God is not boring
There's a chapter in the John Piper devotional that I've been reading called "God Is Not Boring." I read it and was so struck by it that I read it again the next day... and again the next day. I started underlining things, but soon found that I wanted underline everything.
What I love about the chapter is that he very simply puts into words what I have been trying to wrap my head around... my life around for a while. I fear that writing out my favorite parts will be some kind of copyright problem, since I pretty much want to share the whole chapter. So, think of this more as a commercial for the book. Go buy it and see for yourself why I believe that the 22nd century, if it comes, will remember John Piper as one of the greatest heros of the 21st century.
Here are a few lines from the chapter that stand out to me:
One of the great duties of the Christian mind is imagination.
...I say that imagination is a Christian duty for two reasons. One is that you can't apply Jesus' golden rule without it... Compassionate, sympathetic, helpful love hangs much on the imagination of the lover...
The other reason I say that imagination is a Christian duty is that when a person speaks or writes or sings or paints about breathtaking truth in a boring way, it is probably a sin. The supremacy of God in the life of the mind is not honored when God and His amazing world are observed truly, analyzed duly, and communicated boringly...
Imagination is the faculty of the mind that God has given us to make the communication of His beauty beautiful.
Don't mistake what I'm saying. Poets and painters and preachers don't make God's beauty more beautiful. They make it more visible... They cut through the dull fog of our finite, fallible, sin-distorted perception, and help us see God's beauty for what it really is. Imagination is like a telescope to the stars: It doesn't make them big. They are big without the telescope. It makes them look like what they are.
...Imagination is also contagious. When you are around someone (alive or dead) who uses it a lot, you tend to catch it. So I suggest that you hang out with some people ( mainly dead poets) who are full of imagination, and that you exert yourself to think of a new way to say an old truth. God is worthy...
What do you think?