The Poem God is Writing.

There was this season of my life, I was maybe 24 or 25 years old, when I really started to get into poetry. To tell you the truth, I’m not really sure where it came from or why I was all of a sudden interested in it.

I had read a compilation of poems by C.S. Lewis and it challenged me to write my own poetry as well. I wrote about scenery, my wife, and the things that stood out to me.

Poetry isn’t always easy to understand, it can be both mysterious and revealing, all at the same time.

No lie there have been poems I’ve read that have made absolutely no sense to me, and yet, because I didn’t understand it, made me more inclined to read it more deeply.

Poems, to different readers, can be received in entirely different ways. Language, metaphors, and deep emotional tangents can go unnoticed for all their worth and wisdom. A casual read through a poem may leave you confused, and at other times leave your heart broken.

I find that incredibly intriguing.

“It is a test [that] genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

T. S. Eliot, from the essay “Dante.” 

It was recently while preparing to teach through the book of Ephesians that I came across a word from the second chapter that stopped me. It wasn’t new and it wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard before, but the Spirit stopped me and said wait.

Here’s the verse:

¹⁰ For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Ephesians 2:10

The word to look at is workmanship.

Now, before I explain let me first say I am not a Greek scholar and I read and study Greek in my private time of devotions and study. I don’t often say what I find in the Greek only because I feel unqualified to do so, but something inside me was hooked by this word workmanship.

So as I sat in my studio, relaxed and unprepared for revelation I looked up the original meaning to this word Paul uses, workmanship.

Workmanship | ποίημα
poiēma [poi’-a-mä]

The word that we get poem from is the same word translated into workmanship.

Think about it.

The work of salvation in our life, a gift from God, is the poem form the heart and hand of the Father.

Goodness gracious that’s amazing. Not only that, but He’s still at work on it, and in us. God has done all the work of salvation and brings us into Christ Jesus and makes all of that and all of us His workmanship, His poem.

What a beautiful God He must be.
We are His workmanship.
We are His poem.

Imagine the words he’s choosing.
Imagine the phrasing over our lives.

Imagine the anaphora and what God has chosen to repeat in your life, to really emphasize it.

Take a minute, just one minute, and allow the artist of everything speak to you about the beautiful poem He’s writing in your soul through the work of salvation.

Enjoy the love.

Enjoy the time.

Enjoy the Spirit.

Enjoy the rhyme.

You and I are the poem of God.
And He’s hasn’t completed it yet.