Tag Archives: God’s goodness

Reflections at Sixty

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I recently turned sixty.  A lot of water has passed beneath the bridge of my life with what feels like dizzying speed.  How could I have lived six decades already?  Where in the world has all the time gone?

As I reflect, I am struck first and foremost by a deep sense of gratitude.  God has blessed me with so many precious people who have deeply impacted me: parents, family, friends, wife, children, and grandchildren.  I have been given so much more than I deserved through the years: food, clothing, shelter, and health.  There have been incredible and undeserved opportunities to serve God and help others to come to know and grow in their walks with Him all over the world.

Of course, there are many regrets.  I openly acknowledge my many shortcomings, failures, character flaws, and sins.  I wish I were more patient, more humble, more kind, more emotionally engaged and mature.  I wish I were a better listener, asked more and better questions, had a greater sense of teachability and curiosity.

I somehow thought I would be significantly further along in my personal and spiritual maturity by now.  And while I have known many precious moments with Him, I believed that walking closely with Jesus would be easier and sweeter by now than it actually is.  My Christian life is still a daily struggle of wrestling with sin, character flaws, and bad habits.

Beyond this, there have been many deep heartaches and profound disappointments.  Some family and friends have disheartened me by walking away from the faith.  I’ve also caught myself asking: What has my life meant and accomplished?  I had big dreams in my youth.  Have I really followed Jesus whole-heartedly?  Has my life truly mattered and made a difference, making a lasting impact that genuinely honors God?

Nevertheless, in the face of all this, God’s goodness and faithfulness has been undeniable and unwavering.  I see without question the kindness, grace, and patience of a compassionate God who continues to love, forgive, and provide for me a life I never dreamed possible and the privilege to be used by Him in ways I never deserved or could have imagined.

This life has been, is, and always will be, a gift.  And now that I am fast-approaching the increasingly evident tail-end of it, Joe Rigney’s words hold a special significance: “Those at the beginning and the end tell those of us in the middle: This was you: weak, frail, dependent, and needy.  This is you: weak, frail, dependent, and needy.  This will be you: weak, frail, dependent, and needy.  You are a vapor, here today and gone tomorrow.  And your life is not your own.  It is a gift.”

Thank You, Lord, for creating, loving, and saving me.  Thank You for continuing to transform and conform me to the image of Your beloved Son.  Thank You for graciously giving me sixty years of life.  And thank You for the astonishing hope of eternal life in Christ that enables me to look to the future with unspeakable joy versus devastating dread or deluded denial.  You truly are a gracious, kind, and loving God!

God is Quite the Artist

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In my early days of walking with Christ, I was passionate about intellectual apologetics and arguments for the truth of the Christian faith. As important and meaningful as these are, for some strange reason, they tended to make me adverse to other ways to perceive God and His greatness.

The opportunity to spend fall in the upper Midwest for the first time in over two decades re-awoke in me a new appreciation and awe for the beauty of God only dimly reflected in the heartbreaking glory of the autumn colors being unveiled and bursting forth all around me. I have been struck dumb at the scintillating sight of it all.

It may come as no surprise to other thoughtful Christians, but all this beauty strikes me with the simple fact that God is an amazing artist. When you think about it, there is no inherent reason why creation needs to be beautiful—or why we should have the ability to apprehend and revel in that beauty with our five senses. The universe from top to bottom displays gratuitous aesthetic properties that draw us into a sense of gratitude and awe, perhaps even before we know who it is we are thanking and praising.

And I suspect that if God were merely an engineer and not also an artist, our world would look much different than it does. It might be functional and efficient, but it would not necessarily be beautiful in the broader sense of that term. The beauty is simple gratuitous and it is there because God Himself is beautiful and He wants us to see Him reflected in that beauty.

When Genesis tells us that God’s creation is good, it is not merely good for something in the pragmatic and instrumental sense of that word. It is good in part because it is beautiful and pleasing to behold—God saw that it was good and it pleased Him, just as He wants it to please us because He is good and beautiful.

When Paul castigates idolatrous non-believers in Romans 1 for their hardness of heart, he notes in verse 21 that one of the reasons people turned away from God and toward idols was that they refused to give God thanks for creation as a gift from God the Creator. The beauty of this earth is certainly praiseworthy and I thank God for not only being an artist, but for being an aesthetic artist of truly biblical proportions.