5 Amnesia
There is not one little blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make men rejoice.
JOHN CALVIN4
It is the worst kind of blindness. It’s the physical ability to see without the spiritual ability to really see what you’ve seen. It’s the capacity to look at wonders, things specifically designed to move you and produce in you breathless amazement, and not be moved by them anymore. It’s the sad state of yawning in the face of glory.
I remember taking my youngest son to one of the national art galleries in Washington, DC. As we made our approach, I was so excited about what we were going to see. He was decidedly unexcited. But I just knew that, once we were inside, he would have his mind blown and would thank me for what I had done for him that day. As it turned out, his mind wasn’t blown; it wasn’t even activated. I saw things of such stunning beauty that brought me to the edge of tears. He yawned, moaned, and complained his way through gallery after gallery. With every new gallery, I was enthralled, but each time we walked into a new art space, he begged me to leave. He was surrounded by glory but saw none of it. He stood in the middle of wonders but was bored out of his mind. His eyes worked well, but his heart was stone blind. He saw everything, but he saw nothing.
Sadly, many of us live this way every day even though God has designed the world in which we live to be a gloryscope. What does this term mean? Just as a telescope points you to the stars and magnifies them for you to see their illuminating glory, so the earth focuses our eyes on God and magnifies his glory, so it can produce wonder in us. Every beautiful and amazing sight, sound, color, texture, taste, and touch of the created world has gloryscopic intention built into it. Every powerful and mighty thing, animate and inanimate, is gloryscopic by design. No created beauty is an end in itself. No physical wonder exists in isolation. Nothing that is, just is. Everything exists for a grand, vertical purpose.
The glories of the physical world don’t reflect God’s glory by happenchance. No, God specifically and carefully designed the physical world to reflect him, that is, to be the gloryscope that our poorly seeing eyes so desperately need. As the technician grinds the lens of the telescope for the best clarity and magnification possible, so God fashioned his world in such a way that it would bring his glory into view. God created every fish, stone, flower, bird, cloud, tree, monkey, and leaf to be gloryscopic because our loving Creator knows how fundamentally blind we can be.
Pay attention to what these passages say about the way God designed the created world to function:
The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech.
and night to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words,
whose voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out though all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world. (Ps. 19:1–4)
Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory! (Isa. 6:3)
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. (Rom. 1:19, 20)
We can also be so incredibly forgetful. We learn things that soon become distant memories, having little effect on the way that we think about ourselves and live our lives. People do wonderful things for us, but we forget their kindness so quickly that we even fail to e-mail them a simple “thank you.” We learn things about our family heritage, things that explain who we are and why we do what we do, but we soon fail to recall this history and ask the same questions of ourselves that had previously been answered. We forget old friends. Events of the past fade from memory. The concerns of the present so dominate our minds that we have little mental energy left to remember what came before. In fact, many of us have totally forgotten an incredible identity-giving story that defines not only us but everything about life. So we live wandering, disjointed lives, or we work to be the authors of our story, trying to make our personal narrative turn in the direction we would like it to turn. And in so doing, we attempt what we cannot do and want what we will never get.
Because of our forgetfulness, God has created the physical world to be mnemonic, to help us daily remember that we are not alone, that we are not at the center, that life is not primarily about us, and that there is a grander story than the little stories of our individual lives. Physical things are meant to remind us of the grandeur and glory of the One who created all those things, set them in motion, and keeps them together by the awesome power of his will. These constant little physical reminders don’t just happen either. God has carefully planted them in creation to protect us from our amnesia.
The earthly father is a God-given mnemonic device to remind us of the glory of the heavenly Father. The shepherd is a mnemonic device to remind us of God’s care for his own. The snow is meant to remind us of the Lord’s purity and holiness. The storm is a mnemonic device to remind us of God’s power and wrath. The daily rising sun is a mnemonic device to remind us of God’s faithfulness. We’re literally surrounded by gracious reminders of the presence, power, authority, and character of God because he designed created things to function mnemonically. He knows how quickly and easily we forget and how vital it is for us to remember, so he embedded reminders everywhere we look in his creation.
But even with all that, we still tend to be blind and forgetful. When blindness combines with amnesia, nothing good results, yet that’s just what sin does to us. It blinds our eyes and dulls our hearts. We all carry the corrupted capacity to look at the world around us and miss God. We enjoy the glories of creation, yet as we do, we fail to remember the Creator. God meant the earth to ignite and stimulate awe in us. As we encounter the physical world every day, we should be blown away by the glory of God to which it points. But we’re not.
In fact, many of us are positively bored and uninspired. We have every reason to be stunned by God’s glory, to live in life-shaping awe of him. But at street level, we tend to live as blind amnesiacs, and most of us don’t even know it. We think that we see quite well, and we think that we remember what is important, but we don’t. In our blindness and amnesia, we lose our vertical awe, and so our capacity for awe gets kidnapped by other things. I want to examine with you the symptoms of our amnesiac living and then consider what kind of help we need and where we can find it.
Our Blind Amnesia
So what are the symptoms of our blind amnesia? Here is a suggested, though not exhaustive, list:
1. Self-centeredness. This is something I have written about a lot. You see it in the crankiness of the baby, the rebellion of the little boy, the entitlement of the teenager, the demands of the young bride, and the grumbling of the old man. If you’re not living in awe of God, you are left with no higher agenda than to live for yourself. It really does get reduced to your wants, your needs, and your feelings. You really do become obsessed with your own happiness. You really will see other people as standing in your way. Dysfunction will color every aspect of your life because you are in a place where you were never created to be: the center of it all. When do you tend to get angry because life hasn’t worked according to your plan?
2. Entitlement. If life has ceased to be about God and therefore has become all about you, then you will tend to live a lifestyle driven by the language of “I deserve ____” or “I have a right to ____.” To live in awe of God means that you are motivated by his will and his honor. When that awe is missing, you will live in pursuit of what you think you need, deserve, or have a right to. And here’s how this operates. Once you think you’re entitled to it, you will think it’s your right to demand it, and you will judge the love of God and the people in your life by their willingness to deliver it. So, much of our anger with one another and our disappointment with God results from an aweless mentality that produces an entitled way of living. Where do you tend to give in to an “I deserve ____” way of living?
3. Discontent. If awe amnesia has put you in the center of your world, convincing you that you are entitled to things that you’re not really entitled to, you will always struggle with discontentment. The people in your life aren’t in your life for the sole purpose of making you content and happy. The world around you wasn’t designed to do your bidding. Life simply won’t operate according to your personal plan. Things don’t stop and start based on your whims and wishes. True and lasting contentment always results from living for something bigger than yourself. Sturdy contentment that can weather the storms of difficulty and want is always rooted in worship. When the most motivating pleasure in my life is the pleasure of God, I will be content even in circumstances that would tend to make us all grumble and complain. We tend to be way too discontent way too much of the time, not because we have a need problem but because we have an awe problem. Be honest right here, right now: do you live a content lifestyle?
4. Relational dysfunction. We all experience nastiness, criticism, hurt, anger, disappointment, vengeance, and bitterness in some way in the relationships in our lives, and so much of it is connected to and produced by our awe amnesia. Because we do not functionally connect our lives, meaning, hopes, joy, identity, and satisfaction to the awesome glory of God, we look to other people to do for us what they have no ability to do. We want our children to give us identity, and we ask our spouses to be our personal saviors. We want our friends to make us feel good about ourselves and our bosses to give us a reason to get up in the morning. Because awe of God isn’t filling our hearts, we put people where God should be, and because we put people in a position they were never designed to fill, they always disappoint us. So we expect and demand and get hurt and disillusioned. We get angry and strike back and find ourselves in a seemingly endless cycle of unrealistic expectation and relational disappointment. Only when God takes his rightful place in our hearts will the people near us stand in the appropriate place in our lives. In what ways do you ask things of people that they will never be able to deliver?
5. Control. One of the most awesome and glorious things that the Bible says about God is that he rules over all things. Acts 17:24–28 even says that he determines the exact location where each of us will live and the exact span of our lives. Hold on to your hat. God does this for every person living, every person who has ever lived, and every person who will live! To say that God is sovereign means that no situation, location, and relationship that you and I will ever find ourselves in is outside of his wise and careful rule. He was ruling before the origin of this world, and he will rule after this world as we know it is gone. You and I are meant to be mystified, blown away, and left in silent, worshipful amazement in the face of his unshakable eternal sovereignty over everything that exists.
But functional vertical amnesia will rob you of your rest in God’s control and cause you to want to take control. You will tend to want too much power and to be too trusting of your own wisdom. You won’t rest in the fact that God’s will will be done; you will try to exert your own will over people, places, and things. You will try to control what you have little power to control, will experience frustration over your lack of control, and will be intimidated by people who try to control you. You see, you struggle with control not primarily because you have a control problem but because you have an awe problem. Where do you fear your lack of control or try to take control of things that you can’t actually control?
6. Fear. As mentioned earlier, the only thing that has the power to defeat fear is fear. Only when the grander fear of God rules your heart will you be free of all the little fears in life that chip away at your heart. When you live in a reverential awe of the magnitude of God’s power and authority and are stunned by the fact that he exercises his power for his glory and your good, then you can be free from all the anxieties that make you timid and rob you of joy.
I think that we are motivated by fear, worry, dread, and anxiety much more than we realize. The decisions we make and the actions we take are motivated more often by avoiding what we fear than by the courage of faith. Courage results not from trusting yourself, other people, or your circumstances. All these things will fail you. Courage results from being in awe of the majesty of God, that worshipful fear that grips your heart when you are confronted with his holy grandeur. Because you are in awe of who God is and because you know that this awesome One is in you, with you, and for you, you do not live in fear of people, locations, and situations. Where do you see fear setting the agenda for the way that you respond to the people and situations in your life?
7. Anger. When I began to counsel on a regular basis, the one thing that surprised me was how many of the people I counseled were angry with God. They didn’t know that they were angry with God, and it was not the thing that caused them to seek help, but when they began to talk about God, they described a “God” I didn’t know. They described a “God” who was different from the God of the Bible. The “God” they described was distant, uncaring, capricious, unfaithful, judgmental, and angry. Their “God” lacked love, mercy and, grace.
At first, I thought my counselees had a theological problem. I thought they had been poorly taught. But as I listened more carefully, I realized that their anger problem was not first a formal theology problem; it was an awe problem. These were people who had lost their awe and so had inserted themselves in the middle of their own little world, and they were mad that God hadn’t come through for them. They were mad that life had been hard in places. They were mad that the people around them were less than perfect. They were mad that their bodies didn’t always work and that the world around them didn’t function very well. Their view of God’s goodness was directly attached to their own experience of happiness. They didn’t see God as a Lord of awesome glory; in their functional theology, they had reduced him to a divine concierge. His job was to make sure that all their days were good days. He was the divine waiter, delivering the good life to them on his divine platter.
Here’s the reality: most people who are angry with God are angry with him for being God. They’re not angry because he has failed to deliver what he promised. They’re angry because he has failed to deliver what they have craved, expected, or demanded. When awe of self replaces awe of God, God ceases to be your Lord and is reduced to being your indentured servant. What in your life would cause you to struggle with anger toward God?
8. Envy. Think with me for a moment. What is the cause of envy? Envy is not a need problem, it’s not an inequality problem, and it’s surely not a partiality-of-God problem. Envy is an awe problem. When I am in awe of God’s greatness, when I am stunned by his holy justice and mercy, and when I am blown away by the thought that all the Lord’s ways are right and true, I am able to live a grateful and content life. But when my capacity for awe has shrunk to the size of my desires or to the size of the glories of the created world, I will become a scorekeeper. I will always be comparing what I am, have, and have experienced to my neighbor. I will struggle with the blessing that others enjoy. I will struggle to be satisfied, and I will forever be plagued by the question of why others enjoy what I have never had. Where is envy a regular struggle of heart for you?
9. Drivenness. Awe and rest are foundationally connected. I am to live with the grand thought that God rules over all things for the sake of his children, that he has made a covenantal promise to meet every one of our needs, and that he is the ultimate definition of everything that is good, right, wise, and true. When I do, I won’t load the world on my shoulders. God has called me to work, but he has promised to provide. God has called me to parent my children wisely, but only he can build character in their hearts and even cause them to believe. God has called me to be a good steward of what he has provided, but he controls all the outside forces that I must interact with as I do this. Perhaps drivenness arises more from self-glory than we tend to think. When the grandeur of God is not in our eyes and filling our hearts, we will live as if it is all up to us, always working more and trying harder. Awe permits you to enjoy Sabbaths of rest. Is your schedule too full, or are you working too much and too hard?
10. Exhaustion. Living with atrophied awe is an exhausting way to live. All the things that we have considered in this list of awe amnesia symptoms will leave you weary and wanting to get off the never-ending treadmill. I have met and continue to meet so many exhausted Christians, and as I have listened to their stories, I have concluded that they don’t first have a demanding schedule or busyness problem; what they have is an awe problem. Let me say it this way: they have a glory and grace problem. If you lose sight of God’s incalculable glory, you will live like a king instead of trusting the King, and you will load kingly burdens on your shoulders. If you lose sight of God’s amazing grace, you will try to produce by human effort what will only ever come by means of divine grace. You will work harder because you will always feel you need to work harder or do better, and you will exhaust yourself in the process. Be honest: does your way of thinking about and living life exhaust you?
11. Doubt. Ironically, awe amnesia is the principal producer of doubt of God. Here’s how it works. The more you lose sight of the centrality of God’s awesome presence and grandeur, the more you will focus on yourself. The more you focus on yourself, the more you will focus on your wants, needs, dreams, desires, hopes, goals, expectations, and feelings. The more you focus on these things, the more you will define the love of God by his willingness to deliver them. And as God continues to deliver what he’s promised but does not give you what you want, you will begin to doubt his goodness and his love. This cycle devastates people’s spiritual lives because when you doubt God’s love, you cease trusting him and thus quit going to him for help. Where is there evidence of doubting God in your life?
12. Spiritual coldness. I had a counselee say it to me clearly, “I can’t go to church and sing ‘Great Is Thy Faithfulness’ anymore because, frankly, Paul, I just don’t believe it anymore.” She had quit going to her small group. She had quit coming to services on Sunday morning. She had stopped reading her Bible. She was spiritually cold and bitter. Meanwhile, God was still doing, in glorious grace, everything he had promised to do in her and for her. He had not forsaken his wise and holy plan in order to become a servant of what she was convinced she needed. It seems blatantly obvious to say, but there is a direct connection between awe and worship. As I have already stated, we quickly fill the vacuum where awe of God was with awe of self, and when we do, heartfelt worship dies. Do you find joy in the daily worship of God? If not, why not?
Awe Amnesia = Spiritual Anorexia
So here’s the bottom line. When you are blind to the stunning, expansive glory of God, when you fail to remember his infinite greatness, you will live with an atrophied heart. Rather than your view of life continuing to expand to the size of God’s incomprehensible grandeur, your perspective on life will shrink to the size of personal hopes and dreams or to the size of what the surrounding physical world has to offer. You will eat little of the true and satisfying food of God’s glory, and you will try to feed yourself on the nonnutritive morsels of the temporary glories of creation. Because you won’t be getting proper spiritual nutrition, you will be constantly hungry, your spiritual muscles will shrink, and you will be unable to live as God intended.
I would like to give you a set of directions to fix all this, but I just don’t think it’s that simple. We must begin by confessing that we have cold, fickle, and often selfish hearts. We must begin by admitting that, although God made the physical world around us gloryscopic and mnemonic, we often see and remember little of what the world points us to. We get so obsessed with our own desires, plans, schedules, and accomplishments that we have little time for meditative reflection on the awesome glory that is ours to see and remember. We have lost our wonder and, in so doing, have shrunk our souls to the size of momentary, earthbound hopes and dreams. Because we have, we get disappointed, mad, and envious too quickly.
Perhaps we don’t need to institute another reformation program for ourselves. Or give ourselves to a new set of commitments that are more about penance than repentance. Perhaps what we need to do is fall down on our knees before the Great Physician in humility, brokenness, and grief and confess the awe amnesia that eats away at our hearts like a spiritual cancer. Today, plead for eyes to see and a heart that remembers. Today, mourn how easy it is for you to forget God. Confess your spiritual anorexia, and cry out for a changed heart. When you and I begin to confess that we are the problem, we can run nowhere but to God’s arms of grace.
As I have written many times, you can run from a situation, you can run from a relationship, and you can run from a location, but you cannot run from you. When you confess that your problem is internal, not external, you only have one rock to stand on, and that rock is Jesus Christ. You don’t have to live in some form of spiritual shame. Jesus didn’t come, live, die, and rise again to shame you. No, he did all these things to redeem you. Your admission of awe amnesia is a confession of your continuing need of your loving Redeemer. Awe amnesiac that you may be, run to him and see what he will do through his incomparable, efficacious grace.