Dan Huff Concert: All truth and beauty belong to God... And bring Him glory

“All truth is God’s truth” is a maxim most Christians are comfortable affirming. A mathematical theorem is true whether the one who discovers it believes in God or not. There are atheists who have uncovered profound mathematical truths with no awareness that what they’ve found ultimately belongs to God—and yet that truth still brings Him glory. Truth does not require acknowledgment to be true.

But I wonder if we’ve thought deeply enough about a parallel idea: all beauty is God’s beauty.

Whether the one creating it recognizes the source or not, beauty has the same transcendent quality as truth. A melody can move us before we understand why. An Italian opera—words we can’t translate, phrases we don’t intellectually grasp—can still carry us somewhere beyond ourselves. It lifts us above the performer, above the technique, even above the language itself. Beauty points past the human instrument to something eternal.

In that way, beauty quietly refuses to stay contained within human limits. It exposes the cracks in our finiteness and lets light through.

Last night in Nashville, listening to Dan Huff play guitar, that reality hit me all over again. What I experienced wasn’t merely excellence or nostalgia or even admiration for a master musician—though all of that was there. What I felt was gratitude. Gratitude that God, in His ongoing creativity—His creatio continua—still chooses to reveal His glory through flawed, finite people.

That’s the thing about beauty: it transcends the brokenness of the one creating it. It surpasses motive, belief, reputation, and even awareness. A beautiful thing remains beautiful because its source is not ultimately human.

For every beautiful thing, God gets the glory.

Dan Huff absolutely ripped it up last night. It was beautiful. And I left the room thankful—deeply thankful—for what I believe may be God’s most glory-revealing gift to humanity: music. A gift that bypasses our defenses, quiets our arguments, and reminds us that we were made for more than explanation—we were made for worship.

Dan, thanks for coming out of retirement and creating a moment of worship for me.

God be praised.

Is “a Personal Relationship with God” the Best Way to describe salvation? Is it even a good one?

 If you grew up in an evangelical church, you’ve probably heard the phrase countless times: “Christianity isn’t a religion—it’s a personal relationship with God.” Or, "do you have a personal relationpship with God?" I believe the expression is meant to imply that Christianity is real, substnative, and life changing. It isn't cultural Christianity, inherited faith, church attendance without repentance or transformation. The expression means relationship with God matters and God is not distant. That corrective implication of this expression was and is still necessary.

But over time, I’ve started to wonder whether “personal relationship with God” is the clearest or most faithful way to describe what Scripture teaches. I have heard the phrase in a few sermons recently and today I decided to dig in a bit. Not because of any kind of doctrinal or moral high ground, but for the sake of curiosity.

The phrase “personal relationship with God” itself doesn’t appear anywhere in the Bible. Neither do familiar expressions like “invite Jesus into your heart.” That doesn’t automatically make them wrong, but it should make us pause. Scripture gives us its own characterizations of God’s relationship to man, and when we replace biblical terminology with other ones, we often import assumptions without realizing it.

For example, in our present cultural context, a “personal relationship” refers to something individual, emotional, informal, and largely private. It could mean different things to different people. Some may add any number of qualities to a “personal relationship” which are not part of our relationship with God. One example that comes to mind is the ability to negotiate. In my marriage, my most personal relationship, we often use negotiation as a tool and it is a tool for a healthy relationship. This valuable relationship tool and many others just do not carry over into our relationship with God.

So, through this mispereptions, the concept of “personal relationship” can quietly shift the center of faith away from what God has done in Christ and toward how I experience my personal God on my terms. When assurance is tied to feeling close to God, faith becomes fragile. Seasons of dryness or doubt begin to feel like spiritual failure, or a fracture in the “personal relationship”. Scripture, however, grounds assurance somewhere much sturdier than a relationship that is based in how we experience God. It is based in Christ’s finished work.

Certainly, there is a relational aspect to knowing God. As a matter of fact, when the Bible speaks about our connection to God, it uses language that is both relational and objective. It talks about being united to Christ, reconciled to God, adopted as sons and daughters, brought into covenant. These are not cold or distant doctrines. They are God-initiated secure promise that are not based on how we feel. Jesus defines eternal life not as an emotion or an internal sense of closeness, but as knowing God through Him. That knowing is covenantal, not casual. It is both personal and corporate, and the terms of the relationship are not ours. They are his.

If the goal in using the expression “personal relationship with Christ” is to correct casual or cultural Christianity, or to stir people toward a deeper connection to God, a better way to say it might be “union with Christ by faith,” or “being reconciled to God through Christ,” or simply “knowing God through Christ.” Those phrases are rooted in scripture and preserve the relational reality without centering faith on personal feeling, private spirituality, or the whatever messed up perceptions people may have about what “personal relationship”. These phrases keep the focus where Scripture keeps it—on Christ, not on us.

That doesn’t mean we need to ban the phrase “personal relationship with God.” Most people mean something that is true when they use it. But it does mean we should be careful and precise about defining what it means using Biblical language. Christian faith is personal, but it is also covenantal, corporate, and Christ-centered. It begins not with our initiative or our emotions, but with God’s gracious action toward us