In his book Don’t Waste Your Life, John Piper quotes a powerful paragraph from David Wells’ book God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams. According to Wells, while many Americans still assert belief in God, there is a “weightlessness” to our belief in God. He writes:
It is one of the defining marks of Our Time that God is now weightless. I do not mean by this that he is ethereal but rather that he has become unimportant. He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as not to be noticeable. He has lost his saliency for human life. Those who assure the pollsters of their belief in God’s existence may nonetheless consider him less interesting than television, his commands less authoritative than their appetites for affluence and influence, his judgment no more awe-inspiring than the evening news, and his truth less compelling than the advertisers’ sweet fog of flattery and lies. That is weightlessness. It is a condition we have assigned him after having nudged him out to the periphery of our secularized life…. Weightlessness tells us nothing about God but everything about ourselves, about our condition, about our psychological disposition to exclude God from our reality.”*
I found it stirring how Mr. Wells so aptly described how our culture has lost a sense of the grandeur and majesty of God.
May we live and talk and write in such a way that would move those around us to see God for who He is: majestic, holy and worthy of praise.
*[John Piper, Don’t Waste Your Life. Crossway Books: Wheaton, Illinois. 2003. p. 121.]