All of life should be viewed through the lens of the Gospel. A lens colored by who God is and who we are in light of Him. It’s a top-down approach, one largely neglected by many of us who choose instead to see life and the world from our own vantage point. In this bottom-up approach, we falsely define God, our circumstances, and the world in light of who we are. We allow our views to subjectively contaminate how we see life and our Creator.
It’s easy to do. It’s easy to choose the wrong lens––to see God and our lives through the lens of suffering or the lens of betrayal or the lens of sickness or the lens of loss or the lens of discouragement. And it’s certainly easy to allow our feelings to color what we see, but ultimately, if we choose any lens but the Gospel lens we pick up distortions and grossly misinterpret just about every part of life.
Truth is what we seek. Not our truth, not someone else’s, but God’s. He is the one who defines life and gives truth, not us.
J.I. Packer said, “Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God, most of life’s problems fall into place of their own accord.” Brother Lawrence wrote, “Let us occupy ourselves entirely in knowing God. The more we know Him, the more we will desire to know Him. As love increases with knowledge, the more we know God, the more we will truly love Him. We will learn to love Him equally in times of distress or in times of great joy.”
True understanding, and perseverance through life’s storms, comes with knowing God. In knowing who He is and how He sees us. Now, of course we will never be able to mine the depths of who God is, but committing ourselves to a life-long pursuit to grow in the knowledge of God is something that will yield unimaginable fruit. It’s something we will never regret doing.
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[…] week, I wrote about how important it is to engage in the pursuit to know God. About how we can use a Biblically accurate understanding of who God is to see the world and […]
[…] wrote last week about the importance of our pursuit to know God. About how we can use our Biblically accurate understanding of God to see the world and ourselves […]
Laurie,
I think when we see greatness we desire to be great (like someone who is really good at a sport we are involved in we wish to be like them). I think as we grow in knowledge of God and see His greatness our desire to be like Him increases as well. It takes a lot of discipline to not fall into the trap of seeing the world only through our experiences and our beliefs. We need strong convictions but one of those convictions needs to be that we are willing to look inward to see if we need to consider other points of views and most certainly we need to look at things as God would. Truly the only way to approach being able to do that is to know more about all who He is which any life long pursuit would never exhaust.
I like how you put it that way, Mark! Seeing greatness inspires greatness. Great addition! Thank you.