| “For we are God’s workmanship [masterpiece], created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” |
| —Ephesians 2:10 |
Whatever medium in which we work—art, crafts, calligraphy, mechanics, woodwork, database management, website development, or any other endeavor that requires creativity and hard work—from time to time we often experience a sense of deep satisfaction from what we’ve accomplished. Please allow me to share a personal example to illustrate my point.
I can remember many years ago, back in the very early 1980s, when IBM created the first personal computer to become adopted by many businesses, I purchased a Compaq Portable Computer. It was about the size of a professional-grade portable sewing machine. I soon bought a hard drive card for this computer that held a whopping 20 megabytes of storage. I also had equipped my pride-and-joy compuyer with a modem that operated at such a slow speed—compared to data transmission speeds today—that it would hardly be able to display a webpage at today’s data rates.
I also purchased some software:
- Wordstar for word processing,
- Multiplan for spreadsheets, and
- dBase II for database creation.
Of these three, dBase II was the most fascinating and most challenging to me. When the dBase II program launched, all that appeared on the screen was a single dot, or period, that the software developer called the “dot prompt.” It was a truly powerful database program. But, to make it work effectively, the user had to learn a unique dBase II programming language.
I well remember the sense of satisfaction I received when I began to develop some fairly simple, but later very sophisticated, dBase II application programs. In fact, for a while, I worked at night doing dBase II programming for a computer consulting company. During this time period, I created several multi-layer dBase II applications for businesses, who paid handsomely for my work.
After working for two or three months developing a particular application, I felt a deep satisfaction about the “masterpiece” that I had created. It was the result of hundreds of hours of programming and re-programming thousands of lines of dBase II application programming code.
Imagine now how God must feel when He looks at His dearly loved children and sees the spiritual formation that is pushing each of us forward along the pathway that He has laid out before us. This is what prompted the Apostle Paul to write these words, found in Ephesians 2:10:
For we are God’s workmanship [masterpiece], created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
Every opportunity that we take to respond with loving obedience to God’s direction in our lives truly brings Him great joy, for such devoted behavior on our part is exactly what God created us to do. So, as we begin a new day, let’s take time to set a course for the day that will please God through our obedience. As we show forth His love to a needy world, we validate the work of the Holy Spirit within us. We are on display in the gallery of life. Let’s determine to learn how to be the “masterpieces” that God created us to be.
