Beauty That Reorients Our Life

Excerpt taken from The Triumph of Beauty: God’s Radiant Answer for the World’s Growing Darkness by David Sliker.

Chapter 1
Beauty That Reorients Our Life

What is your life oriented toward? There are basic desires that orient our lives and drive our actions and choices. At a base level, we want our material needs met-food, clothing, a home and the means or resources to provide these necessities. In the process of acquiring the resources necessary to build our lives, we also have emotional and relational needs that must be met. Our Creator declared in the Garden of our origination: “It is not good that man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18). We need companionship, friendship and acceptance from those around us. We were created with a need for unconditional acceptance — to be loved and cherished despite our weaknesses and shortcomings. While our material needs might be met on an ongoing basis, if our emotional needs are not met, our relationships will become toxic and unmanageable and our behaviors even more broken and unhealthy.

Beyond these base material and emotional needs, we have desires and longings in the depths of our souls that were placed there by our Father. Some of these desires include a longing for greatness and impact, or a life of genuine significance. Our desire to be loved runs deeper than we realize, too, beyond the surface friendships and small talk that fills our lives. We long to be enjoyed, and to experience the beauty of intimacy without shame. We also have a profound desire to be wholehearted, or fully given to the people and things we love. Finally, we were made for pleasure, and we have a deep desire to be fascinated or captivated by beauty.

A fulfilling and ultimately satisfying life therefore looks like one in which we are known and enjoyed freely, just as we are right now, in all our weaknesses and deficiencies. We want to engage at a deep relational level with the ones whom we trust and feel safe with, genuinely connecting and being known and understood. We want to make genuine contributions that serve those around us who care about us, and we want to have a lasting impact long after we have gone. We want to be fully engaged with all our hearts into these kinds of relationships and significant, meaningful contributions. In the process, we want to be fascinated by beauty along the way.

By design, our deeper needs and longings ultimately find their greatest fulfillment and satisfaction when met by God Himself. His desire is to capture our hearts and fascinate us with His beauty, as the one who authored all beauty. His very design of the human spirit works in us to define beauty. The elements of style, color, design and order that people draw from to determine what is beautiful originated within Him.

It is God Himself who ultimately “satisfies the requirements” of aesthetic or external beauty as a means of drawing us into an exhilarating relationship with Him. This relationship reveals to us the far more profound beauty of His personality, emotions and character. His beauty is inextricably linked to His love-specifically, to how He loves in a manner that brings powerful and eternal resolution to our human search for acceptance and understanding, without shame or rejection. There is no one who loves us like the One who knows us deepest and best.

This kind of beauty awakens and stirs our hearts, and this kind of love frees and empowers our hearts with the kind of fearless, courageous engagement with God that we were made to express. This is the kind of love that ignites the wholehearted response we long to give. We don’t want to hold anything back or live a safe, risk-free life when we feel secure in love. We want to be fully given and are therefore positioned by Jesus’ love to make the kind of significant, long-term impact that we have quietly and desperately been wanting to make on the world around us. This is the kind of life God wants for us — one of significance, fulfillment and purpose from a place of confident rest, as we experience the pleasure of being loved and enjoyed by God and others whom we serve and bless.

Pursuing and growing into this kind of life takes a significant, long-term reorientation of our hearts. Between our own sinfulness or fallenness and the fallen world we have been raised in, we have learned to order our lives around the absence of God rather than around His dynamic presence in our lives. In His relative absence in our thinking and daily experience, our value systems and priorities have been ordered around the satisfaction of our material and emotional needs, with ourselves as the primary source we draw from.

In addition, we have learned to draw from one another for significance, satisfaction and strength. Both sources — ourselves and other people — are profoundly limited, broken, toxic and ultimately dissatisfying and disappointing. Men and women fail one another, fail themselves and even at their best use and exhaust one another in seeking to satisfy the never-ending search for fulfillment and pleasure.

The current orientation of many people’s hearts is built around unhealthy compulsions and unsatisfied desires. Our culture defines success according to the social and economic systems that reward us with honor, privilege, affirmation, increased resources, finances and influence. In other words, we learn to define success according to the measure in which our material needs are assured and our emotional and relational needs are satisfied in relationship with our material needs. If people like us and reward us in ways that contribute to our financial and material stability, we feel a sense of professional fulfillment and personal satisfaction. All of this builds within our souls a love of money and a loyalty to it that supersedes all other loyalties. Our emotional and relational needs therefore become subservient to our need for material security, rather than being complementary to it. All of our needs and desires – material, emotional, relational­ – need to be met in a manner that helps us feel safe and secure. Otherwise, our resultant insecurity positions us to be adversarial to the people who threaten our sense of well-being.

Unless God is our source and supply, the one who meets our deepest needs and desires in the way that best satisfies our hearts, we will never be at rest. We will never, ever be free.

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Order your copy of The Triumph of Beauty: God’s Radiant Answer for the World’s Growing Darkness  by David Sliker.