For Beauty and For Glory: A Biblical Perspective on Teaching Art was the title of the talk I gave at the NYS LEAH Convention this past weekend (June 2-4, 2011). LEAH stands for Loving Education At Home. My husband RB and I have been members of this organization since 2000, when we began homeschooling our oldest son at the high school level. I have long wanted to speak for the LEAH conference and this year the Lord opened the door for me to do that. It was a wonderful experience.
One of my favorite things to do is to help people find and use their creative gifts for God's glory. I say creative and not necessarily artistic because creative is a broad term covering the ability to make a wide range of things whereas artistic is a specific term related to our ability to make art. Every person is creative, although not every person is artistic. Our creativity comes from being made in the image of God, the Creator, and I believe we use it every day in hundreds of ways we don't even realize. Creativity encompasses everything we do as human beings made in the Image of God. It comes out of our pores. It's imbedded in every tiny strand of our DNA. It fills our souls and spirits. Our creative nature is simply HUGE. My pet peeve is when someone tells me they are not creative!
Without creativity, you wouldn't be able to imagine anything -- our imagination is a large part of our creativity. Imagine a world without creativity. What would be lacking? I ask this to my Art students and the lists we make are always pretty long. We wouldn't have any of the Arts -- but we also wouldn't have language or writing or science or math (yes, math is creative too -- somebody had to invent Algebra!) or any of the subjects we study in school. There would be no cooking or culinary arts, or architecture, or medicine. There would be no technology or computers. There would be no engineering or problem-solving. No sports or games or toys or puzzles. No gardens or agriculture.
And the list goes on and on! We would basically live like animals, finding food wherever we could, living a dull existence without meaning. Creativity makes life exciting!
But the one thing that would be missing above all else is worship. Without creativity, we would not be able to look up at the stars and see their beauty and wonder how they were put there. We wouldn't be able to even imagine that our incredible God exists or understand any of His ways. We wouldn't be able to intimately know the Creator unless we shared in His creativity and were like Him in that way. So God made us like Himself, in His image, and gave us the ability to create, although we can't create quite like He does. He did this so we can love and worship Him.
Creativity and Worship are inseparably linked together. In the presence of something incredibly creative, we feel awe and wonder, whether it is something God made (like the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls) or something a human being made (like Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa or Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night). We say things like "Wow!" or "Awesome!" and begin to praise the created thing. We ascribe worth and value to it. We feel delight and pleasure in it and an emotional attachment to it. We feel awe for the creator of this wonderful thing -- "How did he DO that?" This is the beginning of worship.
We need to be careful and remember that God alone is worthy of our worship simply because He is the Creator of all things. Revelation 4:11 says, Worthy are You, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power; for You created all things, and because of Your will they existed, and were created.
It's important to keep these things in mind when being creative. No matter what your creative gift, whether it is drawing, painting, sculpture, opera singing, baking chocolate chip cookies, computer tech support, or whatever -- use your creative gift to reflect God's glory on the earth.
Make Art For Beauty and For Glory.
