Do NOT Be Content. . .without BEAUTY

I have recently developed and given a message entitled "I Choose to be Content" that has proven to be quite a powerful challenge for people. Contentment should be one of the characteristics of a child of God. It reflects trust in His sovereignty and love. It is always an experience of strength--enabled by God himself in the life of a believer. It isn't a wimpy word. It is a position of incredible power. God instructs us that we are to be satisfied with His person and provision in almost every arena of life--health, material goods, relationships and even in deprivation and hardship. But there is one area that God never instructs us to be contented: with ugliness. We are to always seek to create and encourage beauty.

Beauty is an essential component of God Himself. He is beauty. He creates beauty. He delights in beauty. In Psalm 50:2 we learn that from God's throne (Mount Zion) comes the "perfection of beauty." In Ps 27:4 the Psalmist desires to "gaze on the beauty of the Lord" and in Ps 45:11 the king is to be "enthralled by the beauty of the Lord." God created the trees in the Garden of Eden to be wholesome AND beautiful (a delight to the eyes). Beauty, along with God's Truth and Goodness, is essential to who God is. It should go without saying that it is important to His children!

Thomas Aquinas caught this, saying, "The highest beauty is in the Godhead, since beauty consists in comeliness, but God is beauty itself, beautifying all things.  The Creator of beauty has set up all the beauty of things."

There are books written about aesthetics which seek to define beauty. I'm also aware that the interpretation of physical beauty is cultural defined. But no matter what culture or epoch of time we find ourselves, we instinctively know beauty when we see it. It may be a result of being created in the image of God.

Too often, as a child of God, I grow complacent or lazy about my pursuit of the beautiful in my life--whether in my home, personal grooming or worship. This is not an area that I can afford to be satisfied. The pursuit of the truly beautiful is the pursuit of the only one who is "beautifully True."

St. Augustine says it so well,

My God and my glory, for this reason I say a hymn of praise to you and offer praise for Him who offered sacrifice for me…For the beautiful objects designed by artists’ souls and realized by skilled hands come from that beauty which is higher than souls; after that beauty my soul sighs day and night.