Thoughts on the Way Home

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

If Christ is True, Boredom is a Sin

-------


“If Christ is true, then boredom is a sin.

“Boredom is a sin so long as Christ is infinitely beautiful. Even the angels, for whom the gospel is that strange mystery purposed not for themselves, long to look into the deep, fascinating well of its revelation (1 Pet. 1:12). Because the good news proclaims the unsearchable riches of Christ, who opens the window looking out on the eternal mystery of the Trinity, it is endlessly absorbing, dazzlingly multifaceted. When we are bored, it can only be because we have stopped looking at Jesus. He can’t be boring. If we find him boring, it’s because we are boring. The deficiency is ours, not his.

“Boredom and his twin brother laziness are fundamentally theological failures, which is to say they are failures of belief, of worship. Thomas Aquinas wisely says, ‘Sloth is a kind of sadness.’ He has lifted the hood of the lazybones to peer at what’s beneath. ‘There’s your problem right there,’ he says, pointing. A worshipless heart. A joyless heart. The diagnosis is the same for the bored as for the lazy: a kind of sadness. And the prescription is the same for the bored as for the lazy: rejoice in the Lord.

“Laziness is not rest; this is why there is no joy in it. But when Jesus sets us free, he really sets us free—free to work, free to love, free to rest—with happiness and delight, awe and wonder, fulfillment and satisfaction.

“‘The soul has a palate and a throat, else Jesus would not bid us drink,’ John Piper says. It is not just our bodies that are built for enjoyment, but our spiritual senses, the insidest of our insides, and the problem of course is that we are bent to think our insides will have joy when our outsides do. But it doesn’t work that way. It is the other way around. Food and drink will not truly satisfy the body until the bread and wine of Jesus’s body satisfy our soul.”

– Jared Wilson, Gospel Deeps, 80-81
-------