an excerpt from: Skillfulness

An excerpt from: Skillfulness

“I am the Lord, and there is no other, besides me there is no God; I equip you, though you do not know me, that people may know, from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is none besides me; I am the Lord and there is no other.”- Isaiah 45:5-6 (ESV)

It would be an error of discernment to conclude that if God is pleased with the heart over the work, we can then afford to be sloppy in the work. This is the slacker’s mind. God is incredibly skillful. Step back and behold the skillfulness of God! Let your mind pause and feed on the incredible precision with which God created anything that is, and all of which He made from nothing. Figure that out.

If I am to image forth God, I should strive to be skillful. God is disciplined; I should be disciplined. God is patient with us who have lesser talent than He; we should be patient and not proud or arrogant with others of varying degrees of talent. God is continually showing new evidences of His grace; we should be continually testifying of new evidences of His grace. God creates with such great diversity; we should seek to know more about Him through the careful study of His diverse creation. God is clear; we should be clear. God holds things in mystery; we can hold things in mystery. God’s mystery is firmly grounded in His truth and wisdom and will be revealed one day; any mystery we engage in imaging should be firmly grounded in His truth and wisdom so that it can be revealed one day and prove to have been valuable. God’s word tells us plainly to “play skillfully with a shout of joy” (Psalm 33:3b).

So artists, be skillful because God your Maker is incredibly skillful! “Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, and the one who formed you from the womb, ‘I, the Lord, am the maker of all things, stretching out the heavens by Myself, and spreading out the earth all alone…’” (Isaiah 44:24b). Who can even come close to the skillfulness of God?...

MY RESPONSIBILITY WITH THE SKILL THAT GOD BESTOWS

Just as God’s sovereignty does not negate human responsibility, God’s delighting in a humble and contrite heart that trembles at His word, does not negate the responsibility of the body that encases that heart to be faithfully skillful. People can possess skill and yet be undisciplined. We do have a part to play in being effectively skillful. God doesn’t just give skill to me, and then I have no part or responsibility to work that skill, again realizing that I work the skill in the strength that He supplies. A skillful, yet undisciplined labor force will inefficiently erect a sloppy sanctuary. There is an applying of one’s self in faith towards the skill for that skillfulness to be realized to its full potential.

Be amazed at the skill of the Benjaminites. Judges 20:16 says, “Out of all these people 700 choice men were left handed; each one could sling a stone at a hair and not miss.” A stone at a hair and not miss? Does this kind of accuracy happen without intense, disciplined practice? In I Chronicles 12:2 it says that “they were equipped with bows, using both the right hand and the left to sling stones and to shoot arrows from the bow, they were Saul’s kinsmen from Benjamin.” These Benjaminites were ambidextrous fighting machines!

While we can be encouraged from their fighting disciplines, we should take a warning from their undisciplined faithlessness to God in Judges 20. When they didn’t fight on the right side of the issue, the Lord laid them low. All the skill in the world will not benefit me if God is not for me. It is not our skill that accomplishes a victory for us. It is God who accomplishes our victories, and He may or may not accomplish them through the means of the skill he has given us. Remember the Psalmist, “Through You we push down our foes; through Your name we tread down those who rise up against us. For not in my bow do I trust, nor can my sword save me. But You have saved us from our foes and have put to shame those who hate us. In God we have boasted continually and we will give thanks to Your name forever” (Psalm 44:5-8 ESV). When pursuing skillfulness, we must be careful that our skillfulness doesn’t become our hope or boast. Remember, our skill is from God, so then our boast can only be in God.

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excerpt from The Affections of the Heart in Art - a wrestling for the full pleasures in art Jason Harms