William Shatner spent three seasons as Capt. James T. Kirk on the original Star Trek TV series. But pretending to be a space traveler doesn’t compare to the real thing.
October 13 Shatner rocketed from earth for 11 minutes and traveled 66 miles as one of the crew of four on Jeff Bezo’s Blue Origin rocket, making him the oldest person in history to journey into space.
And when Shatner emerged from the space capsule, he was visibly shaken. His feet planted in the awkward Texas desert dirt, Shatner immediately spoke with Bezos to express his gratitude for the profound experience.
“In a way it’s indescribable,” he said. “Everybody in the world needs to do this, everybody in the world needs to see the. . .” his words lost traction, and then he added, “It was unbelievable. Unbelievable.”
And he wasn’t finished. Shatner had gained perspective. The kind of perspective provided from a distance. The kind that can’t be grasped from ground level. Fighting back tears, he told Bezos, “What you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine. I’m so filled with emotion about what just happened. I just… it’s extraordinary. It’s extraordinary.”
And then he added, “I hope I never recover from this. I hope that I can maintain what I feel now. I don’t want to lose it.”
Lose what?
Lose what exactly?
Shatner was overwhelmed, overcome, overjoyed. Grateful, weak-kneed, teary-eyed and enthusiastic. Why? Certainly, as he explained to the press, seeing the world from space impacted him in ways he could not have imagined.
And I think that he was expressing the surprising result of what so few of us ever experience any more. It’s a feeling that we were designed to enjoy. But we don’t. Not because we can’t, but because we choose not to. And because we have forgotten how.
That feeling? Awe. It’s a feeling of reverence and wonder, of fear and joy, blended together in such a way that it leaves us unable to articulate the feeling or even explain what ignited it. It’s struggling to describe the indescribable, to articulate the unexplainable. It’s knowing that no words can do justice to what we have just experienced.
We have lost our sense of awe
But we have lost our sense of awe. We mostly believe ourselves to be magnificent rulers of our own fate, directors of our own drama. But even as we tell ourselves how impressive we are, we still see the world from ground level, standing in the desert sand and wishing there were more to life than the dirt we inhabit.
From this perspective, everything is common, ordinary, and profane (Titus 1:5). We have been taught, and we are teaching our children, that what we see is all there is, and so what we want is all that matters. We have lost our sense of wonder, our grasp of things that are gloriously greater than we are. And we are suffering greatly for it. We are smothered by our smallness and stuck in our depravity.
How did we forget? Easy. We forgot who we are because we rejected who God is (Rev. 4:11).
We have reduced creation to a mix of molecules. Darwin diminishes our humanity, socialism fortifies our selfishness, and a host of ideologies now degrade us and segregate us into factions. In short, we have been taught to be less than who we are. Humanity is confused. We need a dose of awe to give us perspective.
We need to be reminded that life is bigger than us. And we need to be reminded that there is hope when we are hurting, help when we are striving, and strength when we are shrinking. We need to be reminded that there is something, Someone, greater than us. And that this life, this world, is not all there is.
How to be awestruck again
So how do we recover that sense of awe? To be awestruck again? To be overwhelmed with grandeur and grace? We need to see our lives from His point of view.
- God is our Creator (Is. 42:5)
It all starts there. God is our Creator. The Bible opens with the most fundamental fact of our existence (Gen. 1:1-2). So fundamental, that is, that expulsion of this fact from our society and culture is the root cause for our loss of awe and reverence.
We have forgotten our place in the universe (Ps. 8:4-8). We have sifted out the grandeur of our existence by divesting it of the one, great truth that puts everything else in perspective: He is God, and we are not (Num. 23:19).
And He didn’t create us because He needed to. He created us because He wanted to. And He wants us to know Him (Prov. 8:17, Jer. 9:23-24).
- God is greater than we can even imagine (Eph. 3:20-21).
And when we get to know Him, something happens.
When people in the Bible glimpse God, they nearly fall apart (Is. 6:1-5). They are simultaneously overwhelmed by His majesty and overcome by their own depravity. Their self-assurance evaporates and the reality of their condition intrudes on their comfortable delusion of perfection.
They often collapse in fear, mortified by the truth. Why? Because the contrast between us and Him produces awe, reverence, and fear (Matt. 17:1-6). Or sometimes they cling to Him, perhaps afraid that the experience will vanish if they leave His side (Luke 8:38-39).
- God is more gracious than we deserve (Eph. 2:1-10)
So people in the Bible cry out for mercy, and, to their dismay, they find Him ready and willing to provide it (Luke 5:1-11).
God gives grace, and gratitude replaces fear. They respond in awe and reverence at the gift of His grace and the realization of His love (Is. 6:5-9). And they show their gratitude the only way they can. They worship.
And not that weak, dry stuff we so often pass off as worship in our churches. No, the biblical response to God’s grace, the worship from the awestruck heart, is gripping and moving, emotional and inspiring. And grateful. Always grateful.
Awe produces gratitude, and gratitude is the catalyst for worship.
If you have lost your sense of awe, could it be that you have forgotten what He has done for you in Christ?
We are awestruck when we see Him as He is and see ourselves as we really are and ask, Why would He want me? Why would He want us? No reason other than He loves us. And so our hope lies in Him (1 Peter 1:3, Col. 3:1-3).
So be in awe. The indescribable, unexplainable, the absolute truth is that your God loves you for one reason. He created you. So you can always count on that love. For now. And for eternity.
Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful. By it, we may serve God acceptably, with reverence and awe.
Heb. 12:28