Lightness and Heaviness

It was dinner time, and our family was gathered around the kitchen island where we usually eat together. My wife asked me to pray for the meal, and we bowed our heads. As I gathered my thoughts, I realized that I hadn't thought about God for hours. And my full-time job is to lead a Christian ministry!

Amidst the ordinary tasks of responding to emails, managing technology, and checking off my to-do list, I had forgotten the reality of God.

Have you ever felt like God is absent? Instead of sensing the thick presence of God, we often experience life in a secular way. Everything happens according to the quirks of nature, individual effort, and global mega-trends that we cannot control. As we get pushed and pulled around every day, our lives can feel meaningless, empty, displaced, and useless. Apart from any transcendent source, we start to feel a lack of purpose.

What's the point of it all?

Is it YOLO - you only live once?

On a daily basis, the Bible teaches that we try to find meaning through our idols.

As C.S. Lewis put it, "And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modem philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth."

Our cultural moment is disenchanted, where it takes effort for many people to even conceive of the idea of God, much less believe that God is real, much less experience this world as God's creation, full of spiritual powers, and in which God is moving mysteriously but beautifully and constantly to restore all things.

As the pastor Phil Steiger writes, "The story is becoming increasingly common. When Christians present the case for the truth of our faith, a typical response — even among people with open minds — is some version of, 'So, what?'"

We can even have this emptiness of life while mouthing religious words.

Let's recall what the Lord announced to Jeremiah:

"Stand in the gate of the LORD'S house, and proclaim there this word, and say, Hear the word of the LORD, all you men of Judah who enter these gates to worship the LORD. Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Amend your ways and your deeds, and I will let you dwell in this place. Do not trust in these deceptive words: 'This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD.'"

Do you see the contrast? The people talk about God, but it doesn't matter in their lives. They do whatever they want and they bring the same attitude to religion. If it helps, great. If not, so what? Who cares?

Jeremiah's message was delivered to a completely different culture, but with the same spiritual attitude: I want what I want. That religion stuff - whatever, if it helps, who cares?

So I ask you, let's not approach this topic from a posture that is theoretical or judgmental. Let me ask you to consider your own life as I have wrestled with my life.

If you practiced living without reference to God for a week, what would change? Would it change what you do with your time? How do you spend your money? How do you treat people? Does God's presence shape your life?

Considering the weightiness of God's glory prompts us to reconsider our lives.

In Psalm 90, we read, "You return man to dust and say, 'Return, O children of man!' For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night."

And in Isaiah 64, we read, "We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away."

We are made of dust and to dust we will return.

And in our dusty lives, the further we drift away from God, the glorious one, the more insubstantial our lives become.

This is a truth at the heart of the First Love course.

Everything about our lives is fading away. Our disinterest in God makes us less interesting - because we are increasingly disconnected from reality.

Lewis illustrates this so powerfully in The Great Divorce. In this scene, the main character has arrived in heaven and is progressively understanding what it is like:

"My Teacher gave a curious smile. 'Look,' he said, and with the word he went down on his hands and knees. I did the same (how it hurt my knees!) and presently saw that he had plucked a blade of grass. Using its thin end as a pointer, he made me see, after I had looked very closely, a crack in the soil so small that I could not have identified it without this aid.

'I cannot be certain,' he said, 'that this is the crack ye came up through. But through a crack no bigger than that ye certainly came.'

'But—but,' I gasped with a feeling of bewilderment not unlike terror. 'I saw an infinite abyss. And cliffs towering up and up. And then this country on top of the cliffs.'

'Aye. But the voyage was not mere locomotion. That bus, and all you inside it, were increasing in size.'

'Do you mean then that Hell—all that infinite empty town—is down in some little crack like this?'

'Yes. All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World.'"

Is this what you want your life to become? There are two basic alternatives to life:

We can experience the glory and the pleasure and the delight of God — or the emptiness and the misery of his absence.

Our First Love is meant to be the great, all-consuming love of our lives.

Why?

In part, because God knows that our lives gain significance and substance when we grow in the knowledge of our glorious God.

The word for glory is kabod. Interestingly, this word can also mean 'heavy.' As we meditate on the glory of God, we are sensing whether God's presence is "heavy" in our lives - or insubstantial.

My hope is that as we now consider God's glory, and remember the glory we have seen of our First Love throughout this course, that we will be delighted and eager to realign our lives, our relationships, and everything… in accordance with the reality of a glorious God.