“New Eyes to See Beauty” with Greg Boyd
“New Eyes to See Beauty” with Greg Boyd
Greg Boyd has been a mentor of mine for over a decade. Greg is a recognized theologian, teacher, pastor and co-founder of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, and has authored or co-authored 22 books.
While Greg’s credentials are impressive, what has most impacted me is his belief in and teaching on the unconditional and incomprehensible love of God. So, if beauty truly is “the life of God at work in us and around us,” it makes all the difference in the world if the character of that God is entirely good and loving. It means that we are immersed in that kind of beauty and that kind of love all the time. Greg’s teaching on that kind of love has changed my faith and, so, my life.
May Greg’s profound reflections on beauty be transformational for you too.
The Interview
Audio engineering by McGinty Media
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:
Greg: So what's your situation in life now? Are you done with school or is this ...
Melissa: Yeah, great question. So I'm a marriage and family therapist, I teach a little bit at Bethel, the Wellbeing class, and then I am a spiritual director. And I’m doing this blog now around realizing how damaging our narratives for beauty are. So, not only in my own life, but being a therapist, working with adolescent women. Actually I think 80 to 90-some percent of women don't like the way they look. And not only the mental health effects of that, but I think the impact on the soul. I think there are some pretty significant ... shame is huge and I think that diminishes a woman's whole self, including the soul.
So, I’m really wanting to renew some narratives around beauty, because I just really believe that true beauty is the life of God at work in us and around us. And I think we miss that as women because we're so focused on your worth is actually ... Literally, you don't have a voice or as much cultural power or currency if you don't look a certain way or once you hit a certain age.
So, all of that to say, that's kind of the lens. I just ... like I said, you're the first male and I really appreciate your perspectives in general. So, I'm just so curious. I know this is kind of maybe out of the box to be weighing in on beauty, but I do think it's a much larger topic.
Greg: Well, you know, my first book, which is my doctoral dissertation, its central driving motif was aesthetics. It was beauty. I was working on a model of God and also some metaphysical things, but the central criteria for the whole thing was what I called the aesthetic aim. Actually, I didn't coin that word, there are some other philosophers that have used that. But yeah, the drive for beauty is behind everything.
Melissa: Okay, so this is perfect. That's awesome.
Greg: That was forty years ago, but let’s see how much I remember.
Melissa: So, I kind of have these structured questions, but we can kind of go wherever. Do you mind if I just dive right into the questions?
Greg: Let's just pray for a moment.
Melissa: Yeah, thank you.
Greg: Lord, Abba, Father, Mother, we surrender this conversation to you and we pray, Lord, that you breathe your breath of life into this. Use it Lord to plant seeds where seeds are needed and to tear down lies where that is needed, heal wounds where that is needed. We know that little ripple effects can lead to big ripple effects and that can make a mighty difference for the kingdom, so we just surrender this all to you, that you just amplify whatever needs to be amplified to bring about the healing and the freedom, the deliverance, the beautification of people who hear it. In Jesus' name. Amen.
Melissa: Amen. Thank you for that. I appreciate that.
Greg: Alright.
Melissa: Awesome. Okay, so the first question is just really light. It's how do you define beauty?
Greg: Beauty, you know, I always liked Jonathon Edward’s, he had a definition of beauty where, when you break it all down to its essence, it's a particular harmony. It's resonance. It's the relationship between things. And there's a certain kind of relationship, it's just pleasing. It's that which ultimately pleases us, what we're hungry for, what drives us. It's really essential to our whole being. The quest after God is the quest after beauty. And God is relationship in the most profound, incomprehensible loving relationship we can imagine.
Beyond that, there's a dimension of beauty that is indefinable. It's by nature transcendent. So, whatever definition you give to it, it can't capture it. It's inherently transcendent. It's like, "Uh, yeah it is that. But there's a quality to it that is deeper than that." And that's just for any definition you might offer. It goes beyond that.
Melissa: Yeah. Then this next question is a little tricky. Where do you see beauty in the world?
Greg: It seems to me that you could more easily ask the question where don't you see beauty.
Melissa: Sure.
Greg: Of course there are places where you don't see beauty, but it seems to me that there's beauty almost everywhere. It takes certain eyes to see it sometimes. And I'm not saying that everything is beautiful. Certainly I'm not saying everything happens to be beautiful, that it happens for the better. There's a lot of disaster, tragedy, ugliness in the world. But, man, the first snowfall of the winter. I'm just randomly ... It was stunningly beautiful. You realize, "Oh I gotta go home and shovel it." That's not beautiful. But if you just let it be and you can hear the soft gentle falling snow on the ground. It's beautiful. It's just beautiful.
Also it's the stars, mountains. That's beautiful. The loving look of a person's face is beautiful. It's all around us. My little greasy dog sleeping over there, she's beautiful. There's beauty everywhere. It's pervasive. It's just that it also has to war against a lot of other stuff. We live in a war zone where there's a whole lot terribly ugly.
Melissa: Yeah. So that kind of leads into the next couple questions. Could you maybe talk about a time where you've experienced some brokenness in life? Because honestly, I think that that's one of the hardest parts sometimes about opening our eyes to beauty is because there is a lot of brokenness. So is there an incident of brokenness maybe you're currently going through or recently, or it could be any? And then maybe even how you saw beauty breaking into the midst of that brokenness.
Greg: Sure.
Melissa: You can do that in whatever order seems best.
Greg: I'll give you a short version of this little story of this thing that happened to me just several months ago. I shared this in a sermon, if you can call it a sermon, but it's called, "Where is Mommy?" It's on the Woodland Hills Church archive. It was back in April, no probably February. Yeah, it for sure was in February. So short version of this is that my mom died when I was two, my dad remarried to this lady who became my stepmother and it was a marriage just out of convenience. She had two children and needed someone to provide and he had four kids and now there's no mother there. He's a traveling salesman. So they needed each other. They got married.
Some marriages are made in heaven, this one was made in hell, because it was warfare from the word go. And she ended up being very abusive. There'd be times where…I think she went through some kind of breakdown during the 11 years she was married to my father. [She was abusive] especially to me because I was hyperactive and behavioral disorder or whatever. But she would get very abusive and beat up on me quite a bit.
So there was a time when I was six years old when, and I'm trying to make this as brief as possible, but I don't know how to make it shorter. But when I was six, I had taken a beating and I remember I was mad. I was just gonna run away from home after that happened, but on the way out I grabbed some matches, because my dad was a chain smoker so there was always matches around. But I wasn't allowed to play with them. But as an act of rebellion, I grabbed those matches. I went out to the back and we had a creek in our backyard and I started lighting those matches in defiance and throwing them in the water.
I remember as clear as it was yesterday, I said to myself, "I have to face it, Mom doesn't like me. And if she doesn't like me, then I'm not gonna like her." And as I'm doing this, I'm lighting a match with each vow. And then the last one, I said, "She'll never hurt me again." And from that time on, I never cried at what she did. And it amazes me at how well that worked. And how it felt so strong. You know, “I'm invincible.” But you don't realize that you're killing the pain and I found a tremendous off button. I could take any kind of beating and I wouldn't give her the satisfaction of crying. And sometimes even taunt her.
And being this age, not knowing really what's going on in this world, it was honestly very wounding. They finally divorced when I was 13 and I thought I was done with her. I never thought about her, anything like this. It was just not on my mind. I didn't have any anger towards her, anything. She was just “boom.” I never talked to anyone. We came home one day and she was gone. That was it. We went on to celebrate it because ...
But when I was about in my mid-20s, I was a new Christian in this Pentecostal church. It was the last place you were ever going to find any feminism going on, but God began to appear to me in the form of a mother. Actually it was very close to when I was a little kid, I was raised Catholic, and the only person in the heavenly realm that I ever felt safe with was the Virgin Mary. So I always talked to the Virgin Mary. Also, there was kind of a mother ... I was like, "Would you be my mommy?" I would fantasize about how lucky Jesus is to have a mother like her. We'd go to church every Sunday morning, I actually had to go every morning at this Catholic school, and all the pictures of the Father, Son, and Spirit were scary. But Mary was so serene. She had a statue up front.
And God just sort of came to me in this form, which surprised the hell out of me. But this basically revealed that I'm harboring a lot of unforgiveness toward my stepmother and that I can let her go if I would just let her be my mother. “It's the motherly love that you needed that you didn't get that causes the resentment to be there and the unforgiveness. And it's a way of holding on to worth. Like you deserve better. And you did. But I can meet that need so you can let this go.”
And God became my loving mother and I never unveiled this. This is in my early 20s. I never publicly admitted this until about three months ago, that God's motherhood has played a more important role in my life than God's fatherhood. And that just knowing that women are as much in the image of God as men are or God is no more male than female. Knowing that, there's dimensions of God's being, the feminine side of God's being, that will get blocked off from us if we are only thinking of God in patriarchal terms, in masculine terms. And there's a dimension of God's being that, I understand why it may be people have for centuries couldn't have much access to this, but I think we're beyond that now. And I find that to be so healing.
So it's been layering of things. Where I found that with the healing of that kid, from the wounds that he received and lies that he received, and I can now look back and you just see every one of those wounds was like a prophecy about what's going to happen in the future. You know, it sends your life in a certain direction. And there's no pattern, just bringing these to the Lord and letting God redo the memories and just bring tremendous healing in my life.
So, I went through what is sometimes called a “thin place” several months ago, where all of a sudden you're seeing stuff. And I had thought I was ... It's been 15 years since the last time I went back to childhood memory stuff. Out of nowhere, it's all of a sudden revealed that there's another dimension to this, I see something with more clarity. And the love of God comes in and, as God always does, transforms it into something beautiful.
When I invite Jesus into my memories and Jesus isn't always male. This last time, I was back in that backyard and lighting matches and I'm remembering this. I'm entering into the anger. So, I’m the adult and I'm looking at the little boy and Jesus just comes into the picture, but Jesus is here as this radiant, beautiful, Mother Mary and that’s just God, “the Word,” in feminine form. And she comes over and the boy runs to her and she ... This (referring to crying) was not planned for today. And she picks him up and then she says, "You have something that you wanna give, Greg?" Me, the adult. And looks at me and at first he's a little bit cautious, but she says, "It's going to be okay. It's safe." And then I say to him, "Those things got you through a lot of tough years and there's a point where it's okay to let them go." And then he hands me the matches. And we all had a group hug.
See that is the most healing thing in the world. That's beauty. It's reconciled ... reconciliation. There's nothing more beautiful than that I don't think. It's just pure beauty. That's why I don't think in heaven there will be any regrets, because for every terrible thing that happened, God's a master at bringing good out of it. I don't think he wanted it, I don't think he needed it to make it beautiful. But now that it happened, he finds a way of bringing beauty out of it. He beautifies our stories.
Sorry for that really long answer.
Melissa: No, don't be sorry at all. That was amazing. That was really ... Thank you for sharing that. I think what's really cool too is how you're open to God entering into those spaces of brokenness and how intimacy with Him comes because of it. So that's really cool.
Greg: With Him and with Her.
Melissa: Right right right. Yeah, yes. And I appre-
Greg: Yes.
Melissa: Yeah, go ahead.
Greg: It just sort of happened to me ... I always had strongly visual things going on. But the healing thing didn't get really intense, like God played that mother role, which empowered me to forgive my stepmother, which I did. I called her up and forgave her. And that has its own story after that. But what was I saying? It empowered me to forgive her.
Oh, but then a really healing turn came when I was 33. So probably ten years after this. I'm just having normal relation with God, but I had a, all of a sudden, my first flashback memory. And it was a babysitter that triggered it. And it just came back to me very vividly. And I checked with my older sister, I was only three when this happened, and I wanted to know if this was true. My grandma brought Christmas presents for three of us kids, like a pre-Christmas thing. There's four of us kids. This was before we brought my stepmother in. But my grandmother was also a really crotchety woman and I was a hyperactive kid. So we were always clashing.
So she brought these pre-Christmas presents home for everybody, but then when it was my turn, I looked in the bag and there was nothing there. My older sister says, "Doesn't Greggy get a present?" And she looks at me with this real scowl look on her face, she says, "No, Greggy doesn't get a present because bad boys don't get presents on Christmas. And Greggy is a bad boy."
Melissa: Yikes.
Greg: And it was because a babysitter had forgotten to bring my son a birthday present. She forgot I had a son. And it just triggered me and I didn't know why. But that was the beginning of that healing. Where I kept on going back to that scene. Now Jesus would just come in and just walk me through this.
And I didn't have a counselor or therapist or anything doing this. It was just Jesus doing it. Which made it in some ways like it's more obvious that it's Jesus when you don't know what you're doing.
Melissa: Yeah, yeah. No, for sure. And it's so interesting, though, how there are therapeutic techniques that do that. So that's amazing that how God uses that.
Greg: Yeah. Well however it happens, it's beautiful.
Melissa: Yes. Thank you for sharing that all, by the way. I really appreciate your vulnerability in that.
Greg: Yeah. Whatever we have ... Not everything we have, but part of the beauty that God brings out of stuff is when we’re open about it and we disclose it and then that activates stuff in other people and it gives permission to other people. One of the callings, I think, of Christian leaders is to model vulnerability. Sadly, they tend to model the opposite. But I just think that the Kingdom is a Kingdom of vulnerable people who are okay with their vulnerability, because they don't get life from having it together, they get their life from their relationship with Christ.
Melissa: Yeah. Thank you. That's so helpful to see modeled. So the next question is, I don't know if you'd say it's a shift, but another question I think [that] is interesting to know is have you experienced any particular lies about beauty? And this could be you personally or you could answer it, I guess, more generally too. Just lies about beauty that you see at work in the world in general.
Greg: Yeah, all over the place. “The beauty is in the glamor and the gleam and the bling bling thing.” You know? It's the “oh look at the beautiful people.” In some ways, I have an affinity for a Marilyn Manson song, “Beautiful People.” I don't know if you ever heard of that. It's a diabolical sounding song, but it's like mocking. "Look at the beautiful people, the beautiful people." But it's just like we've got this shallow, false view. And a lot of it's driven ... I mean, there's a spiritual quality to all of it, but it's, I think, endemic to a consumeristic society. To the degree that we're commodified, the greatest beauty is going to be “what's in it for me? What pleases me? Getting it my way, getting more of my stuff, getting more funds to get my best life now.” Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble.
And that's held up as beauty. And it's unattainable for 99% of the people. But that's because they're marketing it to the 99% of the people. Like a little piece of cheese with a rat on a treadmill saying, "Hey chase after this." To the degree that you don’t match it, “what's wrong with you?” You know?
Melissa: Right. Yeah.
Greg: It's just a diabolical system.
Growing up, I can think of times where the ideal guy was the guy who's gonna be this sports jock. You know. And this is the way we talk about women. I remember coming to a point where way before I was ever a Christian, I was certainly grieved by that. The way the guys talk. There's all these pressures. “Who's got the biggest muscles?” Or it could be “who's got the smartest brain?” Or “who's got the quickest tongue?” Or “who can throw the best football?” Or “who can dress up the prettiest?” Or “who can catch a guy's attention?” Or “who's got the right kind of hair?” Bah bah bah bah bah. And if you don't make that grade, or to the degree you don't make that grade, well you gotta go from first class to second class or second to third or third to fourth or, God forbid, you could become one of the untouchables.
It grinds up people. It makes objects ... You know, what it does is it objectifies the folks who actually are good at this. Especially if you think along sexual lines. It commodifies and objectifies a certain typology and everyone else is supposed to chase and salivate after it. You know? And the women who actually can do it maybe are the worst victims of all because now they're objects, and that’s what they internalize. It's a diabolical hierarchy.
Melissa: Yeah. Thank you for naming that. I think there's a lot of power in just naming what is.
Greg: Absolutely.
Melissa: I think it's so heavy. Yeah, go ahead.
Greg: And to see the systemic nature of it, you know? We're all conditioned by it. We can't help ... And it takes great intentionality and persistence, transforming by the renewing of your mind. And a lot of discipleship. I think discipleship is 95% mental. Where it's just about what are you thinking? Monitoring are these all true or not?
Paul says this in Romans 12, verse two. Actually one and two. “Be no longer conformed to the pattern of this world.” And he uses this word in Greek, suschematizo. And the word “schema” is in it, “schemata” or “pattern.” And “su” means alongside of. So he's saying don't come alongside or don't be conformed to the pattern of this world, the structure of this fallen world. But rather be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
So it's like the only way out is to really submit your mind to God and just try to conform your thinking to God's standards of beauty. And acceptability. And where you get your life. And all of that.
The only other thing I’ll say about it is that the whole thing that drives it all is idolatry. An idol is anything that we try to use to fill a vacuum that only God can truly fill.
And only God's love, the kind of love that was revealed on Calvary, can really make us complete, can really make us beautiful, beautify us, can set us free. It's the ultimate thing we're longing for, but to the degree that we're not relying on God to meet that need, we invariably have to get it from other sources.
And that's where the world's system throws at us these objectifications and the commodifications and "chase after this" and these false goals. “You wanna succeed in life, well you gotta look like this and you should eat this and you gotta smoke this or drink this or whatever.” And “here are these four thousand eighteen different diets, half of them which will kill you, but guaranteed to get you that ideal body.”
Melissa: Yes. Yes.
Greg: It's nauseating. It uglifies the world.
Melissa: Yes. That's amazing. Thank you for stating all of that. So helpful.
Greg: My pleasure.
Melissa: The next question that I have is, I mean you kind of already spoke to this, but maybe there's something else that comes to mind. [I’m] curious if you can think of any particular experiences that you've had that have transformed your ideas around beauty. There might be a lot.
Greg: Well the experiences I've already shared have made me realize ... I guess I have a better understanding of what beauty incarnate looks like. As God's been bringing this healing into my life, yeah it’s just crystallized finding beauty in empathy, beauty in compassion, beauty in forgiveness. All of that, just the multidimensional aspects of beauty.
I'm trying to think, has there been one that has seriously ... I could throw this in for no extra cost. I did have one experience that told me how deceptive evil can be at appearing beautiful. I was 16 years old and I was really hungry for God. I was an atheist, but I was really feeling so empty. And so I and these other four guys had a rock band and we used to do a lot of drugs. But we didn't do it just to party, we did it because we were reading the Tao Te Ching or The Upanishads. And we were searching for the lost chord, you know. This is back in the 70s when everyone was turning out to tune in.
And I was really searching. I was hungry for this. This one night, we were studying the Aì Qīng. It was actually at a Christmas party, but we were on this table studying the Aì Qīng and learning how to do it. But we're stoned out of our brains and I had taken three hits of Mescaline. Even though the guy said it's my first time I should only take half, but I took three. And then I had this experience that was euphoric, where I turned into this Christmas tree and this Christmas tree turned into me and I saw the yin and yang, you know. And I even announced to the whole party, "I am the Christmas tree and the Christmas tree is me."
I was euphoric. I thought I had really discovered the essence of all things. I went home and I wrote about it for hours and hours and hours. But there's no longer I that was writing, it was the universe writing through me. You know? Because it's all one. Anyways, it was as euphoric as you can imagine. And the next morning, actually it was the next afternoon, I woke up with my head just feeling fried. And I read what I had written and it was utter utter nonsense. Hardly two, three words went together.
Even though at this point, I didn't believe in God or the devil or anything, that felt evil. I thought if that wasn't the true ultimate experience, then whatever that ultimate experience is I'm not going to get it by doing drugs. And that's the last time I ever did drugs.
Melissa: Wow.
Greg: Or at least that hard stuff. That woke me up to ... there is a devil out there and Paul says, Galatians 1:8, that the enemy can appear as an angel of light.
So that's why it's important to know the world always offers us false beauty. But it can appeal to you on so many levels. You can want it, but it's a false beauty. And we've gotta be able to see true beauty. The best true beauty is not obvious.
In fact, the cross is beautiful, but if you look on the surface of it, it's profoundly, profoundly ugly. You wouldn't expect it to be beautiful. It's only when you have the faith to look through it that you can see that it's God, out of love for us, who stepped into this. He stooped an infinite distance to become a human being. And then on the cross, He stooped, as it were, another infinite distance to become our sin and to become our curse. And that's how He reveals the profession of the love that He is.
The distance that He stoops reveals the profession of the love that He is. Which is why the cross is the quintessential, supreme, all-surpassing revelation of God. It's the definitive “this is what God really looks like.” It's beautiful because here God is setting aside his power to give His life for us and paying an unsurpassable price to do it. And that's just beautiful, but it's not obvious. On the surface it can look ugly.
And I think most kingdom beauty is found ... Last night, I'll tell you what was beautiful. Our church has this party for a ministry that's called TAP, Touching All Possibilities. What they do is, they simply take people who've got disability labels, cognitive and physical, who are the most quarantined portion of the population. And they throw a party where they invite the neuro-typical people, people without labels, to come together and have a party. And everyone takes off their labels. The slogan is “proudly dislabeled.”
It's the most fun and beautiful party I've ever been a part of. Every time I go to it, I end up being drenched in sweat because I'm dancing so hard and singing and stuff. And it's just the beauty of this, it was just amazing. There's two miracles that happened yesterday. They were just beautiful. I have a relative, I'll put it like this, because I don't know how public this will go and there's a little confidence I have to keep.
Melissa: Sure.
Greg: But you know, I've talked with him and he's okay with this. I've gone public with it before. I have a son who's got Autism and I've been trying to get him to come to this thing, but he doesn't like to associate with people who've got disabilities because his whole job all his life he's tried to be normal. He's socially aware. And it's the bane of his existence. If he was just a little bit less socially aware, he'd be a much happier person. But he lives in this. He's normal enough to want the normal, but not able to get it. He's like the victim in the world's system of what is beautiful, you know? It's like, you don't rate. It's cruel.
So this is one of those parties. But last night, he called me up out of nowhere. I was just getting ready to head for the championship game, the basketball ... But he calls up and says, "Dad, I'd like to go to the TAP." And it's like “okay forget the basketball game, we're going to the TAP.” And he had the time of his life. He had the time of his life. Even got up and karaoked with some people.
Melissa: Oh wow.
Greg: I can't tell you how shocking that is.
Melissa: Wow.
Greg: And he's up there doing it with another guy who's more obviously has a label on him. But he doesn't care. He's been set free. There's nothing more beautiful than people being set free. It's just a beautiful thing. And I'll tell you one more thing that's beautiful, since you're not cutting me off very fast.
Melissa: No, no, no.
Greg: The guy who runs this things is a guy who, he's not a Christian, he doesn't know what he thinks about any of that.
Melissa: Okay.
Greg: But he incarnates the Kingdom, my ideal of the Kingdom, better than most Christians that I've ever met. In fact, way better than most Christians I've ever met, including me. He just lives it. And I keep telling him, "You're way closer to the Kingdom than you think. In fact, I think you're way more inside than you think.” It’s just beautiful.
But there was a time about six months ago where I was hoping my son would get into this. He got interested a little bit, but then he just lost interest, didn’t want to go. And I got really discouraged because it was the first movement forward that I had seen in his life in like ten years, like a possibility. So I was really discouraged. And this guy, who is not a Christian, this is the beautiful way God works, he says, "You gotta have hope. You gotta play the long game, not the short game." And he tells me a few stories about how people who have seemed like it was impossible they'd ever come are now coming and being set free. It took this one guy two years before he would step in the door and now he's over there at this party, hanging out, he's dressed up at Christmas as Santa Claus. And he's like, "Have hope."
So, here the pagan is telling the Christian here’s how to have faith. I wrote him that this morning, it's like, look at you Mister quote unquote ... You wear the pagan label and here you are teaching me, Mister Christian Pastor label, what it is to have faith. That's how God works.
Melissa: Wow.
Greg: That's how God works.
Melissa: Thank you so much, Greg.
Greg: That's beautiful.
Melissa: That is. Thank you. Thank you for everything you shared. I'm just sitting with that. It's so good. Is there anything else? I know this has been pretty structured that, as even thinking about it topic of beauty ... And I know you said your dissertation on aesthetics and beauty.
Greg: Yeah.
Melissa: Is there anything else that you wish people knew about beauty? Or anything else that's come to mind, thinking about this topic, that you're like ... Anything else you wanna mention on it?
Greg: I guess I'd say one thing. You know, Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world," right? And I would encourage people that that's very true.
But whatever change you want to see in the world is always in the direction of beauty. So, be the beauty you want to see in the world. I think we beautify the world in the little incidental things we do. It's not like the major things. Yeah, you save somebody here, whatever. Those are once in a lifetime.
But it's the way we live and think day by day.
Paul says in second Corinthians five, he says that we're compelled by the love of Christ. Everything we do is out of love for Christ. He didn't do things out of shame or guilt, it was love that drew him on. And he says that we're convinced that if one died for all, and therefore all have died. So in some sense, everybody has already died in Christ. And then he says, so we no longer look at anyone from a fleshly point of view, from just a normal human point of view, what you see is what you get. But rather, he says, if anyone's in Christ, behold there's a new creation, old things have passed away. Behold, everything is new.
And what he's saying there is, he's talking about how do we look at people? He's saying don't look at them from a fleshly point of view, look at them in light of the new creation. Everything that's old about them is dead, it's gone. They don't know it yet, but it's gone. And everything has been made new. So look at them through those new eyes.
So I encourage people, it's good to even practice this. Our minds, you know, are gossip machines and most of it's negative, but all of it presupposes that we're superior because you can't have a judgment about things unless you're above things, right? I'm the arbiter of good taste. Oh, that's nice. It's a yap machine. But if we could just shut that yap machine off a little bit and just start intentionally agreeing with God that ever person we see was worth Jesus dying for. That person has unsurpassable worth because God ascribed an unsurpassable worth to them by paying an unsurpassable price for them.
And agree with God that that person there and that [person there]... Whatever you see on the outside, forget about it. It's irrelevant, it's old, it's gone and no one put you in charge of judging that stuff anyways. Your job as a Kingdom person is to, first and foremost, agree with God that every person's worth dying for.
And when you begin to look at the world in that lens, you begin to see beauty in a way you never would see it before. You see the beauty in all things. And it may sometimes be especially in folks who give you reasons on the outside to think, "Ew." It's like, look closer and look with faith. And you'll see something that's even more beautiful…God died for him too. And that person too. And that friend and that foe, it doesn't matter.
So be the beauty you want to see in the world. Be the beauty you want to see in the world and you'll see the beauty that is in the world. Boom, I gotta write that one down. I'm gonna tweet that right now.
Melissa: You should.
Greg: All right.
Melissa: You got it?
Greg: It's great talking with you, Melissa.
Melissa: Yeah, thank you so much, Greg. I can't thank you enough for this. This has been wonderful, impactful for me and I know it will be for so many other people. So thank you so much.
Greg: It seemed to me like this talk involves a thinner place than usual. I just felt like God was in this. It felt like a thin place.
Melissa: Well thank you.
Greg: That doesn't happen usually.
Melissa: Oh, to me these conversations are incredibly sacred. I think when we're talking about beauty, we're talking about God.
Greg: So you're always talking about stuff that is kind of thin place-ish. Whereas most of my podcasts are more academic and stuff.
Melissa: Okay.
Greg: So this is kind of a unique feel for a podcast, like “Oh,” it feels like God's really present here. So it was a delight.
Melissa: Thank you so much. I can't thank you enough.