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Big News in 7 Days

I am looking forward to sharing something really cool in the coming days.

A Guest in Someone Else’s House

"The heavens are Yours; the earth also is Yours. The world and everything in it- You founded them. North and south- You created them."

Psalm 89:11-12a

Your entire life is as a guest in someone else's house.

New Online Store and Free PDF

I’m excited to announce the launch of my online shop!

To celebrate, I'm releasing a PDF called "Off the Bench: 33 Ways to Engage God's Mission for Artists" for FREE.

If you are a Christian and an artist (or know someone who is), I made this for you. If you want to go from watching the culture engagement game from the bleachers to getting in the kingdom activity with your artistic gifts, this is a must read for you.

Do you feel like your artistic gifts aren’t fully valued? Like only church leaders or missionaries get to "play in the game" of engaging culture? If that sounds familiar, this is for you!

This 12-page PDF is designed to encourage and inspire you to recognize the many potential ways God has gifted you to serve his mission.

Get your copy here!

Creativity & the Kingdom of God (pt. 5)

In this last post, I will consider our God of creativity. Our maker is the capital M Maker. Creating is at the core of who he is. Artistry is the first attribute we learn about God in Genesis 1:1.

Consider with me the idea of God as creative expressionist. He was PLEASED to create you and I, He CONSIDERED giving us good works from before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 2:10). 

What does it mean to become a Christian? Is it simply to now start obeying a new set of rules in your life?

Not quite. 

If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation

2 Corinthians 5:17

Christians, are new creations—the future heavenly realities made manifest at this moment. 

God’s Creation as Gift-recipients

Listen to this list of true realities about what is means to be a new creation by God. Hear them like you are a child in the car at a self-driving carwash. Let them drench you, soak you, be a recipient of them. They are gifts for you.

Christians are those who (from Colossians):

• 1:12 Enabled to share in inheritance of light with other believers

• 1:13 Rescued from the domain of darkness

• 1:13 Transferred into the kingdom of the Son

• 1:14 Redeemed

• 1:14 Forgiven of their sins

• 1:20 Reconciled to God — at peace with Christ, their Maker

• 1:21 Once alienated, hostile in mind/action. Now, reconciled through Jesus death

• 1:22 Have something to hope in their lives: the gospel

• 1:26 Insight into the mysteries of God: Christ dwelling in Christians

• 2:6 Received Christ Jesus

• 2:10 Been filled by Christ, the head of every ruler and authority

• 2:12 Buried with him

• 2:12 Raised to life with Him 

• 2:13 Forgave us all trespasses

• 2:14 Erased the certificate of debt, with its obligations

• 2:20 Died with the Messiah

• 3:1 Raised with the Messiah

• 3:3 Died 

• 3:3 Whose lives are hidden with the Messiah in God

• 3:4 The Messiah is your life

• 3:4 Who will be revealed with Jesus in glory

• 3:9 Who have put off the old self with its practices

• 3:10 Who have put on the new self

• 3:10 Being renewed in knowledge according to the image of your Creator

• 3:11 Unified with Christians of all races, classes, castes, and religious backgrounds

• 3:12 Chosen, holy, loved

• 3:13 Forgiven

• 3:24 Ones whose master is in heaven

• 4:18 have received grace

These are truths that Paul describes as God “lavishing [made abundant; exceeding a fixed number] on us” (Eph 1:8). Your Christian maturity rests on you holding tightly to these truths. 

These are not just ideas. They are truths. They are realities. Christian’s are new creations. When you stumble, sin, fall short, God is always there to catch you, guide you, and give you wisdom. 

Summing up Creativity & the Kingdom of God

God shows us that creative expression is meant to bless the world, not curse it. The golden calf, of course, was an artwork which became worshipped. In contrast, the tabernacle was an artifact which ushered people to behold & engage with God. 

Brothers and sisters, delight in God’s good gifts, but don’t worship them. Worship He who gave them.

Believer, may God’s prompting spark you to be intentional about bearing kingdom fruit and works to those around you.

And fellow artists, the world needs you. You have talents and skills given by God. He wants you to develop them, use them, and steward them. Enjoy those gifts. Don’t worship them. Bring them as an offering to the throne of God and watch how he changes the world by them. 

Creativity & The Kingdom of God (pt. 4)

Creativity & the Christian

In my previous post, I considered Creativity from the artist’s vantage point. In this post, I will turn to creativity as a Christian. I want to do this, first, by looking at all the commands in Colossians 3:12-4:2:

3:12 Put on:

Heartfelt compassion

Kindness

Humility

Gentleness

Patience

3:13 Acceptance of one another

Forgiveness

3:14 Love—unity

3:15 Let the peace of Messiah control your hearts

Be thankful

3:16 Let the message about the Messiah dwell richly among you

Teach and admonish another another in all wisdom

Sing Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude to God

3:17 Do everything (word/deed) in name of Lord Jesus

Give thanks to Go the Father through Him

3:18 Submit to husband (WIVES)

3:19 Love your wives (HUSBANDS)

Don’t be bitter toward them

3:20 Obey parents (KIDS)

3:21 Don’t exasperate the kids (DADS)

PUT ON

Rather than unpacking these commands specifically, I want to consider them as a whole for my purposes here.

To do this, I want you to think of someone in your life who embodied these commands to you. For a moment, rather than think of these commands as Christian duties, consider being on the receiving end of these expressions. 

When someone puts on these commands, they dress, or adorn, themselves with the good news of the gospel. Putting these on makes the good news feel good to others. It beautifies it. Our lives are sermons before we ever share the good news to people.

To put these on in our lives is what it looks like to “create good” (Gal 6:9). When we “put these on” we are making good work for those around us. And our works make our faith alive (James). 

Some of these quotes come to mind when I consider this “put on-ness” aspect of these verses:

Rick Rubin upon meeting the Avett Brothers.

“In the first 30 seconds of meeting them 

I knew that they were people I wanted to work with. 

And it seemed like being around 

them will make life better”

Francis Schaeffer

"Even for the great artist, the most crucial work of art is his life.” (Art and the Bible)

CS Lewis

“Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.” (Mere Christianity)

Mark 6:20b (The Message)

“Whenever [Herod] listened to [John] 

he was miserable with guilt—

and yet he couldn’t stay away. 

Something in John kept pulling him back.”

In this way, we are all creative. We make the gospel beautiful with good works. We do this in many moments in the day. One story illustrates this well.

Remove All the “Shoulds”

I remember the season my wife and I had our first child with glimpses of both fuzziness and clarity. One moment stands out. As we sat down with a pastor and his wife, we shared how we were adjusting as new parents. “We just don’t have the capacity to keep up with the variety of things [ministry things] we should be doing,” I said. “Well,” said my pastor friend,” I think you need to remove all the shoulds out of your life.” 

That was it. That simple. With one word of encouragement, my friend created a whole new world for us to live and operate in. He used that moment for creativity. He chose to put on heartfelt compassion. 

Being Metaphorical Christs - The Creative Effort

This takes intentional action on our part—to manifest good works which do not yet exist. 

Love is never a one-size-fits-all action.

It sees the many needs in the many moments of the day, 

It steps in, and 

It meets those needs.

This is what I call be “metaphorical Christs.” 

We are the image of Jesus when we act in such manners. 

In my next post, I want to highlight the final way I want to look at creativity and the kingdom: creativity and God.

Creativity & The Kingdom of God (pt. 3)

Creativity & the Artist

I want to consider the work of creativity and the artist first before we look at Christian and theologian. Colossians 3:16 states,

Let the message about the Messiah dwell richly among you, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, and singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, with gratitude in your hearts to God.

Now, why doesn’t it say, “Let the message be taught among you?”

The idea of “dwell richly” means to let something enter into and take complete residence in your heart and community. It means that the message of Jesus would fill every crack and crevice of our lives. 

When God communicated, he did not just teach, He dramatized with the prophets, He cooked up heavenly manna, He spoke in parables and other literary genres, He made the longest book a music book, He concluded the Law with two poems, He had Moses sing a song after He parted the Red Sea, He endowed the craftsmen with wisdom and visual art for the temple.

And ultimately, God’s fullest form of expression was sending Jesus as the embodiment of love itself. Of love, himself.

If you want to know or learn ANYTHING about God, look to Jesus. Jesus isn’t merely a message. He brings life to the message!

“Imagination Specialists”

God has gifted certain individuals as, what one theologian calls, “Imagination specialists.” According to Byron Spradlin, artists are particular individuals—imagination specialists—“who [are] unusually wise at imaginative design or expression.” He says that“Artists create environments for people to touch the transcendent realities.”

He’s getting this concept from Exodus 35:30-36:4 where we see the first people God gave the Spirit to: artists and craftsmen to design and construct the dwelling place of God:

Bezalel was 

• Filled with God’s Spirit: with wisdom, understanding, and ability in every kind of craft to design artistic works in gold, silver, and bronze, to cut gemstones for mounting, and to carve wood for work in every kind of artistic craft. 

Bezalel and Oholiab were

• Given the ability to teach others.

• Filled by God with skill to do all the work of a gem cutter; a designer; an embroiderer in blue, purple, and scarlet yarn and fine linen; and a weaver.

• They could do every kind of craft and design artistic designs.

Bezalel, Oholiab, and all the skilled people were

• Tasked to work based on everything the LORD has commanded. 

• The Lord gave them wisdom and understanding to know how to do all the work of constructing the sanctuary. 

What is amazing to me is that in our society today, artists are often poked fun at, considered socially awkward, and used for their gifts. Yet the church does not often asked for their insights. 

In this Exodus passage though, they are the ones God gave wisdom to. They have the ability to teach.

Often, prophets are on the margins of society. Consider the fact that John the Baptist was in the wilderness. Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the others were cultural outcasts for calling Israel to turn back to the Lord. What is significant to me is how they leaned into the the realm of the imagination, of what C.S. Lewis called “the organ of meaning.”

Artists care deeply and have vision or outside-the-box ideas because they want to manifest something meaningful into the world. 

Notes

• Spradlin, Byron. 2023. “Byron Spradlin On Missions and the Role of Artists.” lausanne.org.

Creativity & The Kingdom of God (pt. 2)

The Root of Creativity

The history of this idea of “Creativity” is more of a recent thing.

Prior to the Enlightenment, the Western church was afraid to use it because “creating” had a kind of God-like status associated with it. 

But over these last few hundreds years in the West, an elite cultural status formed around the realm of the arts. 

Artists became a new social class—no longer just “craftsmen” with an artisan trade. I believe that the result of this new distinct artist role has done more harm than good. I made this idea of creativity messy for those who wouldn’t fit the idea of “artist.” Let me explain.

“Creative Expression"

If we consider the root of the words “creative expression” I think we see something interesting though:

“CREATIVE" — To bring into existence, cause something to come forth.

“EXPRESSION” — To make known, reveal.

To creatively expression then means, something like, to intentionally reveal something into existence. It is the taking of a think created in our minds and imaginations made manifest into real space and time. 

There are two struggles with this combination of words though. 

First, these two words seem to be almost saying the same thing, don’t they? 

Second, don’t we create + express all the time? 

Starting With Love

As a base line starting point, as this series is called “Creativity and the Kingdom,” we must consider whose kingdom we are talking about.

In God’s kingdom, the most basic ethic is love for God and neighbor (Mark 12:30-31). To follow Jesus is to love him with our entirety: our emotions, thoughts, and actions. And this is displayed, most purely, in how we treat others. 

Very simply, to be creative means to express love to God and neighbor. To help us understand a way forward, I think Japanese painter, Makoto Fujimura, has a helpful idea. 

The Three G’s

In his book, Culture Care, Fujimura outlines what he calls “generative thinking.” This is the effort we must all put into the expressions of our lives in three ways:

1. Genesis moments

2. Generosity

3. Generational thinking

By “Genesis moments,” he means those moments of need or failure (either in us or others). He says, “Creativity applied in a moment of weakness and vulnerability can turn failure into enduring conversation, open new visits of inspiration and incarnation” (3). What this means is there are multitudes of opportunities (“genesis moments”) every day which could open the door for us to be generous with our words and actions.

“Generosity” then is our responses to these genesis moments. While artists tend to have a keen sense of the worlds aches, this is something each and every one of us know well. Artists more often would prefer to create something as a response. They transmit their feelings into some sort of artistic communication (write a song, a poem, etc.). This is the intentional step for all of us to choose to be generous with these genesis moments rather than narcissistic. 

Fujimura’s third G then is “Generational Thinking.” By this, he means that to be generative in our thinking, we must think long term—beyond the moment. It did not take long for the curse in Genesis 3 to impact Adam and Eve’s next generation. Likewise, the numerous moments of blessings we show to others are what create a long-term culture of care. It is to ask of every action throughout the day: “what will this action or thought become in 200 years?”

Culture Care

Fujimura’s driving point is that our creative acts of love and service (whether we are artists or not) create what he calls, “Culture Care.” He says, “A well-nurtured culture becomes an environment in which people and creativity thrive” (7). 

So, how do we go about this in our lives? Fujimura’s final suggest is to fill in the blank to as many “What if _______?” Questions we can. Here are some of his examples:

• What if each of us endeavored to bring beauty into someone’s life today in some small way?

• What if we saw each moment as a genesis moment, and even saw the current problems we are facing as genesis opportunities?

• What if we considered our actions, decisions, and creative products in light of five hundreds years and multiple generations?

• What if we saw art as a gift, and not just as commodity?

• What if we became custodians of culture, willing to be demoted for standing up for what is right, but taking copious notes so we can challenge the status quo?

So, what are your What Ifs? 

Write them down. Share them with a friend. Make a plan to create!

Notes

• Fujirmura, Makoto. 2014. Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for our Common Life.

• Check out Rainbows for a Fallen World (Calvin Seerveld) for more related to the ideas in this post.

• Thanks to Byron Spradlin for some of these ideas as well!

Creativity & the Kingdom of God (pt. 1)

The Art Gallery & The Skeptic

A few years ago, I was at an art gallery with a group of friends who, let’s just say, weren’t all that interested in being there. 

One friend, who is not an artist, was looking at a painting with me. I could tell he was trying to ask respectful questions about it. While looking at the painting, he turned to me and said, “Matt, I have no idea what that’s about. Help me understand what it is.”

I sensed he felt out of place at the gallery, but I appreciated his curiosity and effort to engage with the artwork.

For many of us, engaging with the world of art and creativity feels like trying to understand a foreign language. However, creative expression is a much closer ally than we might think.

Though creativity is often associated with the arts, it’s not one of those "throwaway" values in the kingdom of God, as it sometimes is in other areas of life. It is not like in public schools where, when funds run low, the art departments are the first to get cut.

Yet, I think when we hear the words “creative expression,” something in our brains tends to shut off, thinking, “That’s not me, so let’s move on.”

What I hope to accomplish

I hope to convince you of two things in the next four blog posts:

First, that the idea of “creative expression” isn’t just something reserved for a category of people called “Artists.” Creativity is a gift God has equipped all of us to engage in.

Second, creativity actually helps to advance and expand the kingdom of God—both in our own hearts and in the communities we serve.

Be on the lookout for these four themes:

• What is Creativity

• Creativity as an Artist

• Creativity as a Christian

• Creativity and God

100% of the World is Oral

You may come across statistics highlighting the percentage of people worldwide who are oral-preference learners. I’ve seen anywhere from 70-80%.

While those numbers are interesting, I see it a little differently.

The reality is that 100% of us start as oral learners. By the time my daughter turned five, she had already been shaped by—and contributed to—the culture of our home and the relationships around her.

It’s only around 5 she began learning to read. 

Before age 5, she had already learned to make up her own songs, express herself, shape her evolving worldview, pick up values, interpret language, make connections, and yes, open a box of crayons, destroy a box of crayons.

For a 5 year old, literacy comes after so many other fundamental experiences. It is a, kind of, postscript for life. By then, life has already consisted of relationships, love, affection, laughter, learning complex skills, listening, and understanding that actions have consequences, with values and incentives learned through everyday experiences—an apprenticeship of life.

What if we embraced this natural, oral-preference tendency more as we seek to influence others, complementing it with more traditional forms of communication and knowledge?

Get rid of the “And”

Beware of what C.S. Lewis wrote into the demon, Screwtape’s, influence with what he called “Christianity And”:

“What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in a state of mind I call ‘Christianity And.’ You know—Christianity and the Crisis, Christanity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitude for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring.”

— Screwtape to Wormwood

Archippus Times

As I have been compiling a list of all the kinds of missionary helpers throughout the New Testament, I came across one obscure name at the end of Colossians 4. As Paul name-drops several people and does his usual end-of-letter closing, he tells the Colossians this:

“Tell Archippus, ‘Pay attention to the ministry you have received in the Lord, so that you can accomplish it.’”

— Paul, Colossians 4:17

What a random thing to say. The only other place Archippus is mentioned is in Philemon 2 where he is called “our fellow soldier.”

I was reflecting on the fact that we live in a kind of ARCHIPPUS-TIMES.

On one hand, you’ve got this guy, Archippus. It is clear that the Lord has an allotted space for him to be doing some kind of service in God’s kingdom. It is also unclear what he is dealing with that would hinder him from getting to this work. Is he being lazy? Is he unaware he’s got work to do? (that can’t be it). Has he run up against some sort of discouragement? Trial? Mid-life crisis? And why him of all the people in Colossae? Are all the other believers doing what God has asigned for their specific good works?

On the other hand, you have the work of the believers to nudge him toward remembering he’s got a specific responsibility for kingdom work. He’s got specific responsibility. God has transmitted some kind of work for him to do.

Sometimes, we need the encouragement to get to it. Other times, we need to nudge others.

What is our work?

I entited this that we live in Archippus times. Maybe we don’t even live in those times though. Perhaps we live in pre-Archippus times. It is easy to assume only leaders, those set-apart with degree in hand, have work to do for the kingdom. At least Archippus likely knew he had specific work to do. He just needed the car turned back on. How do you discover this kind of allotted work then?

Questions

One way to begin is by understanding yourself, your story, your angsts, your failures, your accomplishments, and what you enjoy doing that seems odd to others.

I’ve compiled a list of some of my most favorite questions to get you started.

New Section

I continue to add elements to my site here. Check out my new section “Make Sight.”

Comfort

You never know who you might be a comfort to.

Similarly, you never know who might show up as a comfort to you.

"But God, who comforts the depressed, comforted us by the coming of Titus..." (2 Corinthians 7:6)

Thriller Digital Painting

Fall officially begins September 22. But, you know…we’re almost there.

And what else says Fall than a good 80s Halloween reference.

Thriller (digital painting, 2024)

The Mission Has Always Been The Point

Augustine asked Ambrose where to begin reading the Bible after conversion.

Ambrose told him Isaiah. Why?

“Presumably because the Gospel and the calling of the gentiles are foretold more clearly in that book than in any other.” (Confessions IX, 5)

The mission has always been the point.