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Great Artists of the Bible, Part 1: God · The Daily Writer

• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome everybody to the Born to Create Podcast.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Kent Sanders, and I'm your host.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm an author, musician, and teacher.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: And most importantly, I'm a husband and a dad.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Here on the show we talk about practices, habits, and strategies that help us live out our creative calling.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: This is episode 21, and today we're going to be talking about Great Artists of the Bible.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: This is part one of the series, and we're focusing on God Himself, the Master Artist.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: You can find the post that accompanies this episode, as well as all the links, at KentSanders.net slash Great Artists God, and Great Artists and God all have a dash in between them.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: My favorite TV show of all time is The Twilight Zone.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: This classic series featured characters who were stuck in an alternative reality where nothing made sense.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: By the end of each episode, they were often alone, frustrated, and disconnected.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Many artists of faith today feel like they're stuck in their own personal twilight zones.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you feel this way.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: My guess is that you have at one time or another felt one or more of these disconnects.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: First, is a disconnect between your art and your faith.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: You love God and have devoted your life to Him, but you struggle to see how your creative gifts relate to the Bible or to your spiritual life.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Two, it's a disconnect between your art and the church.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: You value your faith community and want to use your gifts to serve others, but you don't have opportunities to use your gifts, or you feel that others don't value your creative talents.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: And number three, a disconnect between your art and the broader culture.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: As a person of faith, you want to honor God with your talents and be an effective witness for Christ, but you wonder how to do that in a culture that's usually indifferent and sometimes even hostile to your faith.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's frustrating when you feel you have to keep your art in a separate box from the rest of your life.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: You're a whole person, not a collection of separate compartments.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Life doesn't run very smoothly when the parts of your life are separated.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: But what if there was a way to integrate your art into every area of your life?
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: What if you could live from a calm center of creativity instead of the frayed edges of frustration?
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: One of the best ways to do this, I believe, is to get back to the basics and study artists of the Bible.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: When you do this, you begin to see how much God actually values the arts.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: You also begin to see how God has used artists to lead, serve, and inspire his people throughout the generations.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why I'm introducing this new series, Great Artists of the Bible.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: As you learn from these artists of faith, one thing becomes really clear.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: God has woven threads of the creative arts into the tapestry of his redemptive story.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: In this post, we start at the beginning by taking a look at the master artist who is God Himself.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Genesis begins with a simple and elegant statement In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: God's first recorded activity was creating something.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: The following verses describe how God brings shape, form, and structure to his creation.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Then he populates the earth with living creatures.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: At the end of Genesis 1, as he did several times before in the previous verses, God sees that what he created was good.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: He stepped back and evaluated his own artistry.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Here we see the master artist at work.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: The Bible doesn't begin with a lecture or a list of bullet points.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, he begins with a story about an artist.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: God's crowning achievement in Genesis one is the creation of mankind.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: Verses twenty six and twenty-seven tell us that we are made in the image of God.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: But what does this mean exactly?
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's helpful to look at the original language.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: The Hebrew word used here is seleim, which refers to an image, likeness, or resemblance.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: An image contains characteristics of the original and at the same time it points back to it.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: As humans, God designed us to reflect some of his qualities.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: One of these is the ability and desire to create things.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: You might say we're a kind of reference point for God since we're created in his image.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: I've always loved the title of the Rich Mullins biography called An Arrow Pointing to Heaven.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's a fantastic image and a great reminder that all of us should aspire to be arrows pointing to heaven.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: The creative output of our lives should in one way or another reflect the original creator.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now this doesn't mean we have to make quote unquote Christian art or be a quote unquote Christian artist.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I don't think there's any such thing as a Christian artist.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's a concept developed by marketers to sell products to the church.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: There are artists who happen to be Christians, but you can't really have a Christian artist, quote unquote, any more than you can have a Christian table or a Christian computer.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Art itself cannot be Christian, but it can and should flow from Christians.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: As Philip Graham Riken writes in his fantastic little book, Art for God's sake, he says if the opening chapters of Genesis portray God as a creative artist, then it only stands to reason that the people he made in his image will also be artists.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Art is an imaginative activity, and in the act of creating, we reflect the mind of our maker.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now you may be thinking, that's all well and good for people who think of themselves as artists, but what if I'm not very creative?
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't think of yourself as creative, I've got good news for you.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: God says you are creative.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Since you're a child of God, you are endowed with creative abilities just by definition of being a child of God who is the master artist.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is that in our modern culture we have a concept of creativity that's based on the performing arts.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: We see creativity as something that's possessed mostly by movie stars, famous writers, and temperamental but talented musicians.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, all those people are talented and creative.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, most of them are talented and creative.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: But true creativity is not just about performance.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's all about bringing something good into the world, whether it's music in a studio, kindness among strangers, relationships in a broken family, systems for a computer network, words on a screen, a home for foster kids, or a million other ways to make ourselves available as channels of God's blessing in a broken world.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: Creativity just means the capacity and the desire to create.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is that we're too limited in our scope of what it means to create.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: Another question that comes up in discussions about faith-based creativity is this one.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: What about non-Christians who are artists?
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Where do they fit in?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: In a way, this is kind of the opposite question as the previous one.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: That question dealt with Christians who don't feel creative, but what about non-Christians who are creative?
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: How can they be channels of God's blessing, and how can God use them if they're not people of faith?
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, honestly, I think that's the wrong question.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's not really an issue of who created the art, it's more of an issue of whether the art is good or bad.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: There are non Christians who make wonderful art, and there are Christians who make terrible art, and vice versa.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: A person's creative excellence has much more to do with passion and hard work than it does with the presence or absence of faith.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: God's creative gifting is like rain.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: It falls on people regardless of whether they look up and acknowledge where it came from.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: We serve a creative God who imagined everything from neutrons to supernovas, from grains of sand to galaxies of stars.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: When we do any sort of creative work, we are mirroring in an imperfect way the perfect acts of God that brought creation into existence.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, we are most like God when we create.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: The more that we set aside our preconceived notions about creativity and dive into what the Bible actually says about the topic, we're going to be surprised, moved, and motivated.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm really looking forward to this series that will unfold occasionally over the next few months.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: So this isn't going to be like a continuous series.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: This will be occasionally as I write these and turn these into podcast episodes.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to explore what the Bible says about artists even further, I recommend four books.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: The first one is Art for God's Sake: A Call to Recover the Arts by Philip Graham Riken.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: Number two is The Liberated Imagination, Thinking Christianly About the Arts by Leland Riken.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: Number three is Art in the Bible by Francis Schaeffer.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: And number four is Imagine, A Vision for Christians in the Arts by Steve Turner.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: You can find links to all these books in the blog post.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: So how does seeing God as the master artist change the way you see yourself and your creative work?
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love to hear your thoughts.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: You can join the conversation and find the post and the links that accompany this episode at KentSanders.net slash Great Artists God.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: And remember, there's a dash between each of those works.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: When you visit my site, you'll find all kinds of great resources to inspire your creativity.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'd also love to share a gift with you when you subscribe to my newsletter.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: You can check it out and learn more about my books, writing, and services at KentSanders.net.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love to connect with you and you can tweet me at Kent Sanders or find me on Facebook and Instagram as Kent Sanders.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: I hope that you'll also check out our Born to Create Facebook group by visiting KentSanders.net slash Facebook group.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, remember that you were born to create and designed to make a difference.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: What will you do with the time you have left?