Enjoying God in Everything: A 5-Day Study by Steve DewittSample

The Holy Spirit restores our created capacity for wonder-inducing worship, yet we can still experience wonder without worship. I know.

For many years, although I was a Christian, I walked beaches, viewed sunsets, enjoyed music, watched movies, ate desserts, and stared at the stars pretty much like an atheist. I enjoyed these things immensely, but primarily for their own sake and for the sensory pleasures that accompanied them. Based on my conversations with other Christians about this subject, my story is all too familiar. We have largely missed out on pleasure’s ultimate high and God’s intended purpose for it.

The reasons for this are many, but the chief culprit is pride. We remain deaf and blind to the purpose behind creation. We presumptuously accept the joys and pleasures of God’s creation without giving His purposes proper consideration.

Paul describes how sin has incapacitated image-bearers from responding rightly to created beauty in Romans 1:21. Hearing what we have failed to do also tells us what we are supposed to do. We were made to respond to created beauty in two ways: giving God honor and giving God thanks.

To honor something or someone means to magnify its value. The heavens are declaring the glory of God by magnifying the glory of their Creator (Psalm 19:1). The whole earth is resplendent with God’s glory (Isa. 6:3). Every created thing is declaring the truth about God and giving honor to Him. Image-bearers participate in this praise by contemplating the glory of God in our moments of wonder. To give God honor is to agree with what the experience of beauty is intended for.

Giving thanks acknowledges that I am the recipient of a gift. What do we have that we have not received from God? When we experience a moment of beauty, we should turn wonder into worship by giving thanks to God for His goodness in providing it, for His creativity in making it, or simply for our pleasure in experiencing it.

The key is to love God in such a way that we actively contemplate God’s goodness in the granting of pleasure or wonder. We give God honor when we give Him thanks and acknowledge Him as the giver of all good gifts, whether big or small.