True Beauty Ministries Quotes

Those of us who write, who sing, who paint, must remember that to a child a song may glow like a nightlight in a scary bedroom. It may be the only thing holding back the monsters. That story may be the only beautiful, true thing that makes it through all the ugliness of a little girl’s world to rest in her secret heart. May we take that seriously. It is our job, it is our ministry, it is the sword we swing in the Kingdom, to remind children that the good guys win, that the stories are true, and that a fool’s hope may be the best kind.

As Jesus showed us in his life and ministry, healing and transformation flow out of relationship—not the delivery of services. True love flows out of mutuality, where we blur the lines between those who are serving and those who are receiving, and where we humbly acknowledge that we all have something of offer and something to receive from one another...As Christians, we have become so fixated on our roles as servants that we miss out on relationships of mutuality that the Spirit wants to knit between people...This is the beautiful picture of mutuality...each one is invited to participate by serving others. When we allow those we have labeled victims or the poor to serve and participate in our acts of transforming love, we usher in the kingdom of God.

There comes a time in most of our lives in which we no longer have the strength to lift ourselves out or to pretend ourselves strong. Sometimes our minds want to break because life stomped on us and God didn’t stop it. Like a family who watches their loved one slip and fall onto the rocks on a mountainside vacation when all was supposed to be beautiful and fun; or like a parent whose child was mistreated or shot while at school. Charles and those who lost their loved ones that terrible day had to come to terms with suffering in a house of God while the word was preached and a prankster cackled. Questions fill our lungs. We mentally wheeze. We go numb. When on vacation or at school or at church, that kind of thing is not supposed to happen there. Even the knees of a Jesus-follower will buckle. Charles’ wife, Susannah, said of Charles at that time, “My beloved’s anguish was so deep and violent, that reason seemed to totter in her throne, and we sometimes feared that he would never preach again.”5 Though it cannot be said for all of us or for every person that we have loved, it remains true that, in this cherished case, Charles Spurgeon did preach again. But sorrows of many kinds haunted and hounded him for the rest of his life. His depression came, not only from circumstances, or from questions about whether or not he was consecrated to God, but also from the chemistry of his body. God gave to us a preacher who knew firsthand what it felt like for his reason to totter, not just once, but many times during his life and ministry. And somehow this fellow sufferer named Charles and his dear wife Susannah (who also suffered physically most of her adult life) still made a go of it, insisting to each other and to their generation that the sorrowing have a Savior. On that November morning, in weakness, Charles did what some of us are not yet able to do in our sorrows; he read the Bible. Perhaps it will comfort you to learn that for a while “the very sight of the Bible” made Charles cry.6 Many of us know what this feels like. But this Scripture passage, Philippians 2:9-11, “had such a power of comfort upon [his] distressed spirit.” And being found in human form, he [Jesus] humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name (Phil. 2:8-9). From this Scripture, Charles set the larger story of his hope before us. The same Heavenly Father who picked up His son out of the muck, misery and mistreatment can do the same for us.

Everyone wants to be successful rather than forgotten, and everyone wants to make a difference in life. But that is beyond the control of any of us. If this life is all there is, then everything will eventually burn up in the death of the sun and no one will even be around to remember anything that has ever happened. Everyone will be forgotten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavors, even the best, will come to naught. Unless there is God. If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavor, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God’s calling, can matter forever. That is what the Christian faith promises. “In the Lord, your labor is not in vain,” writes Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15, verse 58. He was speaking of Christian ministry, but Tolkien’s story shows how this can ultimately be true of all work. Tolkien had readied himself, through Christian truth, for very modest accomplishment in the eyes of this world. (The irony is that he produced something so many people consider a work of genius that it is one of the bestselling books in the history of the world.) What about you? Let’s say that you go into city planning as a young person. Why? You are excited about cities, and you have a vision about how a real city ought to be. You are likely to be discouraged because throughout your life you probably will not get more than a leaf or a branch done. But there really is a New Jerusalem, a heavenly city, which will come down to earth like a bride dressed for her husband (Revelation 21–22). Or let’s say you are a lawyer, and you go into law because you have a vision for justice and a vision for a flourishing society ruled by equity and peace. In ten years you will be deeply disillusioned because you will find that as much as you are trying to work on important things, so much of what you do is minutiae. Once or twice in your life you may feel like you have finally “gotten a leaf out.” Whatever your work, you need to know this: There really is a tree. Whatever you are seeking in your work—the city of justice and peace, the world of brilliance and beauty, the story, the order, the healing—it is there. There is a God, there is a future healed world that he will bring about, and your work is showing it (in part) to others. Your work will be only partially successful, on your best days, in bringing that world about. But inevitably the whole tree that you seek—the beauty, harmony, justice, comfort, joy, and community—will come to fruition. If you know all this, you won’t be despondent because you can get only a leaf or two out in this life. You will work with satisfaction and joy. You will not be puffed up by success or devastated by setbacks. I just said, “If you know all this.” In order to work in this way—to get the consolation and freedom that Tolkien received from his Christian faith for his work—you need to know the Bible’s answers to three questions: Why do you want to work? (That is, why do we need to work in order to lead a fulfilled life?) Why is it so hard to work? (That is, why is it so often fruitless, pointless, and difficult?) How can we overcome the difficulties and find satisfaction in our work through the gospel? The rest of this book will seek to answer those three questions in its three sections, respectively.

It’s beautiful to me now, both the ideal and the reality. I choose the reality and I choose the ideal: I hold them both. I believe in ministering within imperfect structures. I believe in teaching Sunday school and chaperoning youth lock-ins, in carpooling seniors and vacuuming the vestry. I believe in church libraries and “just checking on you” phone calls, in the mundane daily work that creates a community on purpose. I believe in taking college girls out for coffee, in showing up at weddings, in bringing enchiladas to new mothers, in hospital committees, in homemade dainties at the funeral reception. I believe we don’t give enough credit to the ones who stay put in slow-to-change structures and movements because they change within relationship, because they take a long and a high view of time. I believe in the ones who do the whole elder board and deacon election thing, in the ones who argue for church constitutional changes and consensus building. This is not work for the faint of heart. I believe the work of the ministry is often misunderstood, the Church is a convenient scapegoat. Heaven knows, church has been my favorite nebulous nonentity to blame, a diversionary tactic from the mirror perhaps. A lot of people in my generation might be giving up on Church, but there are a lot of us returning, redefining, reclaiming Church too. We aren’t foolish or blind or unconcerned or uneducated or unthinking. We have weighed our choices, more than anyone will know. We are choosing this and we will keep choosing each other. And sometimes our way of understanding or “doing” church looks very different, but we’re still here. I know some of us are meant to go, some are meant to stay, and most of us do a bit of both in a lifetime. Jesus doesn’t belong to church people. But church people belong to Him, in Him, and through Him. I hope we all wrestle. I hope we look deep into our hearts and sift through our theology, our methodology, our praxis, our ecclesiology, all of it. I hope we get angry and that we say true things. I hope we push back against celebrity and consumerism; I hope we live into our birthright as a prophetic outpost for the Kingdom. I hope we get our toes stepped on and then forgive. I hope we become open-hearted and open-armed. I hope we are known as the ones who love. I hope we change. I hope we grow. I hope we push against the darkness and let the light in and breathe into the Kingdom come. I hope we become a refuge for the weary and the pilgrim, for the child and the aged, for the ones who have been strong too long. And I hope we all live like we are loved. I hope we all become a bit more inclined to listen, to pray, to wait.

if Christians are materialistic, it is not merely a failure of will. Their lack of generosity comes because they have not truly understood how Jesus became poor for them, how in him we have all true riches and treasures. They may have a superficial intellectual grasp of Jesus’ spiritual wealth, but they do not truly, deeply grasp it. Preaching, then, must not simply tell people what to do. It must re-present Christ in such a way that he captures the heart and imagination more than material things. This takes not just intellectual argumentation but the presentation of the beauty of Christ.

carries an avoska. Aunt Mayya comes home laden with grocery bags. Family dinners are true events, every single night, each one capped off by tasty little medovik, or honey cakes. That’s because Pripyat is no backwater town. Pripyat is an atomgrad—an atomic city, built to support the great nuclear power plant and financed by the Ministry of Energy. A beautiful dream, a workers’ paradise. Families sail little boats up and down the river on Sunday afternoons. The wives of the atomschiki spritz their necks and wrists with European perfume. Mayya sets the samovar upon the clean table and serves Pavlo and Yuri tea. Yuri glances at his younger cousins, Alina and Lev. He knows what’s coming. “May we listen to the radio?” Alina asks. Yuri bunches his cloth napkin tightly in his fist, watching the exchange. “One hour,” Pavlo tells his thirteen-year-old daughter. “And be sure to—

nobody carries an avoska. Aunt Mayya comes home laden with grocery bags. Family dinners are true events, every single night, each one capped off by tasty little medovik, or honey cakes. That’s because Pripyat is no backwater town. Pripyat is an atomgrad—an atomic city, built to support the great nuclear power plant and financed by the Ministry of Energy. A beautiful dream, a workers’ paradise. Families sail little boats up and down the river on Sunday afternoons. The wives of the atomschiki spritz their necks and wrists with European perfume. Mayya sets the samovar upon the clean table and serves Pavlo and Yuri tea. Yuri glances at his younger cousins, Alina and Lev. He knows what’s coming. “May we listen to the radio?” Alina asks. Yuri bunches his cloth napkin tightly in his fist, watching the exchange. “One hour,” Pavlo tells his thirteen-year-old daughter. “And be sure to—

Thesis #2: Edwards shows us that true religion is primarily a matter of holy affections. Christian doctrine is meant to be tasted, not just memorized, affirmed and then debated with those who differ. God communicates with us in order to draw us near to him. He helps us grow in spiritual knowledge so we can grow in divine love. Head and heart must work together. “There is a difference between having an opinion that God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace.” God reveals himself to us and dwells within us by his Spirit to inform, guide and fashion our love for him and those around us.

The lionfish comes from the tropical waters around Indonesia. Though beautiful to look at, it is a voracious predator of other fish, and is able to eat as many as 30 in half an hour. Furthermore, one female lionfish can produce over two million eggs per year, which was a particular problem in the Caribbean, where it has no natural predators. The decimation of local species threatened the environment and the economics of Colombia, much of which depends on fishing. It was also destroying the ecology of coral reefs. This was when some colleagues of mine borrowed an idea from Frederick the Great; Ogilvy & Mather in Bogotá decided that the solution was to create a predator for the lionfish – humans. The simplest and most cost-effective way to rid Colombia’s waters of lionfish was to encourage people to eat them, which would encourage anglers to catch them. The agency recruited the top chefs in Colombia and encouraged them to create lionfish recipes for the best restaurants. As they explained, a lionfish is poisonous on the outside but delicious on the inside, so they created an advertising campaign titled ‘Terribly Delicious’. Working with the Colombian Ministry of the Environment, they generated a cultural shift by turning the invader into an everyday food. Lionfish soon appeared in supermarkets. Some 84 per cent of Colombians are Roman Catholic, so they asked the Catholic Church to recommend lionfish to their congregations on Fridays and during Lent. That additional element – recruiting the Catholic Church – was the true piece of alchemy. Today, indigenous fish species are recovering and the lionfish population is in decline.

This is a profound claim. The ancient philosophers longed for a meaningful life. They believed they could discover life’s purpose by finding the answers to three questions: “What is good?” “What is true?” and “What is beautiful?” Educated people of Jesus’s day would have been familiar with Greek philosophy. I wonder if Jesus may have been addressing their mindset when he proclaimed, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). “I am,” he seems to be saying, “the answer to the philosophers’ quest.

When we think about the uniqueness of a friend’s calling, it can lead us to worship God. The spiritual gift of a friend that we don’t ourselves possess can be a blessing to us when we’re in need of that specific ministry. If we will let each individual stand alone as a beautiful new creation of Christ and not lump them together according to secondary identities, we will have an opportunity to worship God instead of comparing and envying other women. It’s only in taking this biblical perspective that we can have the true unity and deeper community we hope for. Only then can we be a godly friend to others.

We must recognize that the apologetic force of our preaching isn’t always that our message is more believable than another, but that it’s more desirable. In evangelism, we don’t simply make a logical case, but a doxological one. We aren’t just talking to brains. We’re speaking to hearts that have desires and eyes that look for beauty. We’re not merely trying to convince people that our gospel is true, but that our God is good. Over the years I’ve tried to move away from cold, structured arguments into exultations of praise. From giving evidence for the resurrection to reveling in its glory. From merely explaining why Jesus is needed to showing why he should be wanted. From defending the Bible’s truthfulness to rejoicing in its sweetness. Preaching the gospel requires propositional truths. Believing the gospel requires historical facts. But when we preach, others should see how those facts have changed our lives. They should hear us singing with the Negro slaves, “I’ve found a Savior, and he’s sweet, I know.” They need to feel the weight of glory. That’s because believing the gospel—like preaching it—is worship. Which makes praise integral to our preaching and turns our priestly ministry into delight!