The Artisan Soul: Your Voice

[podcast]http://www.revkwon.com/podcast/artisan-voice.mp3[/podcast] I remember stories of when I first started learning English. My parents tell me that I would mix Korean and English into sentences together to make sentences and words make less sense than they normally would to an immigrant. I would tell the teachers at my school, “I need to go to hwajangshil” or “Can I please have hueji?” But you see the thing about when I first learned English, was that the words that I uttered into nonsensical sentences was that there were all imitations of things I’ve heard my parents say or I’ve seen on TV. I learned both Korean and English through TV. In fact, when we start thinking about the words that we speak, the ideas that we have, the tone of voice we carry, our personalities, our characteristics, we start to understand that our internal voice, which controls all those things are nothing more than echoes of the voices of people who are around us that speak on our behalf. Last week I concluded that the essence of the things we create in our life must be LOVE. It is when the essence of the things we create and or do is love that we find a beauty that mirrors the beauty of the universe God created us to rule and subdue. If creativity is birthed out of our lives as a matter of who we are, then the voice that tells us who we are as artists in the image of God, as an echo of influences in our lives must be found out from within us and brought to the surface so we can be who God created us to be. Pablo Picasso said this, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” To help frame what that meant, he wrote, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” What he was talking about was clearly our God-given aptitude to create and express what is within ourselves and bring it out into the world with life. He can mimic others, but it would not be his until he could find that thing that inspires his creative acts. Let’s open our Bibles to John 8. ¹ But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. ² Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them.³ The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst ⁴ they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. ⁵ Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” ⁶ This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. ⁷ And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” ⁸ And once more he bent down and wrote on the ground. ⁹ But when they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. ¹⁰ Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” ¹¹ She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.” (John 8:1-11 ESV) The first lesson this passage is simple: what others think of us, what others have said about us matters, it has power, BUT only when it becomes what we think of ourselves. Yes, she was caught in the act of adultery. Yes, there were religious people spying on other people who were doing what they weren’t supposed to be doing which makes them hypocrites, but, this is the important piece of this: they brought her to Jesus and told him what they think of her. This sea of accusations and voices of who this woman was her story because she allowed that to define her. I want to say that the reason she probably was engaged in whatever she was engaged in was because people said that she would be nothing more than what she was engaged in and that’s what she did. She allowed it to be her voice, her story. She would be known as the adulterer and as such, she did just that. Can we look at our lives for a second? I want you to look into your life right now. What voice have you allowed to define who you are by letting is speak loudly to define the paths you walk? Have you let that voice that tells you that you’re not good enough, smart enough, personable enough dictate where you are and the things you strive for? Have you allowed that voice that told you that you were uncool or annoying be the limit of what you can offer in a relationship—uncoolness or annoyance? Has the voice that tells you that you have no self-control, or patience allowed you to be just that—the person who can’t control themselves in situations and makes a bad situation look like the inside of a bathroom in a public park? Far too often when we face crisis in our lives like what this woman in the story faced, it is the voices telling us who unworthy we are that get the better of us and become our demons. My goal today is to make sure that you know Jesus can change the voice and that story that speaks about who you are with the voice that is who you were created to be. Look at what Jesus says to the people who are speaking for this woman’s life, “If you have never ever allowed what people said about who you are dictate what you did (that is to say, if you’ve never allowed yourself be clouded by anything other than what you really are) then you can kill her.” But they knew that Jesus was challenging them to be more than what the voices in their heads was telling them to be: like God’s grace. Moreover, look at what Jesus says to the woman after they all left and there is silence when her soul was laid out there in the dirt: “You can live without the fear of being your true self and be the person God made you to be (sin no more).” Did you get that? “Sin” is just doing what alienates you from God. It’s not breaking rules, it’s not even about that. It’s doing something that alienates you from God. Our sin is that we’ve remained hidden from ourselves and from God and who God made us to be by allowing the echoes of our lives dictate who we are, and what we are and what we can and cannot do. Jesus tells the woman who was caught in her adultery to live the life God created her to have—on her terms, in the power of God. I want to look at Genesis 3 because I think there is a paradigm that we need to see in John 8 that can only be understood when we examine Genesis 3. ⁹ But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” ¹⁰ And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” ¹¹ He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” ¹² The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” ¹³ Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” (Genesis 3:9-13) God says, “who told you that you were naked?” The man heard the woman’s voice and let that be the voice that defined him as naked and shameful. The woman let the voice of the serpent be the one who defined who she was—inadequate and unlike God. The conclusion of this story is simple: God tells the man and woman that since they allowed somebody else speak for them, they will be just that—what they are allow themselves to be defined as. Isn’t this just the same psychology as we saw in John 8? The story ends with God telling Adam and Eve how their lives will be now that they want to hide from who they are when they were naked and unashamed. The nakedness was not shameful to Adam and Eve because God created them as such and allowed them to express themselves without hiding who they are. Adam and Eve were created to be sinless, un-alienated, to be unashamed of who they are in the bareness of it all. It’s something we all need to allow ourselves to be—naked in who we are and unashamed by it. I want to go back to our passage in John 8. I want to take another look at this story, the one thing that’s not mentioned here is that this woman was probably naked and dragged by her hair as her only covering. Remember, she was “caught in the act” by these supposed religious figure who are nothing more than pervs. She probably walked home naked or semi-naked and Jesus saw nothing wrong with that. You have to be asking yourself, “why?” Perhaps its to point out that there is nothing wrong with the nakedness of who you are as long as it’s really who you are as created by God. Just as God asks Adam and Eve why nakedness was a problem for them, Jesus saw nothing wrong with this woman’s nakedness as she was instructed to live sinless. You can say that when we strip down the voices inside of us that are not our own, we are naked and left with only our voice. It is in this nakedness that we live without being alienated, that is to say that we are sinless because we are being what God created us to be. You see as these stories show us, our voice, that thing that we allow to define us, well, is mostly an echo of what other people say about us rather than who God created us to be. It should be the exact opposite. I want to say that the only reason I am who I am is exactly because I spent my life fighting the voices within me that told me I was anything other than what God created me to be. I chose the college I went to because I was told that I couldn’t do it. I chose the line of work that I chose because I was told that it couldn’t be done with my aptitude. I didn’t let the echoes confine me to who God created me to be. Why should you? We find our voices when God speaks into our lives, and He is speaking to us right NOW. Just as Adam and Eve were flipping out before God speaks and as the Pharisees, scribes and women were flipping out before Jesus speaks, we remember best who God created us to be—His children, when God speaks to us. I believe God is speaking to people in this room right now. We have people in this room allowing other people’s voices define them, we need to stop letting them speak into our lives. We need to find our own voices. It’s time to stop alienating ourselves and sinning before God. Jesus lived on this earth to point out that alienation is covering up who we were created to be. Jesus died naked on a cross, without a home, without a grave, and glorified and risen as the Son of God, the King of Kings because he was willing to be crucified naked to a cross. That act became our reward and our hope. If you want to know what your voice says, you need to stop everything you’re doing and stop fighting with the voices in your head and do as the Psalmist says in Psalm 46:10, “Be still, and know God. He will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!” (Emphasis my own). Our voice is what we have to offer the world. It is through our voice that we can tell our story. So much more important than being heard is having something to say. In order to do just that, we must ultimately allow our souls to go silent so that we can find our voice and block out the echoes of people and things that are not God. When we know God and who He is, we will know who we are in God. When we stop fighting ourselves by echoing other people and be still and know who God is to us, our voice can speak to what God does for us. This results in us speaking loudly without fear and with much strength. Lets pray.