Have you ever wondered how God takes weak and broken, messed up human beings like you and me, and takes us on the journey from immaturity and carnality to maturity and transformation? That journey is hard enough to take stubborn, prideful, foolish people like me. When you also consider God’s primary goal––to produce deep, authentic love for Him and for people in our hearts––it seems impossible that God could ever win the prize that Jesus died for. Yet, without violating our free will, God conquers our hearts and helps us love Him with the entirety of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. How does He do it?
Beauty is how God conquers the human heart. This is a new idea for many Christians. Beauty is not often presented as a subject central to our faith. It can therefore be strange to hear that beauty is an essential element of walking in holiness, experiencing the love of God and growing in our relationship with Him. The central feature, however, of our hope in God’s promises to come is that He will make all things beautiful in His time. Solomon talks about this in Ecclesiastes 3:11, saying that God will make all things beautiful, and when He does, as the psalmist declared, Yahweh will adorn (clothe) Himself with that beauty and splendor (see Psalm 104:1–2).
The very proof that God is beautiful in character and nature—a beauty that He will put on display for all to see—is when we, His image bearers, are transformed to express that same beauty and splendor. This is the central premise of my book, The Triumph of Beauty. The beautiful God is going to make you and me beautiful, along with His entire Church, before transforming this world and bringing it into the fullness of beauty. His people and this world, transformed into His idea of beauty without sin or corruption, will be God’s “beauty resumé” by which He will fully conquer the hearts of all of humanity. Every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, and that He is the only one worthy to rule over His created order.
Growing up in a Pentecostal church culture, I learned that experiencing God happened by experiencing the power of the Holy Spirit. I was taught to seek the experience of God’s presence through a manifestation of the Spirit. Sometimes, this meant simply “feeling the presence of God,” as Smith Wigglesworth and other Pentecostal heroes of the faith had done before me. This could mean a weighty presence of the Spirit that bore down on me, or an electric sense of the nearness of God in a manifest way. Historic Pentecostal renewals spoke of even more intense manifestations of God’s presence that could cause physical manifestations like shaking, weeping, laughing or shouting. As a young man, I was therefore taught to “wait on the Lord” and seek the manifestations of His presence that might follow His “arrival” into a meeting.
I was also taught to operate in the gifts of the Spirit, or to engage when others “flowed” with the Spirit through the gifts. Body life meant that Christians could and should prophesy, heal the sick and cast out devils. The power of the Spirit expressed through the Body in ministering to one another is a powerful way of engaging with the wonder and awe of who God is and how He moves in our midst. I do not deny, nor am I ashamed, of these very powerful means of engaging with who God is. This was what my Christianity looked like in my formative years, and because of that, I grew to love the power and presence of the Holy Spirit in my life and in His Church.
Early on, however, I found that I did not know what to do in the meantime, while I waited for God to move. I could serve, work and play, but I felt as if something was missing from my pursuit of Jesus. I had an aptitude for apologetics and the pursuit of truth, which included an ability to expose flawed arguments. Unsurprisingly, my ability to win biblical arguments and advocate for biblical wisdom bore very little fruit in the teenagers and young adults I was ministering to at that time.
“There is a reason that Pentecostal Christianity is the fastest growing expression of Christianity on the earth, and has been for the last century. The power of the Spirit was meant for a higher purpose, however, and not as an end in itself.”
One could contend that this is true, by and large, for the Church of the Western world as well. The evangelical posture of defending the faith has fashioned Christian apologists who love truth and love exposing lies and deceptions, and who rightly seek to “hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). However, the evangelical use of rhetoric, logic and appeals to reason has made little impact on the surrounding culture. I made little impact that way on my city and on the young people I was serving.
I love the power of the Holy Spirit and the manifestation of His presence. I love truth and appreciate the valuable tools available to me to defend truth and expose deception. Reason and logic have limitations, however, engaging the mind but often leaving the heart untouched and unmoved. The power of the Holy Spirit is a critical element of my faith, and the awe and wonder that God’s power elicits go farther than reason and logic in moving my heart. There is a reason that Pentecostal Christianity is the fastest growing expression of Christianity on the earth, and has been for the last century. The power of the Spirit was meant for a higher purpose, however, and not as an end in itself.
The Spirit’s power can shock and awe us, but not sustain or fashion our hearts to be anchored and steady in every season. The power of God can capture our attention and excite our holy imagination, stirring us with genuine excitement to pursue God. The purpose of that power, however, is to point us toward His beauty.
It is God’s beauty that awakens and moves our hearts before making them tender and responsive to God’s truth and active leadership. Power commands attention. Once God has our attention, He wants to fasten our lives to His truth. The way He steadies and sustains us with His truth is through the delight and true joy we find in the revelation of His beauty. When God’s strategy to conquer our hearts by His beauty makes sense to us, He invites us to go on a journey to discover how this works in our lives today, as well as where beauty is taking all of us before the Lord returns.