Christians can create in countless ways beyond flower arranging, painting, and poetry. These are just examples to give you ideas for how you might respond to God’s creation. Certainly enjoying nature and praising God for it is a good first step. But God is glorified not only when you enjoy His creation, but when you take what He has made and create with it. The thing which distinguishes art for mere self expression and art as worship is where you are pointing people.

The sun and warmth of summer always gets me thinking about Psalm 19. Creation really does declare the glory of God day after day after day. I also have recently read a couple books which emphasize creativity: one a book on glorifying God in daily tasks (I have written a post about it here) and another on flower arranging. As I was taking a walk the other day, a thought came to my head: what do Christians do in response to the beauty of God’s creation? Christians create.

Defining Christian Creativity

Non-Christians can create and produce incredibly imaginative paintings, poems, designs, etc. It is part of God’s common grace and goodness that all people who are made in His image can express themselves through artistic mediums. But the richest form of creativity is reserved for Christians: creativity as worship. Before I move on to specific examples of how Christians create, I want to give a basic theological understanding of Christian creativity.

Theological Basis

As expressed so clearly in the first chapter of this book, God is the ultimate and original creator. God creates from nothing: the first two chapters of Genesis detail in beautiful language how God merely spoke and all things were made. The question of why God created is one many theologians have tried to answer throughout the history of the Church. Jonathan Edwards in his book “The End for Which God Created the World” gives the most compelling answer in my opinion.

God created the world to display His attributes to humanity so they would delight in who He is.

That is just my summary sentence; I recommend you read Edwards’ compelling argument yourself. Essentially, there are two points to emphasize:

• God by creating expressed and displayed some aspect of who He is
• God created humans to see and delight in who He is
• One of the ways humans do this is seeing God’s attributes expressed in creation

This overarching theology of why God created is where Edith Schaeffer gets her helpful definition of art, which she says involves creativity and originality:

Whatever form art takes, it gives outward expression to what otherwise would remain locked in the mind, unshared…Art in various forms expresses and gives opportunity to others to share in, and respond to things, which otherwise would remain vague, empty yearnings.

“The Hidden Art of Homemaking”, Edith Schaeffer

You notice in her definition of art, Shaeffer gives the same parts that Edwards uses when describing God creating:

• Humans create something to give outward expression to something inside them, whether a thought or a feeling or an attribute
• This outward expression gives other humans the opportunity to share in and respond to something inside that other person

So, Christians don’t just create because it is something built into humanity. Christians create because they understand it is a way to reflect the image of God. God, the original creator, has given humans the ability to create as well.

Derivative Creators

I must emphasize a second point: God created out of nothing. Humans cannot. So what do we, as humans, use to create? We use the materials God Himself has already created. Therefore, all human creativity is ultimately dependent on God. Unbelievers are unaware of this dependency, but this is one of the ways Christians can create as an act of worship. You and I are derivative creators. We take expressions of God’s attributes from creation and then we create in response to them.

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