Beauty

The gospel is both lovely and commendable. What God has done to save us in Christ is beautiful. And that gospel restores our minds to see the beauty God’s creation; what we can commend and recommend to others. By seeing those things that are part of God’s beautiful design, we can use them to amplify the worship of our beautiful Creator and Savior.

Note: This transcript was auto generated and may have errors.  If you would like to volunteer to review and edit our sermon transcripts before they are posted, contact Gail Peterson, gpeterson@calvaryefree.church.

Well, the past four weeks we have taken a deep dive into the contents of the Christian mind by looking at the categories of thought that are listed for us by the Apostle Paul in Philippians chapter four, verse eight. Let me read that for you. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Now, up to this point, I have had the extreme pleasure of studying very distinct categories marked by words that are used throughout all of Scripture. Truth. I can talk about truth forever. I love talking about truth. Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. You will know the truth and the truth will set you free. And truth has a very clear enemy falsehood. Right. Lies. If I tell you to pursue what is true in the world and refuse to accept lies, you can get a very clear picture in your mind of what that looks like. And the same is true of justice and purity. The other side of that is injustice and impurity. You just throw an M or an N on the front of the word, and you’ve got the opposite of that word. It’s so easy and you can picture justice and you can picture purity. Honor and respect are a bit harder, but we can all agree.

I think that the Bible gives us plenty of guidance on those things, especially people that are dishonorable or disrespectful. So we got to throw a disc there on the front of the word, and we know that we’ve got the opposite. We know what we’re talking about. So true, honorable, just and pure. Those first four words were so nice. Please remember that church and pray for your pastor, who is now heading into the haze and fog of subjectivity. That is the last four words in this list. A few weeks ago, Jamie and I were were talking about this series and I told him I started off with the best of intentions, that this thinking that the whole list would be very, very clear. And as it turns out, the last part of this list presents some challenges. Care to hear my problems? Church. I feel like I should be laying down for this. First of all, the two words that we’re going to look at today are not used anywhere else in the Bible. They’re not used by Paul. They’re not used by any of the biblical writers. Uh, this makes their meaning abstruse. What does abstruse mean, exactly? If I don’t define my words, you don’t know what I’m talking about, right? I used a thesaurus to make that point this week. Also, these last four words have an incredible amount of semantic overlap. Their meanings are not distinct, lovely, commendable, excellent, and worthy of praise.

I looked up, uh, the the word that’s translated here commendable. And it said that the meaning is worthy of praise. Like, are you’re just messing with me now. And the third challenge here is that there’s quite a bit of subjectivity in what makes something lovely and commendable. I mean, what what makes something beautiful? These these are not easy categories to draw lines around and say this is included and this isn’t included, but there is a way forward. God’s word to us is never without reason. And Paul says here, uh, some things that are very helpful for us to strive in our minds to worship the Lord. There’s no question that the gospel, that Christ’s death on the cross for our salvation is lovely and commendable. What God has done to save us in Christ is beautiful, and that gospel restores our minds so that we can now see the beauty in all of God’s creation, what we can commend and what we can recommend to other people. We can see it because our minds are transformed in Christ by seeing those things that are part of God’s beautiful design, we can then use them to amplify our worship of our beautiful creator, our beautiful Savior. So this morning, we’re going to consider what it means to put our minds on things that are lovely and commendable because we are new creations in Christ. Uh, as we’ve have throughout this series, we’re going to first look at what Paul means.

We’re going to work on what is how do we define the word as Paul uses it here in his in his list? What does it what does he mean when he says that something is lovely and commendable? And then we’ll consider how the Proverbs describes what is lovely and commendable. And finally, we’ll consider how Christ displays God’s beauty as we fix our eyes on him. So let’s start with why we’re doing two words instead of one. It’s because these words are very closely linked together. That first word, lovely, is simply a reference to anything that is pleasing. Any anything that’s pleasing to you, it could be something you see. It could be something you feel, something you eat. Now, this might come as quite a shock, but this is an instruction in the Bible from the Apostle Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit to be written down in the Word of God, to think about things that we like. Do you know, the Bible tells us to think about things that that we like. Do you like puzzles? Well, think about puzzles. It’s fine. Do you like aerospace engineering? Think about aerospace engineering. Do you like animals? Well, you can go on down to the zoo and you can watch the lions. I’m. I’m I’m sorry. You can watch the lions, right? I don’t I don’t know how that got in there.

That’s a mistake. That there’s so many lovely things that the point of this first word that Paul uses here, lovely, is that God puts things into the world for us to enjoy for for our pleasure. And he’s designed us to derive pleasure from those things. That’s what the word means. The second word, which is very closely related, simply means to commend something, to say out loud that something is pleasing or good. You see how close that is? They’re very, very, very tightly knit. It’s the it’s the relationship between having some barbecue and then saying, this is good barbecue. That’s something lovely that you’ve commended. Right. It’s, it’s you’ve probably done this. It’s the joy of seeing a sunrise. Right. You get up early in the morning, you see a sunrise and you whisper under your breath, this is beautiful, right? That’s the relationship between lovely and commendable. Uh, this is how we get our word recommendation, right? So we’re recommending something to someone else. When my family moved to town here a couple of years ago, we got recommendations for for just about everything. That’s how we got a realtor. That’s how we got a mechanic. That’s how we got the good ice cream in town. That’s how we found it, right? Everybody was recommending things to us. People pointed us to things that were worthy of praise because they enjoyed their experience, and they wanted us to then have a good experience.

That’s how lovely and commendable work together. I’m using the word beauty to summarize that relationship. Beauty is personal preference on display. Now, I imagine that there are some of you here in the room today who find what I’m talking about pretty different from your typical church experience. You’re not used to liking stuff, liking enjoyable things, and then talking about it with others as a part of Christianity. But it is. It is a part of the Christian life experience. Don’t forget that before Genesis three we have Genesis one and two. I think we forget that sometimes. And in those chapters, we learn God’s original design for humanity was to rule over it, subdue it, take care of it. Right? Work the ground. Do do do the hard work of cultivating the earth that we’ve been given. We can. We can enjoy God’s creation. Now, here’s the difference between the way Paul uses these words and the way they might be used outside the Bible. We need to remember that these words are part of a list. Get those lines out there. These words are part of a list, and they are found within the the world view of Scripture. And what I mean is, even though beauty is subjective, with each person choosing what they like and recommend, the scope of beauty is limited to what Scripture would call beautiful. This list that is these words are found in.

It has to be considered if something is not true, honorable, just, and pure, it can in no way be something legitimately pleasurable or beautiful to a follower of Christ. The way the list is written, you can’t put your thoughts onto something in a category that violates another category. Uh, and this is easier to see if you take two other words take truth and justice. There’s no such thing as false justice. That would just be injustice, right? So there’s no such thing as honorable impurity. If something is impure, it is by definition, dishonorable. So the the same is true of beauty. Something cannot be lovely and commendable if it’s untrue, unjust or impure. This is. This is how you can distinguish thoughts of legitimate and illegitimate pleasure. Just because you like something doesn’t make that thing a legitimate Christian thought worthy of space in your mind. Uh, being attracted to the beauty of your spouse is a wonderful gift from God. Daydreaming about the beauty of other people who are not your spouse is impure lust, and you need to call that what it is. You need to call that sin out for what it is. Those are the same impulse to beauty, but one meets the biblical standard for beauty and the other doesn’t. Now we how can we discern between acceptably beautiful things in the world and those things compromised by sin? Well, church, this is where things get a little bit gray.

Uh, some things that are not sinful can be enjoyed by Christians, but those same things might bind the conscience of other Christians. Uh, if you like steak, and I invite you over, and I grill you up a steak and we have a steak dinner together. That is a beautiful thing, right? But what if, right before you cut into the steak, I tell you, I got these steaks from a local cult here in town that still does animal sacrifices? Are you going to eat that steak? I am, I’m still going to eat that steak. But you might not. That may sound like a weird illustration. And I get it. It sounds like a weird illustration, but it’s exactly the situation that the Corinthian church found itself in, surrounded by foreign temples that would sell meat sacrificed to idols out of those temples they’d sell them in in the meat markets. Can you eat that meat? Paul said that since idols are nothing, that’s just meat. But if you’re a Christian who feels like eating the meat would be like worshipping the idol, he said, then don’t do it. Or if by eating the meat, you would appear to be worshipping that idol to your friend, then don’t do it for the sake of what it appears to your friend. See the grey area there? As it’s a it’s a pretty, pretty difficult grey area. Christians can have different perspectives on what they are free to do before the Lord, and what they aren’t free to do.

Christians have to be constantly asking, is this sin? Is this sin? Is these are these thoughts? Am I sinning in my thoughts? Here? Is this is this sin for me? If something isn’t sinful? It can then be considered part of the beauty of God’s creation. But at that point, after answering that question, the discernment process is not over. Something may not be sinful on its own, but it may take too big a priority in your life. And then it becomes a stumbling block for sin for you. Because it’s too big, it’s too important. Sports, alcohol, video games, certain relationships that you might have work money, even resting. Anything that can occupy your thoughts to, to, to the place that a beautiful thing turns into an ugly thing simply by the amount of space it takes up in your mind and heart has to be rejected and put away. In that same passage about the meat, Paul gives us the key to determining what is and is not acceptable pleasure that can be commanded. Like I said before, these words, lovely and commendable, are not used anywhere else in Scripture. But I think Paul’s instruction in first Corinthians ten, where he addresses this meat issue, is the way forward for all matters of beauty in our world. So I’m going to read this passage to you.

This is first Corinthians 1023 to 31 is the full passage. Listen to this. All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful, but not all things build up. Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor. Eat whatever is sold in the market meat market without raising any question on the ground of conscience. For the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. If one of the unbelievers invites you to dinner, and you are disposed to go eat whatever is set before you without raising any question on the ground of conscience. But if someone says to you, this has been offered in sacrifice, then do not eat it for the sake of the one who informed you, and for the sake of conscience I do not mean your conscience, but his. For why should my liberty be determined by someone else’s conscience? If I partake with thankfulness, why am I denounced because of that for which I give thanks? So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. Now. I can’t cover all that this morning. But you can hear the argument, can’t you? Can you hear how the argument flows and why? It’s a it’s a gray area, this this balance between enjoying God’s creation and loving your neighbor. It’s a hard balance sometimes to to strike. It’s this last principle, though, that we find in verse 31 that that will help every Christian steer a course through the gray area of what is beautiful and what isn’t.

So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. With every pleasure that you put to your mind, ask the question, can I glorify God with this? Can God be glorified in me and through me with these thoughts and these things? See, Paul leaves this. He leaves this open ended so that we can fill it in with any choice that we might make, whatever, whatever it is that you’re doing, do that for the glory of God. So if we want to know if something that we like, a commendable pleasure or a beautiful thing is is worthy of space in our minds, we just need to assess whether we can do this thing for the glory of God. Can can we praise God with this? Can we worship the Lord with this thing? Can you declare God’s goodness for this thing? So let’s, let’s, let’s work with this definition of beauty. Beautiful things are the parts of God’s creation that we enjoy and commend, because we can magnify the glory of God with them. Okay, every beautiful thing in this world, every beautiful thing in the world, has as its purpose to bring forth in our minds the majesty and the glory of God. Food and drinks are opportunities to declare God’s glory.

Uh, Psalm 19, verse one says, the heavens declare the glory of God. The sky above proclaims his handiwork. So the beautiful things, all the things around us, the sky, the ground, the food, everything is designed to point us to the beauty of God Himself and our ultimate flourishing and happiness is to be found in glorifying God with these beautiful things. So let’s look at this described in Proverbs. This is from Proverbs three which you heard read earlier. But I’m going to read it again, because what I want to do, I want you to see the connection between the beauty of God’s creation and the beauty of God and His Word. Okay. The beauty of his creation and the beauty of God in His Word. It’s a very clear connection made in this passage in Proverbs chapter three, this beginning in verse 13, blessed is the one who finds wisdom, and the one who gets understanding for the. The gain from her is better than gain from silver and her profit better than gold. She is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her. Nothing you can desire will ever compare to God and His wisdom. There’s the concept that we’ve been working with here. Desire. See that desire or pleasure? Notice what this author, though, is not saying. This author is not saying don’t find pleasure in those things.

He’s not saying don’t, don’t, don’t want those things. Don’t have a desire for those that you don’t want. Gold and silver and jewels. He’s not saying that. In fact, he’s assuming that these are pleasing things. He’s assuming that we would like these things because his argument is, you like these things. How much greater does the God who provided them? How much greater is is God over these things? If we didn’t like them, we didn’t find them pleasant, then we would never. We wouldn’t worship with them. We wouldn’t want them because we want them. He’s saying that want is even greater for the Lord. This this beauty of these things is pointing us to the beauty of God Himself. The beauty of the creation should point us to the beauty of the creator. Verse 16. Long life is in her right hand. In her left hand are riches and honor. Her ways are ways of pleasantness. And all her paths are peace. She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her. Those who hold her fast are called blessed. Again, we see the appeal here to pleasantness. Does God want your life to be pleasant? Does God want you to experience happiness? Of course he does. He made you to experience pleasantness and happiness. God’s wisdom here is pictured holding long life in one hand and riches and honour in the other hand. So these are three fairly distinct things that are being held in these hands.

And and if let’s take them like long life and riches and honor, you add those together. Can you can you think about retirement? Can you think about financial independence? Can you can you think about the legacy that you leave behind? That will be an honor for you? Of course you can. Those are all good things. But all of those things could be very ugly things if they weren’t in the hand of God. If you don’t think about them in submission to God and His Word and understand those things through his wisdom, those good things should be pointing your mind and your heart to the greatness of the Lord. Verse 19. The Lord, by his wisdom, founded the earth. By understanding he established the heavens. By his knowledge the deeps broke open and the clouds dropped down the dew. When I when I say the greatness of creation points to the greatness of God, these verses reflect the perspective that most of us have. We we think of God’s creation. We think of natural beauty. Usually, most of the people I know who follow Jesus would tell you that they commune with the Lord very well outdoors. And here’s the good biblical reason for that. You’re outside looking at his creation, the skies or the heavens, as it said here, the earth, the depths of the oceans, the, the, even the weather is mentioned here.

They’re all designed to point us to the majesty, majesty and the beauty of the one who created these things that we’re taking in visually and enjoying. Verse. Verse 21. My son, do not lose sight of these. Keep sound wisdom and discretion, and they will be life for your soul and adornment for your neck. An adornment around your neck. A necklace. A beautiful necklace. It’s a is a is a beautiful thing. But that adornment the points then to the beauty of God’s wisdom. Even the ways we make ourselves beautiful, right? We make ourselves up to look nice. Even that should be an indication of the beauty of God. Remembering that we are worshiping God in the way that we put ourselves together. I would summarize all these little pictures by saying that everything that you have, everything that you long for, everything that you desire for yourself, every good and beautiful thing on the earth is designed to turn your mind and your heart to the beauty and the majesty of the Lord and His Word. That’s what it’s all designed for. Now those are going to be different things to different people. This is where the subjectivity of it comes in. This is going to be different things to different people. Not everybody enjoys the same stuff. Right. And so that means we’re all going to be worshippers in unique ways, because what you enjoy and can worship God with other others may not.

They may not enjoy the same thing, and they enjoy other things that you don’t enjoy or don’t even experience. And so you end up worshiping God in different ways because your preferences come into play. Everybody keeps talking about how beautiful it is out right now. You notice this. Everybody’s talking about how beautiful and sunny and warm it is right now. It’s like spring. People keep saying, me, I’m cold, I’m still cold. I’m thankful I’m not as cold as I know I could be. But this is false spring to me at best. Okay? Other people, and I can only assume that these people are clinically insane. They want snow right now. They’re outside in this, and they’re reading Lamentations like it’s horrible. Why do girls want their hand soap to smell like food? Why do you remember when hand soap used to just be yellow? That was it. That was both its sight and its color. Its smell yellow. It was just yellow. Remember? You get hand soap. There was one kind. It was yellow. You had it. That was it. Now we get frosted coconut and vanilla lemon buttercream. My wife is constantly fooling me into believing that she’s baking a cake. Like, hey, we have a cake. No, no, no. Oh, it was just hygiene. Okay, great. I don’t know why people want to wash their hands with cake. It’s not my preference. I don’t like it, but it’s just a matter of opinion.

Some people love that beauty and pleasure are always preferential. Always. And what that means is that we’re going to think about different things as a way of worshiping the same Lord. And as long as those things are free of sin and are expressed in purity and they evoke thankfulness to the Lord, then every beautiful thing becomes a form of worship. Let’s turn to Jesus. I want to I want you to see how Paul instructs us to set our hearts. Uh, on on Jesus. Paul writes in Colossians three, verses one and two. If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. So Paul says that those who belong to Christ have spiritually died and have been raised with Christ. So if you have Christ, you are a new creation. So, so we’re we’re we’re still in this broken world. We’re still in a, in a broken creation. But spiritually, our state is that we are risen with Christ. We have been redeemed out of the sinfulness and the brokenness. And so therefore, we are to strive to have minds that conform to the this new reality. We have to put our minds on those things that are redeemed from sin and redeemed from death, the way that we’ve been redeemed from sin and death.

And what that means then, church, is that we are always constantly on the hunt for the redeemed version of everything in the world. Do you remember the the Gulf oil spill back in 2010, when that the well blew open in the Gulf and and dumped 134 million gallons of of oil into the ecosystem. A lot of conservationists had to get down there and save the the bird population, because the oil for the birds was toxic to them. And it would have would have wiped them out. Here’s a pelican before, before and after. That is a strange bird, isn’t it? But there he is on the left there. He’s just covered in oil, toxic to him. And then they worked on him. Worked on him, worked on him. And there he. Now he stands looking very handsome. Um, as a pelican. Same pelican, same pelican before, drenched in oil that would surely have killed him after he’s restored to life. Friends, if you are a new creation in Christ, this is what we’re doing with every item in God’s beautiful creation. This is what has been done for you in Christ. God has lifted you up out of death, washed you with his salvation, and restored you spiritually. And now that’s what we do. We are washing it. We wash everything in the world to restore it to the God glorifying beauty that it was intended to have.

That’s what it means to put our minds on the things above. We put our minds on the things above by putting our minds on those things that are washed and redeemed and able to be used in the worship of Christ. Marriage is beautiful. Marriage is beautiful. But to put our minds on marriage redeemed, we have to secure marriages sanctity and speak biblically about it. When we talk about how marriage is supposed to work, we don’t just adopt a worldly view of this godly institution. God established the institution, so we have to turn to him to find out what it’s supposed to look like. We redeem the institution of marriage from the stain of the world. The natural order of the earth is beautiful. It is beautiful. But to put our minds on nature means to both work, to preserve it, but while also not falling into worshipping it. We study it to learn about the good gift that God has given to us. We develop the earth. We. We work on the earth, but we never allow the good gift to become God. This is why all the various scientific disciplines are just so beautiful. We can study and develop God’s world in ways that glorify him. Food is beautiful. Food is lovely. And commencement. This sermon is making me hungry. Mm. It’s good. It’s good to work and to earn and to come home and to buy food for your family.

And then to gather around a table and eat together. That is all God’s beautiful design. And it comes right from Genesis one and two. But in a broken world, we have to think about how to make sure that the people who live in scarce circumstances have enough to eat. And then on the other side of that perspective, we have to redeem our view of food and balance it with our view of good health. We have to bring all of that together. See, God has made us with bodies, and a redeemed view of food and drinks has to be part of the way that we think about the world that God is redeeming. Sports are beautiful. God gave us these bodies to push to the limit to enjoy competition. My my buddy Chad Skarin is the pastor of Redemption Hill Church in in Stewartville. He’s the coach of my my daughter’s basketball team. Somehow I ended up as the assistant coach of this basketball team because. Well, because of course I did. I don’t know, that’s just how my life goes now. I guess since I played basketball through the eighth grade, I am now qualified to teach seventh graders how to play basketball. By the way, I found out my level of basketball proficiency. Seventh grade girl I dominate out there. It’s awesome. Anyway, one of the things that Chad is he’s we’re always doing group huddle.

Team huddle. We get together, we’re talking, we’re praying, we’re doing things. But one of the things that he always says when we get together, and I love it, is that he says to the girls, girls, we enjoy basketball, but we don’t worship it. We enjoy it. It’s great. It’s fun. It’s great to be in competition. It’s great for character building and all of that. It’s great to just have fun with your friends and to exercise and all of those things. It’s great. We don’t worship this. This is not God. That’s such a hard balance. That is such a hard balance. It is so easy to take a beautiful thing that God has given us and make it ugly by turning it into something that occupies the place of God in our minds. I could go on like this with every aspect of our world and all of God’s creation, every lovely thing, every commendable and recommendable thing, is a gift from God that is intended for us to find our ultimate pleasure in the beauty of Christ. We are to take these good things and experience these good things, and think these good thoughts about the good creation God has given us and say, we love these things you’ve given us, but they point us to the greatness of who you are, Jesus. We worship you with everything, and so our lives become worship in every respect. Whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable. Church, let’s think about these things. Let’s pray.