More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
we see God’s power because, in this body of Christ, we find a place where we can be gloriously and devastatingly human.
We love people universally by loving the particular people we know and can name. We love the world by loving a particular place in it—a specific creek or hill or city or block.
incarnation of Jesus is the ultimate example of this principle, when the one
who “fills all in all” became a singular baby in a tangible body in a par...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
We are drawn to those we find lovely and likable. Yet those Jesus spent his time among—and those most drawn to Jesus—were the odd, the disheveled, and the outcast. Those who were winning at life saw no need for this life-disrupting Savior. The people of God are the losers, misfits, and broken. This is good news—and humiliating.
God loves and delights in the people in the pews around me and dares me to find beauty in them.
We work out our faith with these other broken men and women around us in the pews. It’s lackluster. It can be boring or taxing. It’s often messy. It’s sometimes painful. But these Christians around me become each other’s call and response.
The church is an eternal body, an international organism, an institution made of every tribe, tongue, and nation (Rev 7:9).
we participate in the life of an international and ancient Christian community—we belong to each other and to those on the other side of the globe.
seeing, and smelling that God is good. Pleasure is our deep human response to an encounter with beauty and goodness.
Ironically, greed and consumerism dull our delight. The more we indulge, the less pleasure we find.
Pragmatism, another powerful cultural force, can denigrate our desire for beauty and enjoyment—we
Coffee was first invented by Ethiopian monks—the term cappuccino refers to the shade of brown used for the habits of the Capuchin monks of Italy. Coffee is born of extravagance, an extravagant God who formed an extravagant people, who formed a craft out of the pleasures of roasted beans and frothed milk.
A culture formed by the gospel will honor good and right enjoyment, celebration, and sensuousness. Christian worship and community have left a legacy of beauty:
G. K. Chesterton saw in God a childlike wonder. Children never tire of beauty and pleasure. They embrace enjoyment with abandon.
We have sinned and grown old, and become dulled to the wonders around us. Though it may seem counterintuitive, enjoyment takes practice. Throughout our life we must relearn the abandon of revelry and merriment.
music has always been a way for the church to hone its theology and practice prayer with artistry and beauty. On
knowing that God
is worthy to be worshiped in and through beauty.
Our God-given, innate thirst for enjoyment and sensuousness is directed toward the one who alone can quench it, the God who we were made to enjoy forever.
We are not only grateful for pleasure; our hearts wonder what kind of Creator makes a world that overflows with such loveliness and beauty.
I have to learn to surrender, to give up my flimsy illusion of control, and relax into beauty. As busy, practical, hurried, and distracted people, we develop habits of inattention and miss these tiny theophanies in our day. But if we were fully alive and whole, no pleasure would be too ordinary or commonplace to stir up adoration.
