As most of you know, my fiancée Melissa is an art major at Gordon College. Part of being an art major, each art student has to complete a senior thesis which is a major final project that takes three months to complete. When they are finished, the outcome is beautiful art work and a gallery display that is up for about a week and a half.
Melissa had her display and senior thesis two weeks ago and tonight I have pictures of some of her pieces to share with you guys. This is a paining that she called “Fat Baby” and is a picture of her cousin Mitchell. This painting was called “Job’s Job” and is a painting of the pastor that she worked with in Mexico whose name was Pastor Job. This next painting, my personal favorite, is a painting of me when we were on our way home from Mexico two years ago.
I was very proud of Melissa and her paintings! She did such a good job and her gallery display went very well as she got a lot of compliments and encouragement. As Melissa and I have been together for almost 4 years, her art has always been something that has blown me away and touched my heart. There are not a lot of people who have the gift of art and the fact that I got one of them, who happens to be really cute too, is awesome.
As she has drawn pictures of me before, like this one here from her senior thesis, and as she has drawn pictures for me to say “I love you,” I have often tried to return the favor by drawing pictures for her. As most of you know though, I can’t draw to save my life and most often my drawings come out looking like this….Melissa has been very moved by my drawings like this and usually shows her appreciation by laughing and rolling around for a good ten minutes.
In my growing interest in art over the last few years, I have realized that art is a great illustration to explain how humans often relate to God. As you read the bible it doesn’t take long to begin to see the standards that God sets for his disciples. We, in essence, are given the formula for being perfect. God wants us to be like a masterpiece and a beautiful piece of artwork, like Melissa can do, but yet, all too often we find ourselves putting out sub par work like I drew. As Paul writes in the book of Romans, we all fall short of God and being the kind of people that God wants us to be.
In Ephesians 2:1-3, Paul writes to the church in Ephesus and compares our sub par performance to something deeper than bad artwork. He compares us to being dead!!
“Once you were dead, doomed forever because of your many sins. You used to live just like the rest of the world, full of sin, obeying Satan, the mighty prince of the power of the air. He is the spirit at work in the hearts of those who refuse to obey God. All of us used to live that way, following the passions and desires of our evil nature. We were born with an evil nature, and we were under God’s anger just like everyone else.”
Paul uses harsh words to describe how we fall short of God. He says that we are dead because of our sin. Paul says we follow the ways of the world rather than following God. We give in to Satan, just like Adam and Eve, as he desires for us to disobey God. Then we gratify ourselves and our desires and thoughts that are not pleasing to God. We so often put all of those things, the world and culture, Satan, and our desires, above God that Paul says God was a right to be very angry at us.
One of the commentaries I looked at compared this description that Paul writes to being a zombie! A zombie is a dead person who is still up and walking around. They have no brain activity and they just kind of moan and walk around like a stiff penguin. Not only is a zombie a dead body that is walking around, but it is also a body that is decaying and falling apart. It is a disgusting site and smells awful. This is the condition that we are in before God’s eyes. We all fall so short of God that we are like walking corpses. God wants us to be alive and free but yet we disobey God blatantly or we just don’t even stop to think about God in our lives. No matter how hard we try we all disobey God all the time!
As Paul has now done a great job in making us all feel bad about ourselves and how much we fail, he goes on in his letter to Ephesus by using a small word with a lot of meaning at the beginning of verse four. He starts verse four by saying, “but…” But is a great word because it puts a conditional value on everything that came before it. You are like a zombie in the way you follow God, you put all these things before God, and you fail all the time in following God, BUT despite all of that,
“God is so rich in mercy, and he loved us so very much, that even while we were dead because of our sins, he gave us life when he raised Christ from the dead. (It is only by God’s special favor that you have been saved!) For he raised us from the dead along with Christ, and we are seated with him in the heavenly realms--all because we are one with Christ Jesus. And so God can always point to us as examples of the incredible wealth of his favor and kindness toward us, as shown in all he has done for us through Christ Jesus.”
This is called grace! The grace of God says, “I forgive you for disobeying me! I know you did all these things to me and disobeyed me over and over again, but…I forgive you.”
A good comparison of this is to think of some of the men and woman that we have met doing Urban Salt and Light. This past Saturday, for the 30 Hour Famine, we had special teams go out into the city with sandwiches and socks and some of the people we saw were anything but pleasant. We saw this one guy who was so high on drugs that he fell of a bench and slammed his head on a stone walkway beneath him. He hit it so hard that we could hear it twenty feet away. Another homeless guy was also high and drunk as he sat next to his friend who just fell. He slurred words trying to get his friend’s attention. Both of the men were dirty and smelled funny and all of us approached with caution to give them some food and warm socks. That is grace!!
Those men didn’t deserve food and socks. They were both druggies and drunks and that was probably why they didn’t have jobs and lived on the street. It was most likely their fault that they were homeless. We didn’t need to help them at all. We could have just looked the other direction and ignored them. But instead, we showed them love and had grace on them.
This is the same thing that God does with us! We turn our backs on him God all the time. We decide that there are things that are more important than God. It is our fault that God seems to not be involved much in our lives because we choose to keep Him out of parts of our lives. Because of the way that we so often treat God, God has all the right in the world to just turn his back on us and ignore us as well. He doesn’t have to do anything for us…BUT, He did because he has grace and love. God now views us as alive. We are so alive that God has made us heirs with Jesus and has made us a place next to Jesus in heaven.
As we live our lives, we all too often get so burdened with guilt. Sometimes we have this thing in the back of our minds that says, “God will never love you. You messed up again.” Instead of viewing God as having this grace and love that he has, we view him like this…
***play video clip***
As that is kind of a funny clip, that is so often how so many people view Jesus. “Jesus is that guy who always tells me what I am doing wrong.”
Going back to using art as an illustration for how we relate to God, if you have ever seen a two year old color, it often looks like this (picture on screen). When that two year old, comes over and gives you that drawing, what do you say? You say, “Ohhh, this is beautiful, thank you so much.” When in your head you are thinking, “This stinks! Have you ever heard of coloring inside the lines?! Have you ever heard of using different colors! This is awful!! Take it back and go and do it right!” (Yaconelli)
Mike Yaconelli says that this is often what we feel that God is saying to us! We have to have a perfect drawing and masterpiece, our lives have to be in complete order, we have to have everything inside the lines and the perfect colors and then we can get to heaven and hand in our drawing with pride and get into heaven.
This will never happen though! We can never be perfect and we will have sin and messes in our lives. When we die we are still going to have colors outside of the lines and we are still going to have colors that we haven’t even used. Rather than yelling at us, Jesus is going to say, “That’s beautiful! You really got that blue and red down! That’s great!”
That is grace!! Yaconelli says that, “God celebrates every move we make towards Him instead of pointing the finger at us.” That is grace!! Grace loves us even though we are undeserving of love. Grace takes the punishment for us. Grace gives us the gift of eternity in heaven even though we constantly do things that make us so undeserving.
