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

Like God-made beauty, man-made beauty requires us to bring God into the enjoyable sensory experience by relating it to what we know about Him.

In Acts 17:28, Paul quotes the Greek poet Aratus’s poem Phaenomonea when explaining the Jewish God to the men of Athens. We can do the same with our modern-day poets, singers, painters, and all the rest. We can mine for truth in the art and turn it into worship.

Most often, this calls us simply to rejoice with thanksgiving that God has blessed us with the experience of beauty (1 Thessalonian 5:18). Every good thing comes from God (James 1:17). The ability of the artist is a gift from God. The art itself is a gift from God. The happiness I feel in the art is a gift from God.

When I was on a trip to the city of Rome, I found out that they would be celebrating the conclusion of Advent with a performance of Handel’s Messiah at the famous Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. When the famed “Hallelujah Chorus” began, I was alive with the beauty of it. My soul was dancing with a long-dead composer. Together we were celebrating the wonder of Christ. It was a duet— image-bearer and image-bearer—Handel and me. One was the creator of the beauty, and the other the beholder of it. My mind went from Handel’s brilliance to thanksgiving to God for the sheer joy I felt.

If musical beauty can do this inside of us, what must the Creator of it be like?

This is how human art can lead to worshipful contemplations about the ultimate Beauty. Artists can be worship leaders if we let them. We must let their art lead us to God through the consistencies or contradictions between their artisanry and the truth of the redemptive story God has written for all of human history. All great art will contain an echo of Eden: Eden in its original glory, Eden that is lost to us, and Eden restored.

Christians who know and love God’s redemptive story will spot this storyline and rejoice in it. Our God wants us to enjoy all beauty as His beauty and for His sake.

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