- He does what he does to clear away the clutter of Christianity so we can see the beauty of Christ.
- Jon shared the story of how StuffChristiansLike.net took off.
- What he wanted to do didn’t match the rest of his life.
- We are becoming the “I’m but…” generation.
- I’m this _______, but I want to be a _________.
- It’s an ageless problem.
- Have you ever bumped into anything that makes you feel alive?
- You find what you feel you are meant to do but it doesn’t feel like the rest of your life.
- We feel like we are created for more but aren’t sure how to get there.
- Quitter came out as a result of that experience.
- There’s a gap that exists between who we are and who we want to be.
- The gap between our current project and where we want it go.
- What do you do when you encounter the gap?
- Nobody’s dream is to maintain the status quo.
- We want to grow and shift things.
- We are up against a huge challenge.
- We are trying to share the Gospel in the 21st century.
- We are in a gap between where we are and where we need to take this message.
What to do when you encounter the gap…
1 – Ignore the voices.
- Artists rarely have a positive internal voice.
- What are the voices you hear?
- What tensions are you facing?
- We always hear voices that say someone better or smarter than us can do something better than we can.
- Social media makes it easy for us to compare ourselves.
- The comparison game is deadly.
- Never compare your beginning to someone else’s middle.
- We will always hear “who are you to do that?” at the beginning of a project.
- The Bible is littered with mess-ups who God used to do amazing things.
- If you feel like a mess up, you’re amongst good company.
- The right question is, “who is God to do that?”
- God is bigger than your project, your budget needs, or the challenge you are up against in your community.
- Ignore the voices.
2 – Face your fears:
- Other fears get louder when
- The fear of starting – the blank page fear.
- When you start something the dragon of perfectionism is awakened.
- Perfectionism looks like a character trait, not a flaw.
- We burn people out in the church.
- Perfectionism always presents itself as “close.”
- Just one more tweak, one more edit… an endless chase that can’t be caught.
- If you going to start and finish projects you have to murder perfectionism.
- 90% perfect and shared with the world changes more lives than 100% perfect and stuck in your head.
- 90% is OK.
- The blog posts you never get comments on are the ones you don’t publish.
- The programs that never succeed are the ones that never start.
- Allow room for God to finish the last 10%.
- The fear of failure.
- God is about filling hearts first not rooms.
- If you are going to risk and maybe fail, fail gloriously at something that matters.
- Even in failure, lives will change.
- The worst kind of failure is to work on things that don’t matter.
- The fear of success.
- Fear is brilliant… it’s both sides of the coin.
- Expectation is present when good things happen.
- A diamond is just a rock unless you think it has value.
- There’s a lot in our lives that can clamor for our attention that appear to be diamonds.
- [Social media, Klout score, number of friends and followers, etc.]
- We can treat the right things as rocks.
- We go to the Bible for research, not renewal.
- Ideas instead of our identity.
3 – Have friends
- Social media is in a weird place.
- If the Internet is a teenager, social media is a toddler and we’re all fumbling.
- It never sleeps… it’s never done.
- It’s awkward and fumbling.
- You never finish… it’s always wanting more.
- Are you paying attention?
- When you start to work on something that you care about you can lose sight of things that are important.
- You can lose sight of your friends.
- The ROI on friendships suck.
- They are ineffective and messy.
- They don’t behave.
- You can’t measure them.
- We need friendships and relationships.
- Real, face-to-face relationships matter… not circles or lists.
- Make relationship decisions.
- You’ll get motivation.
- You’ll get validation.
- You’ll get challenges.
- You need people who love you enough to speak the truth into your life.
Why Does it Matter That We Close the Gap?
- It matters because God cares about art.
- God cares about art more than we do.
- Sometimes we don’t use our best creativity to honor the author of creativity.
- We sprinkle a little Jesus on pop culture and call it creativity.
- The church isn’t a leader in the creative movement.
- God deals with the leaders and the artists in Exodus.
- The pastors and the creatives.
- Exodus 31
- God loves art.
- In Exodus 36 they start to build the ark.
- Something crazy happened… everyone who had the skill and were willing to work came…
- People had the skill who sat on their art and missed their chance to build the Temple.
- We’ve got the same opportunity every day.
- 1 Corinthians 6:19
- We use our skills to help people rebuild their lives… and that’s our way of rebuilding the Temple.
- We are room builders.
- That’s why we do what we do.
- That’s why we face fear.
- It’s not about our art it’s about the Temple we are building.
- We have an amazing chance and an amazing call.
- We need to be artists who answer that call.
We’ve been given a skill. - We need to be willing to come and do the work.
