Look out your window in the next 24 hours and chances are you’re looking at some incredible fall colors. Gold, red, and green in contrast with a blue sky. Up close the color of the trees is inspiring. The deep gold is vibrant as we gaze up to leaf after leaf that obscures the branches of the tree. There is beauty in a distant view of the trees too. Dots of color all blend together to make a fall palate. The deep greens broken up with golden yellow dark reds peppered in boldly claiming their spot on the palette. No individual leaves, just circles of color in a strip across the horizon. In Colorado we’re treated with a mountain backdrop that makes the whole scene spectacular. This year fall has been the MOST beautiful of any fall I’ve experienced while living in this state.

And as I lean into my appreciation of the season I’m realizing that God created this beauty to reveal himself to us.

We can read the Bible to know that he created the heavens and the earth (Genesis). We can know that he is faithful to his people; originally the Israelites, but now that’s you and me too (found in pretty much the whole rest of the OT) and that his love for us is so great he sent Jesus to die for our sins (found in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John). And God’s holiness is seen peppered all throughout the Bible. The Psalms speak of the beauty around us and in reading them we can absorb that truth.

But it is only in gazing upon the beauty of God’s creation that we can truly appreciate what he is capable of and respond appropriately.

I have this wonderful friend who is a very talented designer. She was a pivotal part of our house build. She took our vision and transformed our ideas into something beautiful. And each time she would walk into our space and behold beautifully laid tile, or new hand pulls on a well crafted vanity, she would squeal and dance with glee. It always made me smile.

What if that’s how we experienced the incredible beauty around us? What if we responded with awe, wonder and yes, glee, at the extraordinary work of God’s hands?

As I spend time outside and soak up the views, I’m reminded of God’s holiness and creativity and just general awesomeness, which has led to awe, which has led to worship. In my wildest dreams I could never have created or imagined such profound beauty in creation. I have always needed inspiration from something to create something beautiful. And yet, God created the world with no template. And he did an exceptional job. Worship has become a reflex when I take in the views of creation and realize the magnitude of God.

In his book As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Eugene Peterson reflects on how beauty helps us to experience God’s holiness.

“Both beauty and holiness are perpetually in short supply. Beauty is commonly trivialized in our culture, reduced to decoration…but beauty is not an add-on. It is not an extra. It is not what we attend to when we have a break from necessity. Beauty is fundamental. It is the evidence of and witness to the inherent wholeness and goodness of things.”

“Beauty is our sensory access to holiness. God reveals himself, that is, in creation and in Christ, in ways we can see and hear and touch and taste, in place and person. Beauty is the term we apply to these hints of transcendence, these perceptions that there is more going on here than we can account for.

God is greater than we can possibly comprehend. And creation bares witness to this every day-in the diversity of color as the leaves change in the fall to the complexity of the human body. Finding beauty around us is not a difficult task, we need only to look for it intentionally.

WHAT IF the Church (and by that I mean you and me) became a people that looked for and recognized beauty? We would find it in the world around us: the extraordinary sunrise which speaks to the faithfulness of God, or a pending storm reminding us of God’s power and protection. What if we looked for beauty and in the midst of it, remembered what that tells us about God?

AND THEN, what if we took that knowledge and remembered that he also instructed us to love people? That might mean we regarded the people in front of us and saw the beauty that God created (his image). What if we spoke life into the discouraged because we saw their beauty? We could accept the lonely because we saw them as God created them and not as the world tarnished.

God wants us to know him. He hasn’t hidden himself from us. He has left his fingerprints all over creation. When we see and experience his beauty and respond it transforms us.

Imagine yourself in a field. It’s a crisp fall day. The sun in shining and the sky is the perfect shade of blue. You can smell the leaves on the ground. They crunch as you step forward. 70 meters away is a target. It’s affixed to a very large round hay bale. In one hand you are gripping a bow as the other hand gently grasps an arrow. The target ahead of you has four circles, the smallest is at the center. That is your goal as you lift the bow in front of you and ready yourself to shoot (and if you are not into archery, please imagine in this moment that you are an excellent archer :-)). There is a gentle breeze that tickles your nose. You inhale deeply and slowly exhale as you release your arrow. You blink as you watch the arrow sink deeply into the target. It has landed in the second circle to the middle.

As I consider the Church today, I’m starting to believe that, like your recent experience at archery, we’ve missed the target. Not by a lot, but by just enough to count.

A long time ago, in a town not ten miles from my house, our family attended a sweet little church. And in that church we experienced a slice of heaven. We grew in our faith and we built a strong community; we lived out the first and the second greatest commandments. Many of the relationships we built in that place have lasted for more than two decades. And what I know about God now was a seed planted in that church.

I cannot put my finger on what made it so special. I only know that since that season of church shifted I have not experienced church in the same way again. We have attended churches with great teaching, churches focused on building community and serving others. None of the churches that we’ve been a part of have been doing the wrong things per se…but I wonder if we I haven’t set my focus on the wrong thing. Have I been aiming for the second circle to the middle?

I’ve been looking for a church community: a people gathered; organized around shared beliefs. Conversations circle around worship style, teaching style, serving, how women lead, when the youth group meets. Those are not bad things. But are they the right things? When I consider if the church will meet my faith needs or the needs of my family am I asking myself the right questions? AND, if any church spends a significant amount of time contemplating how to meet the needs of the “target demographic” is it asking the right questions?

What I’m trying to get at is, have I and the Church made an idol of people?

I was contemplating it this morning when I read something by A.W. Tozer that affirmed that this is not a new thought. In fact it’s been considered for decades.

[God] is unaffected by time or motion, is wholly self-dependent and owes nothing to the worlds His hands have made.

It is not a cheerful thought that millions of us who live in a land of Bibles, who belong to churches and labor to promote the Christian religion, may yet pass our whole life on this earth without once having thought or tried to think seriously about the being of God. Few of us have let our hearts gaze in wonder at the I AM, the self-existent Self back of which no creature can think. Such thoughts are too painful for us. We prefer to think where it will do more good–about how to build a better mousetrap, for instance, or how to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before. And for this we are now paying a too heavy price in the secularization of our religion and the decay of our inner lives.

Tozer, A.W. (1961). The Knowledge of the Holy

We are walking around and trying to fix the world, to create a community that reflects God. We are not doing bad things, but some of us have been neglecting the best thing: knowing God. How can we accurately reflect Him if we don’t spend significant time knowing Him?

When is the last time you spent time with God just to know him more? Not to know who YOU are to him, but just to know Him? Until recently, I hadn’t done much of that. Each time I opened scripture I was looking for something. Looking to be affirmed, looking for solace or comfort. I was looking for scripture to tell me who I was to God instead of looking at scripture to tell me who God is. Why does this matter? Because it placed ME at the center when God designed the universe to center around Him. He is holy and majestic. He is creative and just. He is kind and he is good. And when I understand even a sliver of that, then I fall on my knees in humility understanding my need for him. This happens (the falling down in humility bit) in the Bible repeatedly: Isaiah 6:1-5, Job 42:1-6, it happened to Thomas in John 20:26-28)

By centering the world around myself, I’ve created an idol. My day can be disrupted when I’m hyper-focused on me and how I’m feeling. When I am aiming at God, knowing Him, worshipping Him and enjoying His presence AND His guidance, my circumstances are of less importance.

What would happen to our world if we were a community of believers joining together, all setting our aim on knowing God? If we taught the world who He is, holy and majestic and then we let God do the rest? Instead of trying to fix the world, we simply set our aim on telling people who God is to us (not who we are to God) and then let the Holy Spirit move?

So what is it that comes into your mind when you think about God? What do you know about Him and His attributes? And how can you share that to the world?