We are living in a world of dramatic change. The western lifestyle of fast-paced development often leaves one breathless and exhausted. The need for creative ways of communicating, inventing and keeping ahead of culture can be daunting and demoralizing. It can often leave us in a space of trying to copy rather than be authentic. Trying to imitate rather than create.
This can lead you to think you are not creative and your story does not matter.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Your story, no matter how small, matters and is powerful.
One of the beauties of a manuscript that is hundreds of years old like the Bible is that it tells the stories of individuals whose own stories seem small and insignificant, yet God chose to make their lives a memorial of what He can do with a life that the world deems insignificant.
The great power of the gospel is that it changes lives one at a time. God is interested in the individual story as much as He is in redeeming the cosmos. The aim of the gospel is not just dealing with personal sin, but it is about the restoring of individuals into relationship with a kind Father.
In his book Mere Christianity, C.S Lewis coined the beautiful phrase, “The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.”
Justification deals with our standing before God, but our adoption invites us into relationship with the Father – to partake of who He is and to live in a place of deep joy from who He is.
Romans 3:23 reminds us that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Many of us forget that the work of salvation means that the weight of this verse has now been turned around and that we, through Jesus, have been restored to the glory of God. One of the descriptions of the word for “glory” is the divine quality, the unspoken manifestation of God.
Splendor.
It is the revelation of the intrinsic worth and beauty of God. Do you see that? We have been restored to His divine quality, splendor and beauty.
“Let us make man in our image.” When He created us, the desire of the Father was that we would be image bearers of this glory. Our design is fashioned after Him. Our essential worth is connected to who He is. One of the joys of coming into relationship with Jesus is that the original intent of our nature is restored.
In fact, the truth for those of us who have been saved is our original state is not sinful, but Christ-like. We were found in Christ before we were found in Adam.
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him (Ephesians 1).” The original intent for us was never to look like Adam but to look like Christ! This has profound implications for us.
Our Christ-likeness means we now have access to the very creative power of God.
Clearly, in the beginning, we see how God creates the world through the life of His word. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made (John 1).” The definition of “word” here is logos. The word logos is speaking of Jesus, the word incarnate, being the thoughts of the Father expressed by the Holy Spirit.
Here is the point: Jesus is the creative word of God that takes what is formless and without void and creates something out of nothing.
What’s more is that now we are partakers of this divine nature. In fact, we are participators because of our union with Christ, in the very creative power of God. His design for us is that we become His thoughts expressed by the Spirit so that our words and actions become co-creators with God.
You are creative by nature of your union with Jesus.
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