You are listening to the Passion City Church DC podcast. To learn more about Passion City Church, including our gathering times in Atlanta in Washington, D.C.

Visit us online at Passion City Church.com.

Today's talk comes from Pastor Ben Stewart.

Several years ago I traveled Italy with my sister and we went to a number of museums,

the last of which was the Uphizi in Florence, which holds second only to the Vatican the most impressive collection of priceless art.

But as a 22 year old who slept through art class and went to all these museums without a guide or any kind of audio guide or anything,

you know, after you go to a couple of museums, you're like, wow, art, and then after all you're like, I don't know, I don't know what this means.

And so, so our we just

would walk faster and faster through these things we're like okay there's Mary Jesus

naked guy Mary you're just kind of going past them all and we were in the Uphizi and about fifth gear just

zooming through to say we did it and I'll never forget though I turned this

corner and was arrested by this one painting and I've never had the experience before. I've had it from nature,

never from something made by man. It was a painting of the

Jesus and Mary and Joseph and they're out at a park and holding Jesus and it's in so many ways just this normal mundane looking

looking scene and yet Michelangelo had infused it with all this color

that it at once looked mundane, common like you could be there with them. It looks

so real but then it looked transportive. This is some other place, this higher space.

And I realized later that was part of his goal, is to pick normal life but infuse it with a sense of

awe. And this picture did that. And I I'll never forget I stood there as a young

man captured by the beauty of this painting and tour groups came and went and

came and went and probably an hour went by where I was transfixed by the beauty of this picture of Jesus.

Why tell you that?

...