Purify me with hyssop and I shall be
clean; wash me, and I shal be whiter than snow. Make me to hear joy
and gladness, Let the bones which You have broken rejoice. Hide your
face from my sins and blot our all my iniquities. Create in me a
clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Psalm
51:7-10
Continuing our creativeness
theme...more on a sad note, but with eternally good results.
We can use our creativeness to do evil.
Our minds like to wander from the
reality of what is and turn to the possibilities of what could or
should be. This is good if we are painting a flower that doesn't
exist, but we wish did. The blueness of a rose (I know they are
breeding them now, but maybe not in the shade you like), the shapes
and sizes of things that are not. Apples are not the sizes of horses,
but you find them bronzed in a park somewhere. Things can be made
bigger, stronger, faster with a little imagination and the right
materials. Yeah, so that apple may not be edible or nutritious, but
the image exists because we want it to. This creativeness leads to
cures for cancer, breeding of pest-proof crops, and other
advancements in human lives. Proper procedures for digging wells for
fresh water, the high-rise building, and lead-free paint were
creative ventures for someone out there.
And then there are the daydreams of the
destructive kind. The sort of thing that we all fall prey to. The
idea of what life would have been like if we had married differently,
if we hadn't told God we would follow certain guidelines for life
like paying our taxes, or being willing to be honest on the job. This
creative thinking leads to adultrous relationships and discontentment
with what we have, fines and jail time for tax evasion, and being
distrusted and fired from our jobs for petty theft or dishonest
dealings. The problem was creative thinking...irrational thinking
that we would be happier doing wrong and not contemplating the
consequences of such actions. Satan puts temptations before us and
tells us we would be happier with someone else, with more money, and
with a different job or position in the business. This type of
creative thinking is not godly, not good, and not glorifying to the
God we claim to serve. David walked into all sorts of pain and misery
for his creativeness...from taking another man's wife creatively,
bringing the soldier home creatively, and killing him off creatively.
And God dealt with him creatively, with a story of a man and a sheep.
David condemned himself without even knowing it.
And right now there is this very pain
and suffering in the lifes of about the last people I would have
imagined. A marriage is under attack and the creative thought that
justifies it can only be imagined by those of us on the outside. But
those thoughts are not new. Every day Satan gives us creative
thoughts. We have rules and he tries to convince us to break them, we
have standards and he wants us to lower them, we have money and he
wants us to waste it instead of invest it, and we have commitments
and he wants us to walk away from them. And the things he uses to
fool us look good, appear compassionate, appeal to the eye, the ear,
the mind. We question the God who would withhold all good things from
us. Creative thinking can cause us to walk away from God in areas we
never dreamed we would.
This is where David saw what he had
done, and asked God to create...to create a clean heart. His heart
was so evil at that point that it could not be fixed, it had to be
replaced. For God to create, He starts with nothing. He speaks it
into existance. David needed a heart transplant, and he asked God to
do the surgery. The spirit needed renewed, but the heart needed
replaced. The vessels were so clogged that for it to be cleaned was
impossible. It was corrupted beyond repair. David asked God to make
him a heart so different from the one that caused him to wander.
Later David was called a man after God's own heart. I have often
thought of that David being the innocent one, the shepherd and
psalmster. I now wonder if it wasn't the David who had God's heart
made after the sinning. This was the new heart God created for him
since his own had lead him astray? In any case, David knew that all
his creativity was nothing, and that God's creative breath was needed
in his life.
Pray for our dear friends, and for all
marriages and relationships that are in peril from our creative
thoughts that wander destructively from the right paths of God. Pray
for all whose thinking begins to question the holiness of God's ways.
The church is filling with people with their own ideas of right and
wrong, good and evil, beauty and ugliness. Pray that God's Word would
bring our hearts back to a proper and acceptable creativeness that
exalts God and doesn't rebel against Him, for the sake of God and
mankind.
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