Monday's Motivation

      Recently my wife and two children drove up to Illinois to visit with my wife's side of the family. It's always a treat to get away and relax on my wife's farm outside of Chicago. We also took a day trip into the city to visit other family that live downtown.

We also had heard very good things about a church family named Bethel Church so we took the opportunity to visit them just over in Indiana and it was a true blessing to us that day. One of the pastors graced me with a copy of "Eyes Wide Open" from the Bethel bookstore. "Eyes Wide Open; Enjoying God in Everything" is authored by Bethel Churches Senior Pastor Steve DeWitt. So for this Monday's Motivation I'm going to issue a quote from this book. 

"When people think of God, they often consider His power or holiness or love or mercy. But how many people think of God as intrinsically beautiful? Yet it is God who created beauty. He is the Beauty behind every beauty. I am a pastor, I spend my life trying to persuade people that God alone is worthy of their love, dreams, passions-essentially their lives. I often find this to be a tough sell. The primary reason is that for fallen humanity God's desirability is in competition with His created beauties. Created beauty eclipses God's beauty in the desire factory of man's heart. It is a case of mistaken identity. Every created beauty was created by God to lead our affections to Him. That's why He made the pleasures of earthly beauty so fleeting-so that on the other side of the pleasure we might experience either wonder and worship and ultimate satisfaction in God or the pursuit of the pleasure that beauty provides for its own sake. If we choose the latter, we will only be disappointed again." -Steve DeWitt

May your Monday and ultimately your entire week be full of seeing God's beauty not the created beauty that eclipses the true beauty of God.