beauty on Sacrifice

Leader: The mighty one, God the Lord, speaks and summons the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting. People: Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines forth. Leader: Our God comes...

Leader: The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? People: One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after...

Lifeless are our prayers. Dry and brittle are our spirits. Like Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones, we are a people without the sinews of goodness, the flesh of holiness, and the breath of righteousness. W...

In their excellent book on reconciliation, Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice share a story about how small acts of beauty, done well, can lead to reconciliation: A friend told us of visiting a very l...

The mystery of perfection as an aspect of beauty is its transcendence. It points to a glory beyond itself. I knew that when I held my children, I didn’t simply cradle flesh and blood. I held a living ...

Leader: Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name! Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, People: As a father shows compassion to his children, s...

“[Zach] had gone from seeing beauty in the midst of suffering to creating it. He had taken this thing that could have suffocated him with despair and stripped it down until all that was left was hope....

God of the heavens and the earth, Giver of sun and showers, wind and calm: We praise You for Your grace and power, Your beauty, grace and care. You sustain us daily, and encourage us constantly. Than...

Over the triple doorways of the Cathedral of Milan, there are carvings. One features a beautiful wreath of roses, accompanied by the inscription: “All that pleases is but for a moment.” Another displa...

Lord God, we come to adore you. You are the ground of all that is. You hold us in being, and without you we could not be. Before we were born, before time began, before the universe came into being, ...

Each of us, Lord, has failed to fully observe your beauty. We fall in love with our own image and are left disappointed and alone. Please be faithful to us, Jesus, even when we turn from You. We...

From 1992 to 1995 the world witnessed one of the worst civil conflicts, the Bosnian War. Three factions, each tied to a religion (Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosniaks), began attacking...

Every cross adorning a church is in itself a sermon—a sermon proclaiming that if Christ can transform the Roman instrument of execution into a thing of beauty, there is hope that in Christ all things ...

For the beauty of human love Brother, sister, parent, child. Friends on earth and friends above, For all gentle thoughts and mild; Lord of all, to thee we raise, This, our hymn of grateful praise...

Beauty, then, is not mere decoration, but rather an essential element of the liturgical action, since it is an attribute of God himself and his revelation. These considerations should make us realize ...

May the Lord of love keep us all in peace, transform our conflict into the beauty of his grace, and give us joyful hearts to do his will. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. A...

How great and glorious You are, O God. There is no one like You. You transform our weakness into strength. You forgive our stubbornness and arrogance, and fill us with Your generous wisdom. You turn o...

Desire lies at the heart of who God made us to be, who we are at our core. Desire is both our greatest frailty and the mark of our highest beauty. Our desire completes us as we become One with our Lov...

Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body—which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body ...

All: Oh Lord, my Light, my Life, my Joy, my Peace—with you I find refuge from danger, shelter from the storms in my life. You are good and you do good. You are the Strength of my life, and I look to y...

A hunger for beauty is at its heart a hunger for God.

There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.

I am abashed, solitary, helpless, surrounded by a beauty that can never belong to me. But this sadness generates within me an unspeakable reverence for the holiness of created things, for they are pur...

“When Abram came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw that Sarai was a very beautiful woman” (Gen 12:14). What is considered beautiful is one of those things that often goes without being said. Sarah was about...

While brokenness is difficult, it’s beautiful because it makes God look good. Your natural gifts draw attention to yourself while brokenness draws attention to your Lord. With this in mind, power is d...

In his book, Blue Like Jazz , Don Miller tells the story of his time as an evangelical Christian at the extremely liberal Reed College in Portland, Oregon. A part of the underlying theme of the boo...

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to r...

O worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness; let the whole earth stand in awe of him.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Gracious God, thank you for the beauty of this world. Sometimes we can get wrapped up in its pain and brokenness so much that we miss its wonders. Today we pause to thank you for the beauty of your cr...