(30:12):
LESLIE KENDRICK I was over here thinking that I was glad that you mentioned,
excuse me, about Jesus's lineage and his descendants,
because it prompted me to tell of a really cool Holy Spirit moment that happened on Sunday.
So in youth group, we're reading the Bible in a whole year.
Well, we're reading the whole Bible in a year. There we go. And we just finished Genesis.
(30:37):
And in Genesis, of course, we're reading through the stories of Abraham and
Esau and Jacob and Jacob's sons, the 12 tribes of Israel.
And we got to the the reading Sunday morning in youth group where Jacob is blessing Judah.
And Judah is the one who gets preeminence, even though he was the fourth born.
(30:59):
And he says, Judah, may you have all these blessings upon you.
May you be like a lion and all of these things.
And so then you flip to Matthew chapter one, and it has all the descendants
of Jesus, and there's Judah.
And so when we say that that Jesus is the lion of Judah, that came full circle back to Genesis for us.
(31:22):
And you mentioned the lion of Judah in the revelation, um.
Reading that you said. So, John is describing his experience up in heaven.
It's heaven, right? Right. Yeah. And he describes the Lion of Judah,
and the angels are saying it, I think, is what happened. Yes. Yes.
And so then I literally looked behind me to see if any of my youth group kids
(31:45):
had their mouths open like I had my mouth open, because, I mean,
it just came so full circle for me.
Here's the the beginning of the entire Bible.
And it's saying, it's making a reference that Jesus is the Lion of Judah.
And then you're at the very end of the Bible at Revelation saying the same thing.
And it was just a really, really cool moment for us.
(32:07):
And I came up to two of the kids after church and we were just talking and I
said, did you guys catch that?
And they said, oh yeah, you planned that, right? Like you guys coordinated that,
right? And I'm like, no, not at all.
That was was totally the Holy Spirit. And they were just blown away by that.
And it just reminded me of a comment that you've said to me before about how
(32:27):
when Christians are living in the Spirit together, the Spirit will lead and
there will be signs just like that, that the Spirit is leading you in the right direction.
And so I so much feel that at Shiloh right now.
And it's so encouraging and so exciting to be moving because of the Spirit and
to be moving with the Spirit.
(32:48):
It's beautiful Like you said, Christ is beautiful.
And I think as Christians, we're called to shine that beauty to others.
But beauty is not vanity and sanity, right?
It's not like, oh, I have to go get a facial and all of these things and make
sure I'm perfectly healthy.
(33:08):
But it's, like you said right before we went on the air, beauty is humility.
Yeah. Beauty is grace. Beauty is Christ.
And so we can spew all day that we're a Christian and we love our church and all of these things.
But if we're not walking the walk, the gospel is not going to grow.
(33:30):
It's not going to spread.
People are not going to want to figure out what's going on in this whole Christian realm.
We're tasked to share the beauty of Christ. And so it's really important to
talk about these things and read about these passages because we are learning
a little bit about what that beauty actually looks like.
(33:51):
So. Yeah, I love what you're saying.
And it's like, I was thinking about it.
It's something I said several weeks ago that is not original to me.
I actually got it from a Jewish rabbi that we really need to understand that
there are two kind of distinctive worldviews that come out of ancient civilization.
(34:15):
And one is generally you could refer to as the Greek worldview,
and the other is the kind of Judeo-Christian worldview.
And really, if you look at ancient societies and the literature they left behind,
whether we're talking about Mesopotamians or whether we're talking about the
East Asian cultures, whatever,
(34:37):
they all celebrate human beauty in the flesh.
They all celebrate the perfect body, the perfect face, the perfect physical
traits, the Adonis, the human male that is so perfect.
And, you know, that's why they were infatuated with making carvings of naked
(34:58):
men and women, you know, because they wanted to permanently preserve the ideal
beauty that they saw in certain people.
Because you know what happens to all of us?
Gravity takes over as we get older and our flesh gets less firm and gravity
starts making things hang and sag and everything else.
And like it or not, we just can't stay pretty for very long. It's very short.
(35:23):
And yet people will spend their lives fighting this.
And what that does is that proves that you want to be in control of things you
can't really be in control of.
And it makes sense that that is, in effect, the essence of sin.
Because the one who created, you know, like sin wasn't invented,
(35:44):
but sin as a problem for God.
Starts with the rebellion of God's heavenly hosts and the ones that are,
you know, the one that was considered the most beautiful of all the angels is
the one that ends up leading the rebellion against God and then is cast out of heaven.
(36:05):
The bright morning star, the beautiful one, is cast out, this Lucifer.
And what's amazing is that there's a sense of beauty in the natural created
sense, like the flesh, right?
And what this problem of sin is all about is that this Lucifer wants to be in
(36:28):
charge, wants to control things, wants to say to the Creator God,
I know that you are superior to me because you created me and you existed before
anything else ever was, but still I think that I'm prettier than you.
I think you made me better than you. Okay?
(36:48):
And I suppose it could be argued, you know, because I like thinking that my
children are better people than I was at their age, but I didn't make them better than me.
They aspired to be better than me, and before God or the law,
for that matter, they're not.
You know, when it gets right down to it, nobody's really better than anybody else.
(37:11):
Because we all stand before a holy God who determines what good is and what
bad is and what the judgment for such things should be.
And that's the point. And somehow Lucifer thought he could take over God's role.
And it's like God says, you want to take control of things you can't control.
And what is the person who keeps having physical surgeries to offset the weaknesses
(37:36):
they see in their flesh? You know, and then they end up looking like an abomination.
You know, we've all seen pictures of these people. It's usually women, but men do it too.
And they look like these absurd, weird abominations, like something you take
out of a Play-Doh jar or something.
And this is what this person looks like. And they've lost sight of themselves.
(37:57):
They've completely lost their humanity to this weird, distorted view of flesh
and blood. And all of this to say that this Greek worldview celebrates the physicality
and the things we can control.
And so we build monuments to people who control things.
We build, we paint and preserve and photograph and art the best of us in our beauty.
(38:23):
And then when we no longer possess the physical traits that the world admires,
we begin to feel bad about ourselves.
We begin to feel, and then if you just happen to have the dumb luck of being
born incapable of having the physical traits that the world admires,
you go through your life feeling inferior.
So that's a real nice thing that the world of the flesh does for other people of the flesh.
(38:48):
It basically categorizes them according to how pretty they are.
And you can overcome ugliness by having particular charisma or being particularly
strong or something. But sooner or later, the body or the flesh is the thing the world values.
And this is what we roughly, loosely call the Greek worldview.
(39:09):
But then you have the Judeo-Christian worldview, and it defines beauty in an
entirely different way.
It sees old age as more beautiful than youth.
It sees a woman with wide hips because she's had eight strong children as beautiful, right?
You know what I mean? Like the Bible sees the things that God loves.
(39:34):
God sees. See, who does Jesus, you know, how many times does the Bible tell
us that he looked at somebody and had compassion on them.
He sees beauty in their weakness, you know?
What an old man with a long gray beard says to the Lord is, is you have lived.
And you have scars on your body because you have lived, you know?
(39:56):
He sees the faithfulness of that old man's long life of relationship with God, hopefully.
I mean, that's, but God views us in an entirely different way.
One thing I love about going to Israel is that with my gray beard,
I fit right in with those old rabbis that walk around there,
and everybody tips their hat to them and treats them with respect, and it's kind of nice.
(40:19):
It's kind of nice to be seen as somebody whose relative age and the gray beard
says something about them that is admired in that culture, you know, where in our culture,
I worry all the time that sooner or later the church won't grow with younger
people because the younger people will say, well, why don't we have a younger
(40:40):
pastor? I mean, look at that old guy.
But in the Judeo-Christian sense, the Bible is telling us that the best pastors
ought to be old gray-haired dudes.
The best teachers ought to be people who have been around, and they have the
wisdom, and they have the presence of the Lord.
They've walked with God for many, many years, and so they carry that long walk
(41:03):
with God with with them everywhere they go and with whomever they talk to.
And it's just a whole different view of beauty.
And so, the point is, if you want to understand how beautiful the Lord is,
you have to understand what He considers beautiful.
And He considers the people who give up their self-will beautiful.
(41:27):
He considers the people who are already predisposed.
He sees my handicapped daughter and son as much more beautiful than the pretty
people People who walk fast, walk past them in their makeup and their fancy
clothes and, you know, in their slim waists and their broad chests.
And, you know, they walk past my handicapped children and say, oh, that's pathetic.
(41:52):
You know, that's just, you know, boy, do I feel sorry for their parents or whatever.
And actually, and I don't mean this, this is the truth, Adrienne. This is it. I'm lying.
I'm dying, as they say, right? I consider it an awesome privilege to be the
parent of those two handicapped children.
The Lord looks at them and loves them and sees the beauty and loves their beauty,
(42:20):
and he loves me for being willing to do everything and anything I can to care for them in his name.
And I thank him for the privilege because he trusted me to take care of them,
me and my bride, you know, and to think that he gave us this gift of responsibility.
(42:40):
And then there are these vain, self-important people who are always trying to
control how they look and how they're perceived by other vain,
self-important people.
And they go through their lives living in this vanity and sanity.
And, you know, that's just another word for chaos.
And, You know, who is the one behind all the chaos?
(43:01):
And so my whole concept of beauty is different because of the Lord.
And to understand that the older I get and the less physically attractive I
am, the less strength I have, the more beautiful I am in his eyes.
Because whatever vanity I had because I thought I could take care of everything
myself is slowly fading away. And that makes me even more like the kind of person
(43:27):
he wants me to be, dependent on him.
Yeah. So, here's a question, listener, for the next week.
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder and God is the beholder,
how beautiful are you? Something to think about.
(43:48):
Friends, it's in the sermon notes, and I'm going to try to end with it on Sunday,
but I'll give you a preview.
He loves you. He adores you.
He thinks you are the most beautiful you there ever was or ever will be.
He sees you without the filth of sin, without the history that has wounded you,
(44:11):
without the images that were forced upon you.
He sees your mind cleansed of all the ugly things you've seen and heard and said and done.
He sees you pure.
He sees you the the way he saw Adam before Adam sinned. They were naked.
You know, that's figurative, don't you? It may have been absolutely literally true also,
(44:37):
but the reason that they were afraid because they were naked was because they
realized that they had sinned and they couldn't hide that from God.
And so, God's solution is to wash you clean in the blood of Christ.
It's a metaphor, for, but he washes you clean through his son's sacrifice,
(44:58):
and he washes you clean so that you're no longer filthy in his sight,
and you don't have to be embarrassed because he sees all of you and knows everything
about you because he sees it cleansed.
I talked about that last Sunday.
I said, you know, there's something about the glory of God that kind of burns
away our ugliness, and it's as though we're standing in one of those, you know.
(45:26):
Exfoliating baths or whatever, you know, where they take off a layer of your
skin to get down to a fresh, clean layer.
And it's like God has glory enough to exfoliate you into the cleanest version
of you that you can be, and he sees you.
And I mean, like, you can't see yourself. south
(45:49):
and he looks forward to
the day when your flesh and all of its burdens all
these you know what a sea anchor is most ships especially back in the old days
of the sailing ships drifted long heavy chains with anchors on them behind the
(46:09):
boat in order to keep it from tipping and turning too much in the gales and, and,
uh, the sea anchors made the ship more steady,
but they also slowed it down and they also dragged it down, you know?
And, and so we, we are, we are carrying around these anchors,
you know, we're pulling these chains full of dead weight behind us.
(46:33):
And part of it's because we need the stability that, that they give and we're
afraid of what it would be like to be completely set free, and He sees you free.
The Lord sees you the way you would have been in the Garden of Eden had sin not crept in.
(46:54):
He sees you beautiful, no matter your sin.
All right, stay tuned. Until next week, bye. Bye, beautiful.
Music.
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