Creative Prayer: Speaking the Language of God's Heart - Softcover

Tiegreen, Chris

 
9781590529317: Creative Prayer: Speaking the Language of God's Heart
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1590529316 ISBN 13: 9781590529317
Verlag: Multnomah Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Readers are encouraged to embrace a life of communication with God that goes beyond words, in a volume that draws on Bible stories, psalms, and historical examples that remind readers that their prayers are unique to their relationship with God. Original.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Chris Tiegreen is a writer and editor for indeed magazine at Walk Thru the Bible. A former pastor and missionary, Tiegreen is the author of numerous books, including Violent Prayer and The One Year At His Feet Devotional. Tiegreen and his family live in Atlanta, Georgia.

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God Is Not a Formula

Long, long ago, our planet was shrouded in darkness. It was a mysterious chaos, a completely unordered mass of raw material. There were no plants, no seasons, no dry land, no light. “Formless and void,” Scripture describes it. Shapeless and empty. Confused and meaningless. Deep and dark. Desperately lifeless.

But a Spirit brooded over the deep. As a wind caressed the waters, he blew away the darkness and hovered over the surface of chaos, contemplating his design and breathing the Breath of meaning into the emptiness.2 The Hebrew word means “to hover, to move, to brood.”3 His movement was a mission of fertility, and soon this formless mass exploded in creativity. The shapeless raw material became beautiful.

Not long after, God formed the shape of a man out of the dust of the ground. Genesis says he breathed his own Breath into this lifeless being; face-to-face and mouth to mouth, the divine Spirit awakened humanity–the pinnacle of creation. The first sensation this new creature felt was the warm Breath of a creative God; the first thing he saw was God’s face. His surroundings were already lush with life and fruit, stunning in beauty, and perfectly suited to sustain the created order. The Master had painted, sculpted, written, and orchestrated wonder and majesty into his work. The Breath that hovered, the Wind of God, was powerful, perfect, and extremely imaginative.4

Adam didn’t rise up into life to see a blueprint, to hear an explanation, or to find a matrix of complex codes. He awoke to find pictures and sounds and scents and tastes, to feel the warmth of the Breath and the cool of the breeze, and to have those sensations laid out in a progression of time so he could witness the interplay of creation. This Spirit that brooded had not painted by numbers or followed an instruction manual. God thought “outside the box” in everything he did. He didn’t even have a box to think outside of.

God thought “outside the box” in everything he did.

The first couple, we are told, had been made in the image of God–the God whose Spirit hovered and breathed. They had been entrusted with a taste of the Creator’s creativity, blessed with a reflection of his imagination. They would have the ability to create using the tools and raw materials God had given them, and there would be almost no limit to the ways they could express themselves.

Why did God create people in his image? Over the course of Scripture, the answer becomes obvious. We were made in the image of God in order to relate to him. We each have a mind, a will, emotions, a voice, facial expressions, gestures–everything we need to communicate at a personal level. And, because the One we relate to is highly imaginative, we have the ability to do it creatively.

But human potential took a nasty fall when the first couple gave in to temptation, and we know the tragic result. The God who made them came to them in the Garden–in “the cool of the day,” most translations say, though it’s literally “the Breath of the evening,” in the Spirit who had hovered and exhaled life into the chaos–and they hid. They had no urge to communicate, to relate to their Creator as they were designed to do. Expression turned inward as they suppressed themselves in hiding.

Creativity took an ugly turn after that. We read of the son of a murderer who became the father of “all those who play the lyre and pipe.” Another son of the same murderer was the father of those who forge bronze and iron.5 And for millennia, the creative breath of humanity sang music to false gods, crafted hand-carved idols, and designed offensive atrocities like the tower of Babel in an attempt to become divine. Human ingenuity and expression didn’t cease; it just got really, really twisted.

Human ingenuity and expression didn’t cease; it just got really, really twisted.

We get a glimpse of restoration much later when God led his people out of Egypt and into the wilderness. He gave specific instructions to Moses for making the ark of the covenant and the other articles of worship to be used in the tabernacle. And for only the second time since time began, the God of Israel filled a human being directly with his Spirit–that fertile Wind of creativity that once hovered over the deep. Who was it? An artist. Bezalel, or Btsal’el, meaning “under the shadow of God.” His name is derived from a root word that implies not just shade, but a shadow that hovers.

God breathed into Bezalel and (by implication) Oholiab, skilled craftsmen, so they could make a work of art.6 The New Testament tells us that this work of art–actually a collection of works of art, as the tabernacle included multiple elements–was a copy and shadow of heavenly things.7 It is exhibit A in the argument that God values physical expressions of invisible realities. Many centuries later, he would incarnate his Son–not just an expression of the invisible, but an embodiment of the eternal One. But the tabernacle in the wilderness reflected the courts of heaven and pointed to the coming of the Son. God commissioned this work of art because inward truths are to be expressed outwardly.

That’s a major statement from the Lord of a now dark and defiled creation. Centuries, even millennia, had passed since the last time he breathed into humanity at the dawning of creation, when a mound of dust was filled with life. Now, at the moment when a covenant of worship was established with a chosen people, he breathed again. Two wood- and metalworkers were gifted with divine creativity. They would craft a highly symbolic picture that would point to redemption, a re-genesis, a new humanity free to express itself to its Creator. Once again, this time spiritually, chaos was being called to order.

So God commissioned these two artists, and flesh was again filled with divine Breath. The box they made, the ark of the covenant, also reflected the pattern: a spiritual reality expressed in created materials. This intersection of God and humanity would be a model of things to come. The mingling of minds and emotions between the eternal and the temporal, the Creator and created, would continue to produce pictures, symbols, sounds of worship, smells of sacrifice, graphic images in prophecies and parables, and much, much more. And none of it–absolutely none of it–would fit a formula.

A MULTIMEDIA GOD

God is not a formula. That should be obvious to us, though religious instincts have always tried to make him one. But if his varying modes of expression weren’t clear to us before the incarnation, they certainly should be now. God showed us plainly how he communicates.

Long ago, this Creator of the universe clothed himself in human flesh and walked our dusty roads. He also ate our food, wore our clothes, lived in our towns, talked to our ancestors, felt our emotions, and experienced all the pain our nervous systems can experience. He lived a thoroughly human life.

Long ago, this Creator of the universe clothed himself in human flesh and walked our dusty roads.

This wasn’t the first time our Creator communicated with us, of course. He spoke to our father Abraham in the form of physical messengers; he spoke to Moses in the form of a desert brush fire that didn’t destroy the brush; he showed his face in a daytime cloud and a nighttime fire; his voice thundered from a mountain; his angels sent audible instructions to his servants; and his Spirit, his Breath, inspired prophets, priests, and kings to preach, write, and sing.

But when he clothed himself in flesh and walked among us, his communication got much more tangible to a much larger...

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Verlag
Multnomah Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1590529316
ISBN 13 
9781590529317
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
178
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