We are God’s workmanship!
Who? You mean me? Are you sure? How can an inconsistent, imperfect and sin-stained person like me be God’s workmanship?
Yet Ephesians 2:10 declares it as it is.
“For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” Eph 2:10, ESV
The original Greek word is poiema, where we get the English word “poem”. The idea of poiema is that we are like a well-arranged narrative that expresses form and pattern along with beauty. Like the underside of a tapestry, our daily lives may look to be knotted and messy. But when the tapestry is completed and we turn it right side up, we see a beautiful work of beauty that was there all along but that we never understood at the beginning.
God is likened to a master craftsman with His chiseling tool, chipping on an unpolished rock. While the rock may look awkward and formless initially, He already has the completed sculpture clearly in His mind.
With perfect and flawless strokes of the hammer, He shall complete His design and shape the rock to become His masterpiece!
Being God’s masterpiece means we must trust God as our master craftsman.
We must trust His design – That what He had in mind for us is the best that we can be.
We must trust His strokes – That He is constantly at work in our lives, even in our pains and afflictions. That everything we experience in this earthly life will be woven together for His perfect will in our lives.
We must trust His time – That we are in a journey of becoming His masterpiece. We should not despair over our apparent formlessness or awkwardness, but trust that He will make all things beautiful in His time.
God has proven Himself to be a master craftsman. Read the lives of King David, Joseph the dreamer or Daniel the prophet. See the way how God turned their ruins to glory and their mourning to dancing.
Will you allow God to use our sin-broken lives to tell His redemptive story? What we need to do is to surrender ourselves as clay into the hands of the Potter.
Yes, we are “God’s workmanship” – we are His authentic creations. We are to be authentic beings. We are “created in Christ Jesus for good works” – we exist for a purpose, to fulfill His mission. We are to be missional. We are to “walk in them” – we are to be actively engaged in His mission, this calls us to be intentional in our walk on earth.
In 2015, let us experience this promise in great measure: we are God’s glorious ruins – His masterpiece.
For the next three weeks, our pulpit will be considering our theme for 2015: “We are God’s workmanship”, from Ephesians 2:10.
Let those around us come and experience forgiveness and hope as they witness how God redeems our brokenness and makes us His masterpiece!
By Rick Toh, Lead Pastor (YCKC Bulletin 3&4 January 2015)