Like a month or so, Mel is living the dream, right? Well, I come down here, this is probably, I don't know, time number 10, and it's a trek for me. It's a round trip. I'm typically driving three and a half hours on these Sundays. So why do I do it? Every time I come here, when I did the men's retreat last year, I have one goal, and that is to just show you how utterly astounding and glorious and weighty and radiant Jesus is. That's why I come here. And what we're gonna do today, I mean, over my years that I've been here, I've shown you the intellectual brilliance of Jesus. I've shown you, last time I was here, the emotion of Jesus. I've shown you the graciousness of Jesus, the compassion of Jesus, the relationality and radical love of Jesus. And so my hope and prayer today is that I can just turn Jesus a new angle for you, so you walk out of here appreciating the creative genius of Jesus. Something that we often don't talk about, but it's a huge running theme in the scripture, that Jesus is the one who thought up sunsets. Jesus is the one who thought up ladybugs. Jesus is the one who thought up newborn babies. Jesus is the one who thought up the flavor of watermelon. Jesus is the one who thought up peacocks and chameleons and mandarin fish. Jesus is the one who thought up coffee beans. Can I get an amen? The flavor of coffee beans, that was Jesus' idea. And so in our time together, I just want you to see the artistic genius of Jesus in action. I remember preaching at a church up in L.A. This is going back over 10 years now. And I was the teaching pastor at a little church called Cornerstone. And we had been planning an event that we called Neo Beatnik Night. Neo Beatnik Night. And what that meant was I'd been doing a series on the creativity of God and what that should look like in the Christian life. And so we decided to actually do it. And so we hosted this event and so some people decided, okay, I am a culinary artist. I'm gonna glorify God by what I do in the kitchen. And so there was a big potluck, people crafted the best kind of art, the edible art, otherwise known as food. And so we had a great time just eating this amazing food, and people brought poems, and people read poetry, and they did paintings, and they did dances, and it was just this big night to do art, not just for art's sake, but for the glory of God. Now leading up to Neo-Beatnik night, there was a man in the congregation who we'll call Jasper. Jasper was skeptical about the whole thing. He was skeptical about the whole idea of Christian art, and he was skeptical for two reasons. Reason number one was Jasper was the kind of guy who couldn't draw a stick figure to save his life. He believed that he had not a creative bone in his entire body. You know the old thing about left brain is logical right brain is creative. He believed his right brain he was just brain dead. And so that was his first pushback was you're asking us to be creative to the glory of God. Well again I can't draw a stick figure to save my life so That's problem number one. Problem number two is that Jasper had seen a lot of, quote, Christian art. He had watched enough Christian movies, listened to enough Christian music, seen enough Christian paintings to believe that most of it was pretty bad. He thought most of it was really kitschy and inauthentic and just poor quality. He believed, you know, there's a quote by a scholar called Greg Thornberry who says, Christianity is the greatest of all nouns, but the lamest of all adjectives. That the minute you put Christian in front of music or art or movies, it gets bad. And so he was skeptical about doing Christian art. And so I took Jasper through scripture from Genesis to Revelation to build a case that Christianity is actually big on creativity from Genesis to Revelation. And I hope to convince all of you the same thing today and think more deeply about how can you integrate your imagination into your spiritual life. And so I'm just going to start at Genesis 1 and run you through the entire scriptures and our whole conversation is going to crescendo with the resurrection of Jesus. And so this is kind of post Easter reflections on how that empty tomb inspires our creative lives to worship. So what's the opening line, help me out Riverview, opening line of the entire Bible? In the beginning God what? Created. The first line of scripture, the first verb in the entire Bible, the first time we meet God is God created. The first time we meet God is a creative genius in action. Now what does God say? at the end of every single creation day in Genesis 1 and 2. He says it is good, right? He speaks these benedictions over creation. Bene means good, right? You have a good Italian meal, you say bene. And diction, a dictionary is full of words. So benediction is a good word that God speaks over his creation. But let's think about it a little more deeply. In what sense is it good when God creates the heavens and the earth, and then as God separates the waters above from the waters below, and as God separates the dry land from the waters, and as God fills those waters up with sharks, and blue whales, and man o' wars, and as he fills the dry land up with beavers, and dinosaurs, and ladybugs, and coffee, and strawberries, Why is it good? Well think about it like this. God could have made an all brown universe where everything is brown. Rainbows are just brown on brown on brown against a brown sky. In that universe we would call oranges browns instead. Right. Everybody has brown eyes and brown hair. He could have created this brown topia. Why didn't he? Well, that universe, a brown universe, could have been totally efficient from an engineering perspective. It could have functioned great. So why the color spectrum? Why create orange oranges and yellow bananas? Why create people with different skin tones? Why create rainbows with the color spectrum? Because it's good. Because it's good. Now, when God says it is good, most of us would hear like a moral word, right? Like it's good in the sense of if little Johnny eats his green beans like mommy tells him, Johnny's being a good boy. But that's not what's going on in Genesis 1 and 2. God isn't saying it's morally good that there's ladybugs, it's morally good that there's bananas, it's morally good that there's sunsets. So if God isn't making a moral claim it is good, then what kind of claim is he making? I would argue he's making an aesthetic claim. Less like saying, it is good that little Johnny listened to his mommy, and more like if you see, if you drive out to the ocean and watch the sun go down on a beautiful night, and somebody asks you, how was the sunset tonight? You say, it was good. An aesthetic declaration. More like if you go to a symphony, how was it? It was good. You go to a museum and you look at a Rembrandt's canvas, or a Titian canvas, or a Michelangelo canvas, how was it? good. God has cared about beauty since the very beginning. Now let's take it just one level deeper. When God is saying it is good, i.e. it is beautiful, he's saying that on creation day 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. People don't even show up until day 6. Think about that. God can declare things beautiful even before we can. What that means is that there is real objective beauty in God's world even when we're oblivious to it. It means that beauty isn't just in the eye of the beholders, us. Real beauty exists in the eye of the capital B beholder, the God who created the universe. And so now we don't enter the world around us as some kind of blank slate to impose our own constructs of beauty. We enter a universe where beauty already exists. Beauty isn't just something we fabricate, it's something we find in God's world. Amen? Let me give you just one example. This is a little section from a book I took the men's group through on our retreat last year. And I say, it's a little book called Reflect where I get into all this. Beauty isn't just something humans dream up. Thankfully we can, but it's also something we discovered, something beyond and even before us. This means that when the Hubble Space Satellite left our atmosphere, and started relaying space pictures back to us. There's nothing arbitrary or artificial when we exhale together, beautiful. When human beings over the past 30 years first beheld the sprawling fuchsia clouds of the Orion Nebula, the cobalt pupil and auburn iris of the Helix Nebula, or the somber towering gas pillars of the Eagle Nebula with their speckles of pink fire and wispy sea green auras, we did not fabricate beauty, found beauty. They were beautiful long before Hubble left our atmosphere and would stay beautiful even if we all went blind tomorrow. So that's where the Bible starts. God created, first verb, first line of the Bible, calling everything good, i.e. beautiful in Genesis 1 and 2. And then when he makes people, he gives the first command to a human being, which is a command to be creative. Anybody know the very first command in the entire Bible? He tells Adam to name the animals, to name the animals. That's a creative act, right? God doesn't say, well, that's a lion and that's a tiger and that's a bear. He says, I just created you in my image. I've just made stuff. Now I want you to make names for all the beauty around you. The very first command an image bearer ever receives from God is a command to be creative. And then you get the commands to be fruitful and multiply. God has just made a bunch of beauty. Now he's commanding Adam and Eve, take this universe and fill it with even more beauty. Sometimes theologians in church history have called this the culture mandate. That command to be fruitful, to multiply, to subdue the earth as a culture mandate, to make something of God's universe, to increase the net beauty in the universe. And so all that is happening in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. And then as we move further into the Old Testament, by the time we get to the book of Exodus, there's this A fascinating little scene where the Holy Spirit of God fills a man named Bezalel and his sons, who were ancient Jewish artists, and the Spirit inspires them to create all the temple decor and all the robes for the priests and everything. Now, it's interesting that God didn't want to be worshiped in a drab, hollow cube, right? It was filled with color, it was filled with beauty, and there's this little passage in Exodus 39, verse 24, where it says, Bezalel, this ancient artist, on the priest's robes, he stitched together blue pomegranates, which might just seem like a strange little detail that the text throws in there, but think about that. Why is that strange? What color are pomegranates in real life? Yeah, they're red or kind of a pinkish hue, and here's an ancient artist And he decides, I'm gonna make blue pomegranates. It's kind of interesting because it shows that we aren't limited to just reproduce stuff God has made. Part of being an image bearer is thinking up brand new beauty. Blue pomegranates never existed until Bezalel decided to make them on the priest's garments. And so part of our creative lives, again, is adding to the net beauty of God's universe. As we continue through, The Old Testament, you get to the Psalms, and there's psalm after psalm after psalm that says things like, play skillfully to the Lord, sing a new song to God. They didn't just stand up in the ancient Jewish congregation and say, here's some theological truth about God, now go home, right? They sang like we just did, right? We just, as a congregation, sang God of wonders, and there's something about melody and sound that is expressing worship in a way that wouldn't happen if we were just standing up here with, you know, bored expressions reciting truths about God. And so all over the Psalms, there's these calls to worship God. It says, play skillfully to the Lord, sing him a new song. As we continue through the Old Testament, just kind of building this biblical vision of art in the spiritual life, We meet prophets who performed what we could maybe call performance art, where you have Hosea marrying a well-known prostitute as a way of a kind of performance art piece of God's love for Israel through all of her infidelity. There's a scene where Jeremiah invites a prohibitionist group of of really legalistic Jews, he invites them to a wine tasting party in God's temple as a kind of performance art. Isaiah ends up wandering naked in the wilderness for over 10 years. And so you have all these different kind of performance art pieces in the Old Testament. Now, let's think of the Bible itself for a second as God's art, right? Because the Holy Spirit is the one inspiring everything from Genesis to Revelation. So let me As we think about the Bible as God's art, let me kind of share a little story of a friend of mine who's an artist, and we'll think critically about how it applies to the Bible. So a good friend of mine, he actually lives over in Carlsbad. He's a worship leader out there, and he attended a worship leader conference up at Saddleback Church in Orange County. And they had this very famous worship leader, and he was giving his presentation on the secret to success in worship leading. And this very famous worship leader said, and I quote, never use a minor chord. Only use major chords because major chords are happy and you want worship to be a celebration. If you start throwing minor chords in there, you're going to bum people out. So keep it upbeat with the major chords. Now, how many of you in the room are musicians, I'm curious? All right, we got about a quarter of us, maybe a third of us who are musicians. The musicians in the room know instantly how bad that advice is. So for the non-musicians, let me kind of break it down. A major chord typically sounds happy. It's sunny outside. A minor chord, you drop the third and all of a sudden it's raining outside. A minor chord, right? And so let's ask the question, if God is the artist behind scripture, which he is, What chords, let's pretend together that the Bible is one long song. What chords does God, the most creative genius in history, use in his art that is the Bible? Does God use major chords in the text of scripture? Are there these happy, uplifting moments? Yeah, throw out some examples. What are some major chord moments in the text? What comes to mind? Yeah, what we just celebrated a week ago, right? That is a huge major chord moment. He is risen, he is risen indeed. What else? Yeah, the birth of Jesus, right? There's a reason a lot of the best Christmas hymns are major chord moments, right? Jesus has been born. God is finally with us. Emmanuel, God is with us. That's a major chord moment. But let's ask this question. Does God the artist use minor chords in the text? Help me out. Where are they? The crucifixion is a major, it's a minor chord moment, right? God incarnate is bleeding out to die. God incarnate has just been stabbed in the heart with a Roman spear. God incarnate is breathing his last and groaning from the cross. Or think of Psalm 88. It's this song by a young Jewish man named Ethan. And Ethan is griping about the fact that God has abandoned him. And the way the psalm ends is with the powerful line, darkness is my closest friend. That doesn't work very well with a major chord. Darkness is my closest friend. It doesn't work, right? It's a minor chord moment. Or think of there's an entire book of the Bible called Lamentations. That doesn't work very well as some happy clappy song. Jeremiah was known as the weeping prophet. Jesus is called in Isaiah 53 a man of sorrows. And so part of how God makes beauty is he isn't afraid of the minor chords. Well, let's think of there's another kind of chord known as a power chord. And the way a power chord works for the non-musicians in the room, it's just the first and the fifth and they tend to sound really like aggressive, like you hear it a lot in like heavy metal music and punk rock. And so they sound a little bit angry. So help me out. Does God use power chords in his art that is the Bible? Examples, where are some of these angry moments in the text? Yeah, the temple. Jesus in the temple, he goes storming in there. He's flipping tables everywhere in this outrage that his father's house has turned into a den of robbers. Or think of God's wrath being poured out on the Babylonians or Assyrians in the Old Testament. These are big power cord moments. Think of the book of Revelation where you have the lake of fire and brimstone and the beast is being thrown into the fire, being thrown into the sulfur. And think of this monster rising out of the sea that Jesus destroys. That would make a pretty epic heavy metal album. The Lion in the Sea. It's this very aggressive, like the wrath of God, his justice is crushing evil forever. Well, what about weird jazz chords that don't seem to make any sense? Chords that are like... And the notes are like, what? Why that note? So these kind of nonsensical Does God use those in the Bible? Think of the book of Ecclesiastes, right? Where if Ecclesiastes was a song, what's the chorus? What does the author of Ecclesiastes keep coming back to at the end of every chapter? This phrase, meaningless, meaningless, chasing after the wind, vanity, or some translations, futility, futility, some translations, absurdity, absurdity. And so God isn't afraid to include those notes in his art too. And so hopefully you're starting to see some of the artistic genius of Jesus. It's not all major chord and happy clappy. God makes much more profound beauty because he's able to mix in sad chords and angry chords and weird seemingly nonsensical jazz chords. So the Bible as a whole is God's art. Well let's shift gears to the New Testament. In the New Testament, that creator from Genesis 1, the one who thought up coffee beans, the one who thought up rainbows, the one who thought up space nebula, the one who thought up supernovas, the one who thought up sun, that same creator is born into his universe, right? The New Testament opens with the incarnation, and we learn in John 1 that without Christ, nothing would have been made that's been made. So Jesus is actually the creative genius behind all of it. We read in Colossians 1 that Jesus, all things were made through him and for him. We read in Hebrews 1 that Jesus laid the foundations of the earth. And so at the beginning of the New Testament, we get to meet that creator in a more personal way and find out, lo and behold, it's Jesus who thought all this up. What does Jesus decide to do when it comes time to pick a career? What was his job before he launches his earthly ministry? Yeah, he's a carpenter. And the Greek word there actually calls him a tekton. And tekton was a little bit more than a carpenter. It was kind of a contractor who could work in all kinds of different fields. Jesus was good at masonry. He could do stone work. He could do metal work. And that's how God incarnate decided to spend the bulk of his adult life on earth, making stuff. The most spiritual person who ever lived made stuff. Now here's my question. When Jesus is framing a house, when Jesus is doing masonry work, when he's constructing a table or chair, is he not being spiritual in those moments? Is he not loving his father in those moments? Is he kind of spiritually neutral until he kicks into ministry mode, and now that he's preaching and teaching, all of a sudden Jesus magically becomes spiritual? No. Everything Jesus did, everything Jesus does at every moment of his life is spiritual, is an expression of the great commandment. He is loving his Father with his whole mind, with his whole heart, with his whole soul, with his whole strength. Connect the dots. If Jesus could build a chair to the glory of the Father, if Jesus could frame a house to the glory of the Father, if Jesus could eat a meal or prepare a meal to the glory of the Father, then just think how that opens up your entire life to be lived to the glory of God. You can brew a cup of coffee to the glory of the Father. You can fix that wobbly chair to the glory of God the Father. You can write a well-crafted email to the glory of God the Father. You can give a haircut to the glory of the Father. There's really nothing in your whole daily experience that can't be lived under the Lordship of Christ to the glory of the Father. Amen? And that is a compelling vision of the spiritual life that we get to see in Jesus in his career as Tecton. I remember there's this quote from Martin Luther, the great Protestant reformer, where he said that the widow sweeping her floor to the glory of God can be more spiritual than the Pope high upon his throne. The widow sweeping her floor to the glory of God can be more spiritual than the Pope high upon his throne. Now, years ago, Some of you might remember this story. I was working at a Ralph's supermarket and I was running their dairy box. And so I had the graveyard shift. I would show up at midnight and work till 9 a.m. And we had this little ritual that we called throwing cheese. And so me and my coworkers would throw cheese, and what that meant was that the delivery truck would show up about 3 a.m., we'd open it up and there'd be these big pallets of cheese, so we'd pull them off the pallets, and then we'd slide them down the slick supermarket floors in front of where the cheese display is, and then we'd break into the boxes with our box cutters and begin the tedious task of putting every cheese on exactly the right hook, and it would just take us like four hours, because there's a million different cheese options. And so it's very mind numbing, just kind of grinding work. And so I'm kind of standing there like a zombie. It's like 4 a.m. and I'm just hanging like, okay, Havarti, mozzarella, low skim mozzarella, sharp, extra sharp, mild, just going down and just kind of half awake when that Luther quote pops into my head. The widow sweeping her floor to the glory of God could be more spiritual than the Pope high upon his throne. And it got me thinking, if that widow can sweep a floor to the glory of God, why can't I throw cheese to the glory of God? And so I just prayed this very simple prayer. I said, Jesus, I tend to think of worship as standing in a church on Sunday morning with my hands outstretched, singing a song. So I'm not really sure what it means to throw cheese for your glory, but somehow be glorified in this. Havarti, O Lord my God. Cheddar, when I in awesome wonder. Sharp cheddar, consider all the worlds thy hands have made. Mild cheddar, I see the stars. Mozzarella, I hear the rolling thunder. And I will tell you, it was one of the most intense worship experiences of my life, just throwing cheese at 4 a.m., standing in the dairy box at Ralph's. And it was a breakthrough for me because I realized that kind of before that moment, my view of worship and what it meant to be spiritual was too head in the clouds in a way that doesn't really reflect Jesus, who when he, again, is framing a house, when he's hammering a nail, he is glorifying his Father. And it was really freeing because I think what a lot of Christians fall into is this kind of super spirituality where I'm only spiritual if, fill in the blank, if I'm at a men's retreat. I'm only spiritual if I'm at Riverview and Scott's up here strumming away and I'm singing my heart out. I'm only spiritual if I'm sitting and listening to the Bible being taught. I'm only spiritual if. And in a biblical spirituality, a true spirituality, causes this breakthrough where we see all life lived out under the lordship of Jesus. And so it was this breakthrough that a Irish poet named Evangeline Patterson had, and I'm just gonna quote her briefly. She says, I was raised in a Christian home where because God was so important, nothing else was allowed to be important. But, she says, I've broken through to the position that because God exists, everything has significance. Because God exists, everything has significance. And that is a biblical spirituality. all of life lived under the lordship of Jesus. Because without that, what happens, and I've seen this in years of ministry, is people kind of become the spiritual equivalent of a drug addict, where a drug addict needs their fix, right? They have a high, the high wears off, and so they need their next high, and then the high wears off. And we can do the same thing with Jesus, where you have that Jesus high, and as it begins to wear off, you think, I'm not spiritual anymore, and so I need to get back to the next event, I need to listen to that song, I need to do something that'll give me that jolt, and then it wears off, and we just become these kind of spiritual addicts. Well, the problem with that is it doesn't really reflect Jesus. When Jesus is doing just everyday life, when he's cooking a fish breakfast, that's spiritual. And so that's something we learn from the creativity of Jesus, that everyday life creativity is part of what it means to keep the great commandment. Now notice when Jesus teaches, when he does launch his public ministry, he doesn't just stand up and put everybody to sleep, right? He's creative. He tells these powerful stories. When somebody asks him, you know, what's the great commandment? And he says, love God with everything that you are. And the second greatest commandment, love your neighbor as yourself. And the lawyer asked Jesus back, okay, well then who's my neighbor? And Jesus doesn't say, well, in a Kantian meta-ethic, your neighbor is anyone with intrinsic dignity anchored in human autonomy. He doesn't put him to sleep with some boring answer. Instead, what does Jesus do? He tells a story. He says this man went out on the road and he's overtaken by bandits and thieves. They beat him up and they leave him bloody in a ditch. And along comes this priest. He's very spiritual. but he sees the man bleeding out and he takes a wide berth around him because he's got more spiritual things to do. Along comes a Levite, he just passes the guy too, but along comes a Samaritan. And a Samaritan in the first century, there's a lot of racism going on where the Samaritans were mixed blood, they weren't pure Jews and so they were looked at as subhuman and Jesus makes that impure-blooded Samaritan, the hero of the story. He gets down and binds the man's wounds and takes him to the local hotel and pays his bills. It's this vivid story, the parable of the Good Samaritan, that's still living in our imaginations 2,000 years later. He tells stories of parables of sowers throwing their seeds around and treasure hidden in a field. I want you again to see Jesus from that angle, not just as loving, which he is, not just as brilliant, which he is, but as an artistic genius. Now all this leads us to the big crescendo moment of the entire Bible that we celebrated last Sunday. Jesus died and didn't stay dead. Jesus died and didn't stay dead. So what does that teach us about the creative life and what it would look like for all of us to love God with our imaginations along with everything else? Well, let me give you just a couple, three quick insights for our creative lives from the resurrection of Jesus. And I'm going to read from Luke, chapter 24, and I'm going to look at the first three verses with you, and then I'll leave us with three thoughts as we go into our week. So Luke 24, starting at verse one, says, Why? It wasn't there. Right? There was no corpse inside because Jesus didn't rise as a spirit. Jesus didn't rise as a ghost. Jesus didn't rise as a hologram. Jesus didn't rise as an inspirational idea. Jesus rose bodily from the dead. And in Colossians 1 it says he's the first fruits of those who rise from the dead which means you will rise from the dead because Jesus rose from the dead. Now let me. unpack a little bit of that and push back on some ideas that float around the American church that I think we need to rethink. How many of you by a show of hands have ever heard the gospel presented this way? Which is, Jesus died so you can go to heaven. Jesus died so you can go to heaven. Is that true? Sure. But I would argue the Bible goes even way further than that because if Jesus just died so that your spirit could float off to the clouds, there's no compelling reason for the tomb to be empty. Think about it, if Jesus is just in the business of saving souls or spirits, Jesus could have died for your sins in his body and his body could have rotted in the ground while his spirit floats up to the clouds and he could have opened a magical portal in the sky so all of your spirits too could float up to the clouds. So why the empty tomb? Why when they went there could they not find a body? Because Jesus isn't just about saving your soul, He's about saving all of you. He's about redeeming the whole person. You see this all over the text. You see it in Ephesians 1 where he is reconciling all things to himself. Things on earth, things above the earth, things under the earth. You see it in Romans 8 where it says the creation, the material world is groaning. under the fall, but it's awaiting its liberation, its freedom from the bondage of decay. And so did Jesus die so you can go to heaven? Yes, but the scope of what he did on the cross and with the empty tomb is way more expansive than that. Jesus is in the process of redeeming the whole person and the whole cosmos. That's why the tomb was empty. Why? Because matter matters to him. Matter has always mattered to him. Go back to Genesis 1 again when God makes the material world and he says, it's good, it's good, it's good. And then that God enters into the material world that first Christmas and then he lives in that material world. He builds chairs and frames houses in that material world. He dies in that material world and he resurrects as body. And so our bodies matter to Jesus. And this is why, by the way, the way you worship and what you're doing with your body matters when you worship. It's why when we pray, it's not just some weird tradition that we bow our heads. It's a way of embodying the truth that God's bigger than us and above us and we're in a state of submission. And so we want a worship that includes matter because matter matters in a biblical worldview. That's a first kind of take home point. And think about in your most practical moments of the week, when you're preparing lunch today, when you're cooking dinner tonight, when you're brushing your teeth, think that this is spiritual. I'm living out the resurrection truth that matter matters because the tomb was empty. Now we can take it further. In Luke's account there's this deep theology that's, let me say it like this. Let's pretend we time travel back to the first century and we're all ancient Jews. We would think of the whole world as happening in two what they called ages or aeons. You have what the ancient Jews called the present age and you had what they called the age to come. The present age, age to come. The present age is broken. It's fallen. It's sad. It's twisted. It's corrupt. It's where depression comes from. It's where anxiety comes from. It's where evil comes from. All of that that's messed up in the world is what in the ancient Jewish world they called the present age. But then they had this belief based on the Old Testament of what they called the age to come. And if you pay attention to the red letters in your New Testament, Jesus is always talking about present age, age to come, present age, age to come. The age to come is the age of shalom, of peace, of everything the way it's supposed to be. The age of crescendoing joy and connection with God and connection to who God made us to be and connection to the people around us in a right relationship with the whole cosmos. And so with those distinctions, present age, age to come, Which age are we living in right now in 2018? Present age, you're half right. It's the present age and the age to come because of the resurrection. Let me unpack this because it's really deep Christian truth. We are in the present age, sure. Read the headlines, right? Watch what's happening in the world and you will realize we are not yet fully in the age to come, things are still really really messed up on lots of levels. But we're also in the age to come in a sense because of what we celebrated last week. Because you see when Jesus died and didn't stay dead that was the dawning of, theologians would say he is inaugurating, he's starting the age to come when he walks out of that tomb. Why? Because in the present age, dead things stay dead. That's the way the present age works. By breaking the rules of the present age, by coming back to life that first Easter Sunday, he broke all the rules of the present age and ushered in the age to come. And so as we live and create stuff in this world, we wanna do that with this kind of resurrection hopefulness that says Jesus, because of that resurrection, moving all things towards a state of ultimate redemption. Here's the way one theologian N.T. Wright puts it. N.T. Wright says it this way. He says, Jesus is raised so God's new creation has begun and we his followers have a job to do. What you do in the present by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself, all of that will last into God's future because of the resurrection. Now give me two minutes as I wrap up here. Use your imagination for a minute and pretend that Wright, who I just quoted, let's pretend that Wright is wrong. Let's pretend Jesus never rose from the dead. Let's pretend Easter Sunday never happened. What would it mean for you to make stuff in that universe? Well, there's an atheist, Bertrand Russell, who says that all the noonday brightness of human genius, all of our ambitions, all of our dreams, everything we make, this is a quote from Russell, is destined to be buried under the debris of a universe in ruins. So in case you were having too cheery of a morning, there's a little Bertrand Russell to take you down a few pegs. So Russell, we can at least appreciate his honesty. If there's no God and God didn't raise Jesus from the dead, then everything you make is destined to be buried under the debris of a universe in ruins. That is the tragic conclusion that follows if there's no Easter. But thank God Russell's wrong. Thank God Jesus walked out of that grave 2,000 years ago. Thank God Jesus broke the rules of the present age. so that as you make stuff, it's not an exercise in futility, it is living out the resurrection reality that death has been defeated, that Jesus is redeeming not just souls so we can float off to the clouds, but redeeming the whole person and redeeming the whole creation, amen? So final thought, what happened to Jasper? After we went through this biblical case for creativity in the Christian life, I challenged him and said, hey, it's a cop out if you think you don't have a creative bone in your body. You're creating the image of the same God that Bach was created in, that Rembrandt was created in. I want to push you to connect creativity with your love for Jesus. So he went and dusted off an old camera, and he went around town snapping pictures. And when we did our Neo beatnik night, showed up and he hands me this little CD and says, could you pop this into the computer and show it on the big screen? And so I say, sure, Jasper, pop it in. He took like 50 pictures, arranged them into like a little movie and wrote a poem to go with it. And when it got done, when Jasper's movie was shown to the congregation, we typically snap. It was like beatnik night. So instead of clapping, we snap, you know. Nobody even snapped because we were all just like, Like jaw on the ground, like Jasper did that? And then slowly like the snaps started up. And it was so beautiful to see a man who for 50 years of his Christian life didn't see creativity and imagination as part of his love for Jesus. To see that finally connect in a biblical way was beautiful. So to any Jaspers in the room, that's the challenge I leave you with this week. Go make stuff to the glory of God. Go live out that resurrection reality that matter matters. Let me pray for us. Great God.