The last three posts bring me now to what God has taught me about humility and the use of my gifts. I am experiencing a fascinating aspect of spiritual growth that I like to call the “pendulum swing”. This happens when we discover we are wrong, and we do an “over-correction”. We discover our error, and we “swing wide” to the other extreme to fix the problem.

That’s what I had to do for a period of time, as a creative person – to take my “self” out of the equation, so that my ego didn’t get in the way of God using me. And boy, did I ever do it! Actually, I probably went a little too far the other way. It got to the point where I felt guilty using my gifts in public, or receiving any praise from others.

It was at that point God threw a penalty flag. He told me it was time for me to stop avoiding my gifts, but now to begin using them the right way and for the right goals. It was time to stop avoiding the spotlight, and to use my gifts to their fullest extent.

So today, I am enjoying being a fully-matured “ham for Jesus”. I do not avoid using my gifts, but only will be sure to continually check my motives along the way. But at the same time, I do not react to accusations of being out for my own glory. Honestly, I know how to do that really well, so I can tell when I’m actually walking in God’s Spirit.

Finally, for those of us who have a showy, audacious, extravagant gift – God does not want us to fain a false humility. He doesn’t bless us with a gift and then shame us for using it. He may shut down our opportunities for a while, but it is only to teach us to use the gift responsibly. When that happens, it is only to help us realize that though we are gifted, God can only use us when our hearts are right.

But if our hearts are His, then we are to use our gifts audaciously, with joy and exuberance! We are to never apologize for our talents, or allow ourselves to be chided by those who only covet our abilities (and there will always be those who will – count on it). We have learned our lessons, and our gifts have been laid intentionally at God’s altar. Now God is saying to take them up again, and use them as weapons to rescue a world lost in sin, sorrow and hopelessness. Our gifts bring light and illumination to a dark world – so submit them to God and use them for His glory alone.

Oh, and by the way…HAVE A BLAST DOING IT! It’s OK – God’s reward for using the gift correctly is the joy you will feel in being used. You’ll know the thrill of being fitted on His hand like a glove, and creating beautiful things through that simple little gift He gave you – what an honor!

The first half of my adult life, I’d have to say that God was teaching me humility and discipline mostly – in other words, He had to repeatedly let the air out of my ego.  When I started out in ministry, I’d have to admit (along with my most severe critics) that it was pretty much all about me.  My attitude was: God has gifted me, called me into ministry – therefore, my job was to give people the benefit of those gifts.  Um…yeah, pretty arrogant.

Over the course of several years spent employing this stellar philosophy, God proceeded to “beat the living crap out of me”, as I’m now fond of reporting.  I discovered to my surprise that, despite my extensive talents and gifts, God refused to use me in any measurable significant way.  Oh… and on an additional note, people couldn’t stand me either.  

I realized that God wouldn’t use me until I became less about promoting myself and more about helping people and serving Him (imagine that!). So over the course of the next several years, I became a “recovering jerk” and tried to let God teach me how to be humble.  Instead of promoting myself, I helped others use their gifts.  I wrote songs and never told the audience that they were mine.  I asked others to sing the solos, and rarely took one myself.  I wrote plays but gave others the large parts, only occasionally taking the smallest of roles for myself.

So if you are one of those creatives that think your “tremendous gifting” gives you a free pass out of being a decent human being, think again.  No one is so talented that they are indispensable.  People will ditch you and use someone humble and much less talented…and they’ll be just fine with that lesser amount of excellence.  Just how easily I could be replaced was a lesson I learned repeatedly, and to my inexhaustible astonishment.

That was a great lesson learned, but there is one problem with it:  if i stopped listening to God at that point, I might spend the rest of my life assuming He never wanted my performing gifts to shine again.  I’d take those early lessons and think that there would never be a time when God decided to take a different strategy in dealing with me.  But God is always changing His tactics – His teaching methods.  He never wants us to get lazy following Him, or to think that we’ve got a handle on all that “God stuff”.  

Also, He knows that once we learn a lesson, it is time for Him as the Great Teacher to take us through a completely different class.  This way, we keep growing and improving.  So on the next blog, I’ll tell you what God taught me AFTER He humbled me…

While I may be wiser than I was, the one sin that old men fall to easily is pride.  We begin to glory in the little wisdom we’ve gained…so we stop listening.  We become stubborn, immovable, and complacent.  In our mature arrogance, we attribute this to being circumspect and cautious.  But if we were honest, we would acknowledge that we are only glorifying our own fears by giving them nicer names than they deserve.  Fear becomes “caution”, a judgmental spirit become “discernment”, and laziness becomes “pacing ourselves”.  We fool only a few other fools with our excuses

One of the things I’m discovering about God is that, while He never changes, the way He works in my life is ALWAYS changing.  I think that’s because if one kind of prayer always got the job done, or one way of studying the Bible, we would just focus on doing that and stop really listening for His voice and looking for His leadership.  

That’s why you have to be careful of folks who say that the only important thing is the Bible, or prayer, or service – all of those are extremely important, but God never intends for us to focus on just one thing.  He wants us focused on HIM, and so He keeps us on our toes by continually changing what He’s doing and how He’s working in our lives.

So the most important lesson is: you have to keep learning.  Don’t use the wisdom of years to mask your failures and shortcomings.  No matter how old you are, there’s still time to learn…and more to learn!

So I’ve passed a little milestone in my life: I just completed my first Masters Degree.  I say first, because I plan to keep working and get my MDiv in about a year and half, expanding on the work I’ve completed.  And it has only taken me about 25 years to finish from when I started.  Yeah, I’m quite the slow learner…

My first efforts in my youth were a time of immaturity and lack of focus, and I eventually gave it up to take a job and get going with life.  Now I’m more mature, less distracted, and I’ve learned enough “life lessons” to fill several degrees.  God has taught me a lot, and I guess I’m living that old cliche of the mature adult who says they are a “life-long learner”.  I’ll probably be that 99 year old, standing in line to finally get their doctorate – the one who needs help throwing their cap in the air at the end of the ceremony!

That all sounds quaint to young people, who think they have already learned everything life has to offer and wonder why I evidently haven’t figured it all out yet.  As a young man, you think you know everything and believe everyone else is stuck in the remedial class.  I listen to those guys talk now and just smile…because I know what is coming.  They may think they know it all already, but really their education is just about to begin for them – class is just now in session in their lives, and they don’t even know it.

I know what that young man is about to experience because it is a class I’ve been through, and am still taking.  If we truly are God’s child, He will not allow us to remain in ignorance and self-deception.  He greatly wants for us to know the truth – about life, about God, about ourselves.  He is the Great Teacher, and what my young friend doesn’t know is that class is always in session.  

Twenty five years ago I thought I was leaving school.  I had no idea I was actually only beginning to learn many, many hard lessons.  School was not over by far.  But they are lessons I’m so thankful for.  I’ll let you in on a few of them in the next few blog posts…

I talked to a friend this week who is an interior designer.  He said that, before he was a Christian, he didn’t understand where his artistic ideas came from.  It seemed almost like a miracle had occurred, that something so beautiful could have come from him.  He would look at his designs with amazement, and now he finally knows the Source of that creativity.  And it is a miracle – a tiny miraculous glimpse of the wonder and awe of an endlessly creative God.

So when we realize what God creates through us, we expect the world to be amazed and celebrate with us.  Not to celebrate us – no, not at all.  Because we as artists realize what an undeniable miracle it is that God worked through us to make something beautiful – it is nothing short of astounding. 

But if you are not careful, you will be blind-sided by the fact that some people will see your talent and their reflex will be to tear it down and minimize it.  They will question your motives in creating, that you are just “trying to impress people”.  They will leave you gasping for air, so hateful will be their attacks on you and your love for God.  You thought your creation would be a cause for celebration, not of you, but of the True Creator who lowered himself to bother creating through you.  But they will not see it that way at all.

Don’t be surprised.  It’s the “Saul Syndrome”.

Saul was the first King of Israel, but Saul didn’t really care much about God or His will.  Saul cared mostly about being King and getting Saul’s way.  So finally when God had enough, He had Samuel the Prophet anoint David as King while Saul was still on the throne. 

Saul recognized immediately that God’s hand was on David’s life.  You would think this would make Saul respect David, or at least make him want to use David to his own advantage.  But instead, Saul saw David as a nagging reminder of what Saul was not – a “God-hearted man”.  And this ticked Saul off to no end, so much so that Saul eventually made a fool of himself trying to destroy David.  And eventually he died, and his throne went to the very man whose anointing he had so despised.

So strong was Saul’s resentment that it was passed on to his daughter Michal, who became David’s wife.  When she saw David’s obvious passion for God in worship as the Ark reentered Jerusalem, she accused David of the ulterior motive of dancing to impress the ladies.  God responded to her spiritual barrenness by cursing her with a reproductive barrenness to match it.

When hateful, bitter or petty people see your giftedness, they will not rejoice with you.  They will resent you for the fact that God is not using them in the same way.  They will see in your success their own failure, and they will work hard to destroy everything of yours they can.  Even when you benefit them, whether in business or in the ministry, they will try to undercut your creativity, even to their own disadvantage. 

I cannot count the number of pastors and ministers I have worked with who saw my gifts and abilities as threats, even when I was working with them or for them.  I was genuinely stunned by this at first, thinking that all I was doing was helping them.  But I finally realized that though I thought we were both on God’s team, we were really not on the same team after all.  They were in fact a team of one, and in their eyes the gifts and talents of others only served to show the inadequacy of their own.  Every victory of mine was their defeat.  When others recognized my spiritual insight, they questioned my motives and implied that I ministered out of pride.  Any attention that came to me was proof of my insincerity.  So they had to shoot down my songs, my sermons, and my creativity in order to feel any sad sort of self-worth themselves. 

As one young friend of mine loves to say, “Haters gonna hate”.  Yes, that is exactly what they do.  So don’t be surprised when your gifts draw hatred from some.  It should not discourage you at all.  And unless God convicts you through the Holy Spirit, you should ignore what they say and realize their criticism is not an indictment on your ministry.  Quite the contrary – it is your validation that God’s hand is really on you.  If God were not so greatly on your side, the haters would not be so threatened by you.

So go ahead and create…and let the haters hate.

We “creatives” are an interesting breed.  We are highly gifted in creating what many of us like to call “art”.

And yet Joe, the guy who cuts my hair, wouldn’t call himself a “follicle sculptor”.  He does excellent work, yet would stare at me funny if I suddenly exclaimed “what an artist” when he shows me my haircut in the mirror.  He is a skilled craftsman who doesn’t take what he does too seriously.  And the more I think about the music and theatre I create, the more I see Joe as a good role model.

Creative people do have a tough time in the church, it’s true.  Churches have a long history of looking suspiciously at the Arts, and are usually a good ten to twenty years behind any creative trends.  And church is by nature a rather “conservative” place, and tends to take a long hard look at things before deciding they are spiritually “OK”.  It is this cautious approach to the Arts that has often put a distance between them and “the Artist”.

Since artists tend to be rather emotionally wired, we see this cautiousness as rejection. We have often been heard whining about how church leaders are being Philistines…or Pharisees…or some other word we use to make us sound smart.  But while there are some thing in the church which definitely need to change toward the Arts, there are also some practical things there that make us better and keep us grounded.

One of those is teaching us to be a servant with our gifts just like Jesus. Certainly no one in history was more gifted than He. And yet He is the one putting a towel around His waste and washing the grime off the disciple’s feet. If He was the ultimate example of creativity personified, yet was humble, why should we be any less?

Another thing we can learn occasional trials in the church is what my friend Joe is good at – not taking ourselves too seriously.  Joe cuts my hair way better than the fancy salon where I used to go. But Joe is a lot less pretentious about his skill than the “stylists” who cut my hair before.

Yes, we creatives have a gift, and yes, our gift gets a lot of attention from others.  But the little secret we all know in our hearts is this: that gift doesn’t mean we are any closer to God than anyone else, or any deeper spiritually for that matter.  It really only means that we are better at expressing that relationship in pleasing and elegant artistic terms than others may be. When people see their own relationship with God mirrored in what we perform, it puts their feelings into an artistic form and they identify with it. That’s it – that’s all.

Unfortunately, some people’s talent has given them a forum that their spiritual maturity hasn’t earned and doesn’t deserve.  Look back at some of the Christian celebrities of the past who were thrust into a premature spotlight, simply because they believed in Jesus and could sing real pretty.  The fact that they had a nice voice didn’t necessarily mean they really had anything special to say…they could just say it better.

But it’s not just a problem with musicians – I know some gifted preachers whose spiritual lives don’t come close to matching their oratory skill.  And many of yesterday’s gifted yet immature preachers and singers are today’s walking “cautionary tales”, warning us of the pitfalls of having too much talent with too little maturity.

So maybe instead of calling ourselves “Christian artists”, we might just think of ourselves as Christians who happen to have a skill that God can use…just like everybody else.  And we should discourage people when they try to put us on that pedestal, because in our hearts we know that our gift is just that…a gift we didn’t earn in the first place.

So no, please don’t call me a Christian “artist” – I don’t think Joe my barber would be very impressed with that. The fact that my gift is flashier than someone else’s should mean little to me… I know it means little to God, compared to how much my life reflects Him and how much I use that gift to give Him glory. That’s a goal we all should be reaching for, whether we call ourselves an “artist” or a barber.

Do you think it is pretentious for a creative person to call themselves an “artist”?

How do you guard against taking yourself too seriously?