When David wrote Psalm 27 he was in awe of the Lord, happy in Him, and found nothing more beautiful than God to capture his heart.
I have asked one thing from the Lord; it is what I desire: to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, gazing on the beauty of the Lord and seeking Him in His temple (Psalm 27:4).
As David gazed on the beauty of the Lord, he was surely not bored. The Lord is not boring. He is infinitely awesome. And because God is infinitely awesome, boredom is a sin because it reveals our hearts are not in awe of Jesus.
Jared Wilson writes, “Boredom is a sin so long as Christ is infinitely beautiful…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 is a sin that leads to other sins. Destructive behavior often follows boredom, from the teenagers smoking pot to numb the pain of boredom to the spouse seeking an affair to feel alive.
When we lose our awe for God, we look to other things, lesser things. When our hearts don’t rest in Him, we look for other things – often things that will destroy us. Blaise Pascal wrote, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
We even see this in David, the man after God’s own heart, the man who declared his one request was to gaze on the beauty of God. He could not sit quietly in his room alone. He had to have something to gaze upon. And because he was not in awe of the Lord, he looked for something else to stir his heart.
One evening David got up from his bed and strolled around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing — a very beautiful woman (2 Samuel 11:4).
In that tragic moment the Lord’s beauty was not capturing David’s heart, so he looked for something else that would. Adultery, murder, an elaborate cover-up, and the death of a child would follow.
We are wise to continue to “gaze upon the beauty of the Lord.”
