Your Gifts Have Nothing to do with Your Salvation
Christian creative, I want you to listen to me very, very carefully: using your God-given gifts and God-given creativity — even for God’s Kingdom — has nothing to do with your salvation.
It cannot give you salvation. It cannot help with your salvation. Not using it won’t impact your salvation.
Your God-given gift is a beautiful thing. Even more beautiful is the fact that you get to use that creativity to worship God by pursuing it with the resources and blessing He’s given you. These gifts — talents, abilities, and skills — are all good things given to you by God. They are wonderful blessings that God can and often uses in your sanctification journey; to teach you about His creativity and His nature, or to teach fruits of the spirit.
But, Christian, your creativity is insufficient to save you from a really bad eternity.
The only thing that can save you is Jesus. His sacrifice on the Cross. His sinless life. His selfless love for you. That is it. Full stop.
I say this with great emphasis because I want to take a weight off your shoulders. Putting any of our salvation on our creativity or projects or effort in an artistic career is like trying to peel the ocean up from the sandy beach. It’s useless and it’s frustrating. Trying to pursue salvation through creative works is going to leave you feeling spiritually empty, emotionally drained, and burdened beyond what God is actually putting on your shoulders.
Your gifts, talents, and creativity were never meant to save you.
They are meant to be a blessing and a God-given purpose on your life.
This idea can be expanded out, too: your gifts, talents, and creativity were never meant to save anybody. God may use projects and things that you work on in other people’s salvation story, but it is Him and only Him who can save lost souls. Not you, not anything you create.
So, take that burden off of your shoulders. Put aside the idea that you have any part in your salvation, outside the sin that made it necessary, and put the weight of your eternal soul’s rescue squarely on the Cross. The only thing strong enough to carry it.
And then take some time to rest. Rest in how much God loves you and what He has sacrificed to save you.
Putting it into Action
Have you recently fallen into the idea — even subconsciously — that your creativity is ultimately tied to your salvation? That, if you don’t use the creative gifts that God has given you, in the way that you feel is right, that your salvation — or anyone else’s — is at stake? Take some time today, right now, to rest. Remove or ask God to remove the burden on your shoulders of trying to save yourself or others through your creative endeavors. You will not save yourself that way. Jesus’ sacrifice is more than sufficient.
“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
“...He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior...”
“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
