Beauty & Mystery

Soon we at The Core are looking forward to unveiling a brand new website. But we're not just looking for a new look, we have been busy putting into words the convictions God has been giving us over the past year-plus. Some of it is a re-working of the perspectives we held when we first announced our presence on the web, and some of it is brand new material.

Two topics of conversation that I believe to be painfully absent from the Church at large are Beauty and Mystery. Is it any wonder that Christianity has become a formulaic, money-driven institution when we've lost our beautiful, mysterious moorings? Following are the "blurbs" for each, which we intend to include on the new website. What's your perspective?

Beauty. God is beauty. It is not enough to say that God is beautiful, because He Himself is the standard, the essence, and the source of all that is beautiful. As a broken race, we humans have corrupted the standard of beauty. We try to make the world more attractive by replacing God’s creation with ours. We release movies and publish magazines to normalize an impossible standard of physical charm. As in all other sins, we have displaced God, and we must repent. First, we must commit to honoring all God’s beauty. We must remember that “man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart.” And though this is true, it is no doubt that God sees physical beauty in every human, something we cannot fail to recognize. Second, we must honor God with our own creative gifts, not settling for that which is utilitarian, but striving for gracefulness, intrigue, authenticity and wonder in all that we do. In the process, may we worship Him by fitting our expressions into His, and never exalting the works of our own hands. (I Samuel 16:7, Psalm 27:4, Ecclesiastes 2:11, 9:10)

Mystery. One of the definiting characteristics of Western Culture is the compulsion to “figure it all out,” and the word Mystery has come to describe nothing more than a genre of “whodunit” literature. While the quest for Truth is a noble one, it is foolish, arrogant and sad when a society settles for nothing less than a thorough, systematic comprehension of all it surveys. And when this approach is applied to the study of God it becomes sinful and idolatrous as well, because it presumes that we, as humans, can rise to achieve God-like understanding. God’s ways are higher than man’s ways, and we embrace His mystery when we revel in that, when we accept diversity in the secondary doctrines, when we celebrate the variety of His creation, and when we worship God, not only because we know Him to be good, but because He is a being far beyond our full knowledge. (Isaiah 40:13-14, 55:8, Romans 11:33-36, I Timothy 3:16)

3 Promises

It is a comfortable and happy religion to get a little book of God's promises and read them all the time. There's usually several hundred, and apparently we are supposed to "claim" them for ourselves.

God makes many, many promises in the Bible. But the fact that is disappointing for many people is that almost all of those promises were made to other people. To claim those promises for ourselves is a type of spiritual theft.

When it is all boiled down, God has really made only three promises to those of us who surrender our lives to Him:

1) I will be with you.

2) I will fulfill My perfect plan for your life, which includes being conformed to the likeness of My Son.

3) I will not hold your sin against you, so that when you die, you will live with Me forever.

Is that enough for you?