Everybody worships.
These are the words that David Foster Wallace spoke to a 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College. The choice isn’t for us whether or not we are going to worship something, that’s already a given, we are worship beings, but rather what is it that we are going to worship. We were made to set our hearts upon something, to be filled with wonder and excitement over this god or God that excites us. If you don’t agree then well I don’t believe you truly “know thyself.” Ponder for a moment. What do you think about when you are not doing anything? Where does your mind go when you lay on the couch, take a shower, go for a walk? Or sadly, are you like most people where you cannot bear the sound of silence? Because silence means you are alone, and that’s scary. But if you are honest with yourself, you will see that your mind goes to obsessions about money, or sex, envy of another husbands wife, wishing you had a nicer body, deeper friendships, or lived in another part of the world. You think if you have these things, or just this one thing then everything will be right with the world. You will truly be satisfied. As if satisfaction was that easy to come by.
But as Wallace says, if you worship money you will never have enough, if you worship sex and beauty you will never be beautiful enough and see yourself as hideous. Worship power and you will try and control everyone, worship intellect and you will always think that you are stupid and a fraud. We are caught in a society where these things are what give us purpose and worth. These are the idol factories that John Calvin talks about, and anything can be an idol. So what hope do we have? What do we do? Augustine says that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God. We will travel over arid plains seeking a place to rest our hearts, but there is truly only one oasis for our hearts. One person I love from my bosom is C. S. Lewis. He wisely says “aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.” Ps. 37:4 saysTake delight in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. I believe what this passage is saying is that if you can bring your heart to desire Christ, seek first the kingdom of God, His will for your life, then your desires will be God’s desires. If so, then he will give you the desires of your heart. Not all the things we worship are wrong things to want, we just put them in the wrong order. If Christ is our joy, the ultimate desire of our hearts will be his desires, we will grow into those desires and affections throughout our whole life and then the things of this world will grow strangely dim, in the light of Christ’s glory and grace.
