You're His Masterpiece

Not everyone knows that I was an art minor in college. I took drawing, printmaking, and graphic design. They were all classes I felt pretty comfortable with. But there was one course that made me nervous: painting. Aside from the cheap watercolor sets you use as a kid; I had almost no experience with painting... Especially not with oils. Surprisingly, it became one of my favorite classes.
 
Painting gave me a whole new understanding of art. With drawing, you can erase, but faint lines often remain. With printmaking, almost every mark is permanent, so you’d better get it right the first time. Graphic design is done on a computer, where edits are simple and reversible. But painting, especially with oils, is different.
 
Oil paints let you work and rework directly on the canvas. Don’t like a color? The paint is still wet. Just add a little more burnt umber. Need to adjust that nose? Keep working at it. And if all else fails, you can paint over the whole thing and start again.
 
I remember spending weeks on one painting that was meant to depict a woman joyfully worshiping God. Instead, it looked like a mash-up of Ariel and Belle (beautiful in their own right, but not the goal). I adjusted, edited, and repainted for days, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t un-Disneyfy it.
 
Eventually, I got so frustrated that I stopped working on it altogether. A few days later, I returned to the studio with clarity. I painted the entire canvas black and started over. The final result was very different, more abstract, but it expressed the ecstasy of genuine worship far better than my original attempt.
 
That experience reminds me of our passage this week. As we begin a new series on the real Jesus. He’s not who culture says, who we say, or even who I say. Jesus is who the Bible says he is. Our first week of Community Group focuses on how we try to edit Jesus into our image. We can be tempted to treat him like he’s the painting and we’re the artist. Christianity flips that entirely. Jesus is the artist. We are the canvas. He edits, reworks, and sometimes starts over, and not to make us more comfortable, but to make us more like Him. He makes us in his image.
 
This week we're studying Romans 8:28, where God says he works all things for our good. Join us this week as we discover what that “good” really is.