The Pleasure of Fascination with God

God created us with a longing for the pleasure of being fascinated, awestruck—filled with marvel and wonder. If we do not live with a sense of awe and wonder and a sense of fascination in our relationship with the Lord, we will live in spiritual boredom.

Many believers love Jesus but are spiritually bored, trying to find fascination in their ministry assignment or secular entertainment. When their ministry assignment is frustrating—people are not responding as expected, doors are not opening, money is not coming in, nobody recognizes them—they become disillusioned.

Those who live spiritually bored are more vulnerable to temptation. To escape this boredom, we need to redirect our attention to Jesus, the most fascinating Man who ever walked the earth. We need to turn our attention from those things that we desire to the most fascinating Man, who desires us.

It is your inheritance to live preoccupied with the glory of the Man Christ Jesus, not in boredom. To be honest, a spiritually bored believer is spiritually boring to unbelievers; they say, “Why would I want what you have? You are in anguish all the time. You are down on everything. You are not even happy with yourself. The only things you are happy about are the areas you are compromising in—and then you are sad after you compromise because you feel guilty that you felt happy! Why should I want what you have?”

Unbelievers are looking for someone who has something genuine on the inside, not just something showy on the outside. Some people think that if they have all the good stuff “just right”—fortune, fame, and so on—then unbelievers will say, “I want the good stuff too.” But that is not ultimately what attracts unbelievers. They want to see a person who is gripped by the person of Jesus and fascinated with Him, living from a place in their heart that rises above circumstances, unperturbed by who likes them and who doesn’t. Unbelievers will look at the believer’s genuine response to God and say, “How do you live that way? Why are you doing that? How come you are so gripped by this Jesus?” And it doesn’t matter what station of life you are in—working in the marketplace or in the church world, retired or in school—you can live fascinated and preoccupied with Jesus while your hands are occupied with other things.

Cultivating a responsive heart of extravagant devotion to Jesus takes time and effort; we must be deliberate about it. Love does not automatically grow; rather, it automatically diminishes unless we intentionally cultivate a responsive heart. Do you remember feeling the joy of abandonment to Jesus when you first heard the call to extravagant devotion? The Holy Spirit will help that freshness to return. Those who are seeking to be truly devoted to Jesus ask, “What is the most that God will empower me to give to Him?” They are not content with the minimum requirement of salvation.

By God’s grace we can live fascinated with the beauty of the Man Christ Jesus.