Beautiful God

The Sunday morning message given in the United Methodist churches of the Wheatland Parish on July 23, 2023.  The Bible verses used are Romans 11:33--12:2.

            From the time human beings were capable of thought, we have tried to understand God.  Who God is.  What God does.  Why God does what God does.  How God does what God does.  How God can possibly be all the things we say God is.  There have been, literally, millions of books written trying to answer those and other questions about God.  There have also been magazine articles, movies, TV shows, youtube videos, and any number of other things published in which humans have tried to understand God.

            It’s a natural human impulse.  We try to understand God for lots of reasons.  For one thing, we worship God, and we want to understand just who it is that we worship.  For another, we look at all the chaos and confusion, and we want to believe that it makes sense somehow, so we try to understand why God would allow things to be the way they are.  We also want to believe that God is going to use all this chaos and confusion for good in the end, and we try to understand how God is going to do that.  We want to know what happens after we die, and so we try to understand God so that we can understand what heaven will be like.  And on and on and on, all these reasons why we try to understand God.

            There’s nothing wrong with that, really.  It’s certainly not a sin.  As I said, it’s a natural human impulse.  But while there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s also not a very productive thing for us to do.  It’s really kind of pointless, because it’s impossible.  There is no way that any human being can ever understand God.  God is completely and totally beyond our understanding.

            As the Apostle Paul put it in our reading for today, “Oh the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!  How unsearchable His judgments, and His paths beyond tracing out!  Who has known the mind of the Lord?  Or who has been His counselor?”

            The wisdom and knowledge of God are deeper than we can ever imagine.  We cannot know the mind of the Lord.  Not because God does not want us to know His mind, but because our minds are simply not well-enough developed to understand the mind of God.  It would be like trying to explain advanced calculus to a three-year-old.  Advanced calculus makes sense–if you’ve studied enough mathematics to understand it.  But if you have not, it makes no sense whatsoever.

            That’s how the mind of God is.  God makes perfect sense–if our minds were developed enough to understand God.  But they’re not.  The only one whose mind is well-enough developed to understand God is–God.  So God makes perfect sense to God.  God just does not always make sense to us, because we don’t know all the things God knows, we cannot see all the things God sees, and our minds are not developed enough to understand all the things God understands.

            But still we try.  We try to understand God.  And so we come up with all kinds of lists to describe who God is.  God is love.  God is mercy.  God is almighty.  God is all-powerful.  God is all-wise.  God is all-seeing.  God is everywhere.  God is grace.  God is holy.  Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

            But you know, there’s one thing God is that usually does not make those lists.  And it’s another reason we cannot understand God.  Our contemporary song this morning alluded to it.  God is beautiful.

            Have you ever thought of God that way?  I have to admit, I rarely do.  But I should.  We all should.  Because God is beautiful.

            In saying God is beautiful, I’m not talking about physical beauty.  God may be beautiful in that way, too.  In fact, I suspect God is.  God certainly understands physical beauty, because God created a world with so much of it.  And we are really fortunate to live in the part of the world we do, where there is so much physical beauty.  The beauty of the river.  The beauty of the sunrises and sunsets.  The beauty of the clouds.  The beauty of the animals and birds.  God created a lot of physical beauty, so it certainly is possible that God possesses physical beauty.  But since no one has seen God, we cannot say that for sure.

            But God is definitely beautiful in many other senses of the word.  Listen to the definition of the word beauty, according to dictionary.com, and I think you’ll agree that it all applies to God.  “Possessing qualities that give great pleasure to see, hear, or think about.  Delighting the senses of the mind.  Something extraordinary or incredible.”

            That all describes God, or at least it should.  It should give us great pleasure to hear about or think about God.  God should delight the senses of our minds.  And God certainly is extraordinary or incredible.  By the very definition of the word, God is beautiful.

            And the fact that God is beautiful is another reason why we cannot understand God.  You don’t understand beauty.  In fact, trying to understand beauty misses the point.  Beauty is not there to be understood.  Beauty is there to be appreciated.  Beauty is there to give us pleasure.  Beauty is about love, not understanding.

            Paul goes on to tell us how we should live in appreciation and love of God’s beauty.  He says, “Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God–this is your true and proper worship.  Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

            When Paul says “offer your bodies as a living sacrifice”, what he’s saying is that everything about our lives on earth should be dedicated to God.  Everything we do should be dedicated to God.  Everything we say should be dedicated to God.  And not just the public things we do, either.  Yes, we should love our neighbors and make our public acts dedicated to God, but it’s not just that.  Everything we do or say, even when no one else is around, even when no one else will ever know what we’ve done–those things, too, should be dedicated to God.  That’s the only way we can truly and properly worship God.

            And in fact, it goes deeper than that.  Not only should our actions and words be dedicated to God, our very thoughts and feelings should be dedicated to God.  That’s what Paul means when he says, “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”  Because that’s where our words and actions come from, right?  They come from our mind.  They come from what we think and how we feel.  

We cannot dedicate our words and actions to God unless we have dedicated our thoughts and feelings to God.  Yes, we can do the right thing, outwardly, for a while, even if our hearts and minds are not in it.  But eventually, our true self is going to come out.  Our true thoughts and feelings will make themselves known.  We cannot help it.  And if our true thoughts and feelings are not holy and pleasing to God, then our words and actions will not be holy and pleasing to God, either.

But our true thoughts and feelings will only be holy and pleasing to God if, as Paul says, we are transformed.  That transformation can only come through the power of the Holy Spirit.  We cannot transform ourselves.  We need to do our part, but we cannot transform ourselves just by an act of our own will.  We need to open ourselves up to God’s will.  We need to open ourselves up to the power of God’s Holy Spirit.

How do we do that?  By prayer.  I know that tends to be the pastor’s answer to everything, but I really mean it.  I believe prayer has great power.  I’ve seen that power in my own life.  Not that I’m perfect–I’m nowhere close to perfect.  But I think I’m better than I once was.  I don’t think my mind has been transformed–but I feel like I’ve at least taken a very few small steps down that road.  And however far I’ve gotten, it did not happen because of my own will.  It happened because I prayed for God’s Holy Spirit to help me be the person God wants me to be.

And in this and most things, I’m no better than anyone else.  If God’s Holy Spirit can help me, God’s Holy Spirit can help you, too.  So pray.  And I’m not just talking about a brief, five-second prayer.  I mean, if that’s all you need to get transformed by God’s Holy Spirit, then that’s great.  But for me, it takes time.  It takes repeatedly asking for God’s Holy Spirit to transform me.  Not because God needs to be reminded, but because I do.  I need to remind myself to make it a priority in my life to allow God’s Holy Spirit to transform my mind, to help me overcome my sinful nature, to help me have thoughts and feelings that are holy and pleasing to God, so that my words and actions can also be holy and pleasing to God.  

And again, I’m not saying I’ve gotten there yet.  I have a long way to go.  But as they say, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  I may have nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go, but that’s still better than a thousand.  The point is not how far we’ve gone or how fast we’re moving.  The point is that we’re making progress.  The point is that we are dedicating ourselves to God, transforming ourselves, with God’s help, into the people God wants us to be.

We don’t have to understand God.  It’s impossible anyway.  God’s awesomeness and beauty cannot be understood by humans.  It can only be appreciated and loved and loved and worshiped.  So let’s do that.  Let’s ask God’s Holy Spirit to transform our minds, so we can dedicate our lives to God.  As Paul says, that is true and proper worship.