Recapture the Wonder

by Ravi Zacharias

Francis Bacon ruefully observed that though it may be true that all philosophy begins with wonder, it is also true that wonder dies with knowledge. Explanation is the termination point of mystery, analysis the death knell of curiosity.

Wonder is not merely the same as happiness.

Wonder is that possession of the mind that enchants the emotions while never surrendering reason. It is a grasp on reality that does not need constant high points in order to be maintained, nor is it made vulnerable by the low points of life’s struggle. It sees in the ordinary the extraordinary, and it finds in the extraordinary the reaffirmations for what it already knows. Wonder clasps the soul (the spiritual) and is felt in the body (the material). Wonder interprets life through the eyes of eternity while enjoying the moment, but never lets the momentary vision exhaust the eternal.

K. Chesterton once quipped that before you remove any fence, always first ask why it was put there in the first place. You see, every boundary set by God points to something worth protecting, and if you are to protect the wonder of existence, God’s instruction book is the place to turn. Anyone who thinks he or she can place the boundaries arbitrarily will either destroy the enchantment of life or else wear him- or herself into exhaustion. God’s commands are there to protect what life is truly about, not the other way around. Implementing that truth in our lives keeps us from losing the wonder.

In the 1950s kids lost their innocence.They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, and lyrics in music that gave rise to a new term—the generation gap. In the 1960s, kids lost their authority. It was the decade of protest—church, state, and parents were all called into question and found wanting.Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it. In the 1970s, kids lost their love. It was the decade of me-ism dominated by hyphenated words beginning with self. Self-image, Self-esteem, Self-assertion . . . It made for a lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and no one had the nerve to tell them there was a difference. In the 1980s, kids lost their hope. Stripped of innocence, authority, and love and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation stopped believing in the future. To bring it up to date, I have added two more paragraphs: In the 1990s kids lost their power to reason. Less and less were they taught the very basics of language, truth, and logic and they grew up with the irrationality of a postmodern world. In the new millennium, kids woke up and found out that somewhere in the midst of all this change, they had lost their imagination. Violence and perversion entertained them till none could talk of killing innocents since none was innocent anymore.

The years of childhood are filled with mystery.Evidently God does not see mystery as inimical to reason. In this day of cloning and genetic engineering we would do well to remember where to draw the line. Unlimited “creativity” that overruns the boundaries given to the “human creator” gives to us that which even God does not have. God did not give us infinite knowledge. When we pretend to be God and play God,we do so without the benefit of God’s character and we redefine good and evil. Pushing the boundaries of knowledge without the knowledge of who we are makes the knowledge sought greater than the seeker, and only God is big enough to hold that supremacy. Wonder can be enhanced when reasoning knows where to draw the line, for the noblest reason is to know God Himself. This is a divine principle carved into the human longing for a story with enchantment. Ultimately, we will get to where that principle leads us, but before we do there are markers along the way we must first examine.

To ascribe value only to monetary things is to reduce one’s own value to the same level. To lift the value of something beyond the monetary is to make it immeasurable.

In that one statement Jesus put our relationship with God in a direct line with our relationship with Himself. You see, the Christian faith is really not one that calls us to a ceremonial life by means of which spirituality is attained. Rather, it challenges us to remember that by our own efforts we cannot produce a truly spiritual life. It takes the work of the Holy Spirit in us. That, religion cannot do. Ceremony has the power to soothe and mollify the conscience, but ceremony no more changes reality than outward behavior guarantees love.

When you entrust Him with your life, He generates the wonder.

But the word gratitude may need a little explanation. It comes from the same word as the word freedom. When something is gratis, we consider it free. Gratitude is the freeing expression of a free heart toward one who freely gave.

The gratitude that I am speaking of is not sporadic. It cannot be spent or exhausted. It is the transformation of a mind that is more grateful for the giver than for the gift, for the purpose than for the present, for life itself rather than for abundance. It values a relationship rather than any benefit made possible by the relationship. Even more, it is the capacity to receive, rather than the gift itself, to trust even when the moment seems devoid of immediate fulfillment. It is more than happiness. It is more than peace. In short, where there is no gratitude, there is no wonder.

In philosophy, he takes us through the ponderous musings of thinkers with their singular ability to climb the ladder of abstraction. Volumes, debates, and arguments abounded in early Greece. They spared no verbiage in their attempts to transcend the physical and grasp the metaphysical. In the end they arrived at descriptions of gods and goddesses in squandered and perverse loves, in fact, in worse moral shape than humanity. Mythologies filled their pages, with seductions and betrayals at every turn. Truth became elusive and the conscience was still left empty. As someone said of ancient Greece,“The Greeks abandoned their gods not because the people became so immoral, but because their gods became so immoral.”

A different route was taken by science in search of the sublime. This discipline set its gaze upon the heavens and tried to solve the riddles of the universe. Its readings expounded upon the marvels of time and space. But for a vast number,“staying true to their profession” meant that only natural explanations won the day. Science kept its sights on forces and laws and events. At best, some would concede the “footprints” of a designer, but the footprints they offered often did not lead the soul to satisfaction. It was one no less than Bertrand Russell who said that of the two deepest hungers he ever felt, knowledge and love, the latter one remained, at the end of his days, unfulfilled.

Then there was the venture of Judaism, one of the greatest ever contributions for mankind in search of the sublime. The Law was revealed to Moses; yet, in the end, the Jews recognized that the Law was only a mirror that revealed their flaws and disfigurements. It did not have the power to transform. The nation that received the Law found out how easy it was to disobey it, and in the end, feel nothing more than wretchedness. The Law was the main script, but the footnotes of destruction and death ov...

One can understand how, in sensitive hearts, the knowledge of having betrayed the God one loves is not easy to overcome. But is not this the very depths to which God descends in order to meet us? Was not this the point of the shepherd leaving the ninety-nine to go and look for the one? The psalmist David knew what it was to blatantly dishonor God, yet it is he who wrote, “Blessed [Happy] is he . . . whose sin is covered” (Psalm 32:1). Forgiveness that makes it possible to delight in the loving mercy of God should never lose its novelty if wonder is to impel life forward so that we are not trapped in the past.

True love is a thing of the heart and must be raised to what God intends it to be. It can never be fully expressed until it has been totally given first to God. The illustration is so vividly put before us. We see Jesus’ personal love for this disciple. Time and again Peter had failed. He stumbled, bungled, and overestimated his own commitment, and yet there is a tenderness that Jesus shows toward Peter that is proverbial. But having known forgiveness, Peter missed love’s second step—to give himself fully to that love.“Peter, do you really love me?” That was the question. Only in the binding of one’s will can love be truly expressed. Jesus reminded Peter of this. He in effect told Peter that the day would come when he would have to prove his love by his willingness to lay down his life for his Lord. How does one enjoy love? By being totally sold out in the heart to God Himself.

But there is more to reading than the Word alone. There is the very discipline of reading and, I might add, what we read. I am a writer and I have some deep struggles in the Christian faith. It is not with my faith, but with the way I see it abused and, if you will, treated as something trite and shallow by those who claim to be believers. There are books by the score on the shelves of Christian bookstores. Check them out. What do they point to? Is it to the nobler and higher and richer truths of God, or is it to more of ourselves? Thankfully the nobler and higher truths are there, but for the most part, judging by the titles and content, one would think the Christian faith is all about me and how I feel and what I want. There are books on happiness by the score, how to succeed in a variety of ways. Stop. Ponder. Reason. Is your own reading shallow or deep? The wonder that you will find in the shallow end can only be for a child. Swimming in the deep is for the mature. If a follower of Jesus does not mature in his or her reading, the church could end up running the biggest nursery in the world.

When the apostle Paul was in prison he wrote to his spiritual son, Timothy, asking for his cloak and his books. How often have we read or heard that it was the books or thoughts from their reading that helped a person in dire straits in prison or in a situation of danger to survive and triumph through the situation? G.K.Chesterton was once asked for the one thing he would want if he were stranded on an island with no hope of any outside rescue. His answer was as practical as his wit:“Why, a book on boat building, of course!” If wonder is to be retained in our mind, reading and reading well is indispensable to the imagination and the heart. Good reading is like looking for something you have lost and finding it, but in the search finding something else that had also been lost. That is how wonder is constantly replenished.

If reading is the first component of retaining wonder, reflection is the second. I have often been asked as I have carried out my responsibilities and calling over the years how one remains fresh in one’s thinking and able to keep one’s heart sensitive to the newness of God’s touch. I know of no better answer than to be in regular times of solitude and quietness before our Lord. In our harried and hurried lifestyles we work and rush and meet and talk. We take very little time to think. Thinking is a dying discipline in a society that throbs with activity.

But this is what our society is so afraid to do in our day, is it not: to pause, to think, to reflect, to listen? I shudder to think of all that has been aborted in life, of creative ideas and so much else that has been lost to the imagination when we do not even think of the decisions we make or of the deeds we practice. Into this rushing lifestyle have come theories on meditation telling us how to think on nothing until we realize we are divine inside. The Scriptures do not tell us to empty our minds and think nothing but to exercise the minds God has given us to think on things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, or praiseworthy (see Philippians 4:8), to meditate on His law (see Psalm 119:97), and “to take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). So little of this is done that the mind becomes incapable of living in silence for even a short span of time. Wonder is retained by wise pondering. Unless we learn to think and reflect on things above we will reflect the hollowness of a world moving fast but slow to think.

A student at a university said to me,“I often wonder about Jesus struggling at Gethsemane over the impending crucifixion. What was happening there? Jesus asking to be spared the cup? It sounds crazy to me,” he said. I answered,“Ponder with me for a moment. The cup of human sin was to be drunk to the last dregs by the purest one of all. The most painful physical torture was that of being crucified. Yet the Lord Jesus did not fear the physical pain. The only indivisible entity in the world is the very Holy Trinity. The possibility of His Father turning away from Him when He was subjected to the accursedness of sin was paramount in His mind. But He knew that if that was the only way to accomplish salvation, He would do it. “Think further. There are realities in the human experience that cannot be mitigated until they have been seen for what they are. Evil and love are two such truths. There is nothing so horrific as evil and yet we have tried to deny its existence. The Hindu calls it Maya—nonreal, illusionary, having a different context in appearance than in actuality. The Muslim denies original sin. The Buddhist believes you can work your way through the maze of reincarnations till all evil, that is, desire, is shaken off and we are left desiring nothing. “Look at the Cross, now. Evil is seen for what it is—all the vileness in the human heart is there in the face of the perfectly pure. Evil is not covered up. See again the marvel of God’s love that offers forgiveness of such...

The early church father John Chrysostom said this of prayer: The potency of prayer hath subdued the strength of fire, it hath bridled the rage of lions, hushed anarchy to rest; extinguished wars, appeased the elements, expelled demons, burst the chains of death, expanded the gates of heaven, assuaged diseases, repelled frauds, rescued cities from destruction, stayed the sun in its course, and arrested the progress of the thunderbolt. Prayer is an all-sufficient panoply, a treasure undiminished, a mine which is never exhausted, a sky unobscured by the clouds, a heaven unruffled by the storm. It is the root, the fountain, the mother of a thousand blessings.6 We can either dismiss this as mere rhetoric or face the grim fact that prayerlessness is the scavenger of wonder. If prayer is indeed the root, the fountain, and the mother of a thousand blessings, then prayerlessness is the seed and weed of the destruction of a thousand blessings. It is here that we win or lose.