Preaching the Beauty of God

Beauty is the “uncontained splendor” that dances around the true and the beautiful.1 It is the fragrance that attracts us towards the good and shows forth the loveliness of the world in which we live. Beauty heralds the full, vibrant possibilities of goodness and offers us a glimpse of the world to come. In this way, beauty is the gravitas of triune love—the impression of God’s abundant life as triune love that displays the excellencies of that life and summons those who behold it into union with Christ.2

If beauty is the fragrant impression of God’s triune life in beautiful things, then heralding God’s beauty in preaching is a matter of heralding the excellencies of God’s own character. In this article, I will explore this way of preaching God’s beauty to God’s people.

Preaching and the Discipleship of the Imagination

The way we imagine the world impacts the way we live in it. If I think the world is a dark, depressing, dour place devoid of any higher purpose, my life will take a shape fitted to that vision. Living well, then, involves imagining well—imagining the world as it really is. St. Augustine rightly taught that to love God well, we must imagine the world as a world of signs that point to God as their meaning.3 After all, just as all the commands are summed up by love, so Christ is the “summation of all things” (Eph. 1:10) and, therefore, the one to whom all things refer. The norms by which we imagine and interpret the world in the light of Christ are given to us in Scripture.

If preaching is concerned first and foremost with stirring hearers up to the love of God and all things in God, then preaching heralds the Word, disclosing the world as the revelation of God’s beauty, which, when perceived, evokes love by its excellency. Preaching reaches its summit, then, by disclosing the meaning of a text as it points to Christ—indeed, as that historically contextualized meaning finds its true, transfigured sense and meaning in reference to the life of God disclosed in Jesus of Nazareth.4 Preaching, as an exposition of the Scriptures, is thus both an act of setting forth the world in the norming light of the Word and an act of modeling what it’s like to read our world of signs as pointers to God’s internal beauty.

For instance, suppose someone preaches on 1 Corinthians 1:18–31. A preacher ought to understand why the cross is “foolishness” to the Greeks and the Jews—that the Epicureans and those formed by Homer thought that a physical resurrection was absurd and that Jews were expecting a victorious Messiah, not a crucified one. A preacher ought to unpack the depths of the “foolishness” of the cross. Yet the task of teaching the text tends toward the proclamation of the fragrant beauty of God’s character disclosed in the epistle. In other words, it’s not enough to (rightly) teach that the God of 1 Corinthians 1 is good news for the despised of the world. One must also place the accent on the lovely character of God. In this text, God is he who elevates the despised and thereby shows himself to be the God who is known on his own terms. He is the God who subverts the idolatrous imaginings of humanity in the sovereign demonstration of his humility. He is not merely the God who places his feet on the neck of his enemies, but the God who slays the serpent by submitting to execution on a cross—the one who crushes the head of the serpent by absorbing its bite in the majestic freedom of his condescending love. Via this text, a preacher may then direct the flock to see signs of God’s loveliness in humble scenes. Whenever the simple thwart the learned in wisdom—when our grandmothers and grandfathers tell us simple truths that outstrip the offerings of predominant philosophies—there we may see the sweet condescension of God and the depths of his love, which reaches down to the lowly. When evangelical scholars, pastors, teachers, or laypersons seek to uphold the authority of Scripture with an eye fixed on a rigorous pursuit of the truth despite sneers or false accusations, they have become icons of God’s humble wisdom, which does not lose an ounce of soundness in the face of cultural unpalatability. In this way, the preacher teaches God’s people to see situations analogous to the situation of the text as tangible disclosures of those same aspects of God’s beauty.

Preaching from the School of Prayer

Thus, preaching the beauty of God from the text is a matter of shaping the imagination of God’s people to see the world as a world of signs that reveal God’s loveliness. One must do historical-grammatical work as the anchor for any deeper meaning to any text; this is essential. When one does this, they are equipped to proclaim the lovely character of God revealed in and through that text, modeling how to savor that self-same character disclosed in situations relevantly analogous to the text. In this way, they are setting forth the world in the light of the Word.

Because preaching is an act of modeling, the flock will not see what it’s like to encounter God’s beauty if preachers do not themselves exhibit wonder and delight. Preachers need to be people who preach from the beauty they have tasted in the text. As such, preaching the beauty of God requires prayer—not merely prayer for God’s help in the act of preaching, but prayerful meditation as a way of basking in the beauty of God in the light of the text. Prayer is the place where, under the tutelage of God’s Spirit, one’s imagination of the world in the light of the text is internalized within the heart. Only from the school of prayer, with the lovely presence of God as our guide, is one able to bring their people into the joy of God’s beauty, which suffuses God’s world and Word.