#282: Creativity in the Kingdom: Worshiping God through our writing

Welcome to Kingdom Writers, where we help equip and empower Christian writers of all genres to share your unique gifts with the world. We're your hosts, C.J. and Shelley Hitz.

This podcast is filled with spiritual encouragement as well as prayers to help you overcome the resistance you face as a writer. Your story matters.

So welcome to this mentoring moment. We're going to be talking about creativity in the Kingdom. Kingdom Writers, are you ready to unleash your creativity into the world through your writing and other means? If so, let's do this. My name is Shelley Hitz.

And I'm CJ Hitz. Good to be with you again.

Yes. We are your author coaches and mentors inside Christian Book Academy. And it's amazing to me that we have been mentoring writers for over a decade now, and I'm getting ready to press publish on the 68th book between the two of us. So crazy, right? But today, CJ is going to spend a few minutes just encouraging you with this theme of creativity in the Kingdom, about worshiping God through our writing.

Yeah. So why don't we just start with a word of prayer? Just ask the Lord to really do what he wants here. So, Father, we just thank you so much for your word that we're going to look into.

We thank you, Lord, that you do have a plan and purpose for each of us as Kingdom writers. And I want to pray that we would.

Not only worship you in our writing, but really glorify and magnify you. To all those that read our books and our writings, we just pray that people would be drawn to the beauty of Christ through our writings. And we thank you for each one here. Thank you for those that are live, those that are listening to the recording. And we just pray, Lord, that your holy Spirit would have your way today as we look into your word. And we ask this in Jesus name, Amen.

And all the Kingdom writers said amen.

So.

We'Re going to be looking at some words from First Kings.

Back in the Old Testament. First Kings, chapter 7, verses 13 through 22, and then jumping down just for a quick 6, verses 40 to 45. So if you want to open your Bibles, you can do that or pull it up on your phone like I have and join me with First Kings, chapter seven. So listen to this. These words, and this is just to put it in context, this is. They're in the process of building this grand temple that Solomon has been.

Commissioned to build. And so listen to this. As we pick up in verse 13 of chapter 7, First Kings, it says, king Solomon then asked for a man named Huram to come from Tyre. He was half Israelite, since his mother was a widow from the tribe of Naphtali and his father had been a craftsman in bronze from Tyre. Hurom was extremely skillful and talented in any work in bronze, and he came to do all the metalwork for King Solomon. So Hurom cast two bronze pillars, each 27ft tall and 18ft in circumference. For the tops of the pillars, he cast bronze capitals, each 7 1/2ft tall. Each capital was decorated with seven sets of latticework and interwoven chains. He also encircled the latticework with two rows of pomegranates to decorate the capitals over the pillars. Now, the capitals on the columns inside the entry room were shaped like water lilies, and they were six feet tall. The capitals on the two pillars had, get this now, 200 pomegranates in two rows around them. Beside the rounded surface, next to the latticework, Hurom set the pillars. And at the entrance of the temple, one toward the south and one toward the north, and he named the one on the south Jakin and the one to the north, Boaz. The capitals on the pillars were shaped like water lilies. And so the work on the pillars was finished. Now, let's jump down to verse 40.

And this is going to give a little summary of the things that.

This Hurom fella, who is extremely talented in what he was working on as a craftsman, it's a little summary of what he basically did. So he also made the necessary wash basins, shovels and bowls. So at last, Hurom completed everything King Solomon had assigned him to make for the Temple of the Lord. And what are those things? Verse 41, the two pillars, the two bowl shaped capitals on the tops of the pillars, the two networks of interwoven chains that decorated the capitals. Verse 42. The 400 pomegranates that hung from the chains on the capitals. Two rows of pomegranates for each of the chain networks that decorated the capitals on the tops of the pillars. The 10 water carts holding the 10 basins, the sea and the 12 oxen under it, and the ash buckets, the shovels and the bowls. Hiram made all these things of burnished bronze for the Temple of the Lord, just as King Solomon had directed. And so.

As I'm looking at this guy reading, you know, all of his intricacies, the detail of the work, I can't help but think of us as artists, us as craftsmen in our writing. And it says here that this man Huron was extremely skillful, talented. Again, his mother was Jewish, so she's from the tribe of Naphtali. So he had that aspect of his heritage. He was taught the things of God. He was, you better believe his mom was teaching him the word of God and teaching him everything regarding the Lord. How proud must she have been that her son was going to be working on this grand temple that was going to be built that King Solomon was commissioned. His father had the vision David, but Solomon was the one that was able to complete that temple. And then it says his dad was a Gentile from, from Tyre. Now Tyre is a region in Lebanon today. And so it was known that there were, there were skilled craftsmen in bronze in that area. And so after reading about the precision and detail of Huron's work, we see that this is a guy who glorified and worshiped God through his skills. There was thought, purpose and intentionality in his work. Now how do we know that there was intentionality? Well, right away we see that he actually named these two 27 foot tall pillars. And what did he name them? Well, he named one of them Jakin. Jakin actually means he establishes and Boaz means in him is strength. Imagine all the worshipers who are going to journey to this magnificent temple which stood, get this now, it stood for over 400 years before it was destroyed, before the Israelites would be carried off into the Babylonian exile. And so Hiram essentially was being intentional and that he wanted each of these worshipers, as well as all the kings that would come after Solomon, to be reminded of the fact that God alone establishes our ways and upholds us in his strength.

Upon entering the temple, they were set in the right frame of mind to worship the Lord. These two pillars, these magnificent pillars that we read in detail were an invitation to come and get established, to come here and receive the strength of God.

And you know, as believers in Christ, we can also say that we've actually been established in a right relationship with God and we're also given strength to endure to the end. But as kingdom riders, as kingdom writers, endeavoring to glorify the Lord, endeavoring to worship the Lord through our writing, we've been given the wonderful privilege of being established by God in our calling, to write words that will outlive us. Amen. And to actually receive the strength to endure as long as God has us here on this planet. And we all know that there's difficulties. We all know that getting those books published is not an easy thing. We're going to face resistance. We're going to face difficulty. And yet the Lord wants to give us strength. He wants to establish us. It's like these two pillars that stood as a reminder at the very front of the entrance of the temple.

And just as Hiram was hired and appointed to furnish and magnify the beauty of Solomon's temple, we as kingdom writers are called to glorify and magnify the beauty of Christ in our writings. Our writings can help display a God that's more than worthy to be worshiped.

Now, I think it's also good that we remember that these two pillars. I want you just imagine this. These two pillars were nearly 30ft high.

Now, a standard basketball hoop in a gym. Those of you who play basketball in, you know that it's 10ft high. I just want you to imagine three times that. Now, now, Michael Jordan's not going to be able to dunk on a 30 foot high.

So you're talking about the actual rim is 10ft high.

The rim on a standard basketball hoop in a gym is 10ft high. These pillars were nearly 30ft high. And so I want you just to imagine these pillars and they're nearly 30ft in height. Now, I don't know about you, but as I'm just imagining worshipers coming to the temple.

And bringing their offerings, I imagine not everyone's going to actually notice the 200 pomegranates.

That this Huron put on each of these pillars. Now, each, now there's 400 total, fashioned out of bronze. And you can just imagine the detail in these pomegranates. I imagine not everybody's gonna notice those. They're gonna walk through. Everyone's eyes aren't naturally gonna go to the 30 foot level as they're walking in and like, oh, wow, look at those pomegranates up there. Yeah. Now a lot of people would notice. There's going to be people that are lended toward that, that eye for art, that eye for detail.

Right?

But a total of 400 pomegranates handmade out of bronze. But I want to tell you who did notice, who noticed. God noticed.

Right?

God noticed those pomegranates. Every single one of those 400 pomegranates that Huron labored over, I imagine just each one was a labor unto itself. Just the detail there and the lattice work.

You and I have no idea who's going to walk through the front doors of our books. Many of those readers may not even notice the painstaking detail that each of us are putting into these books. The effort that we've put into them the blood, sweat and tears, the agony, the prayer, just asking the Lord for clarity, asking him to overcome our writer's block. But you and I can rest assured that God notices.

Amen.

And our books and writings are one of the primary ways that we've been called to worship and glorify our great King. We have a privilege here of offering our worship to the Lord through these books. And this is why we refer to ourselves as kingdom writers. We are priestly pens, as we say, in the hands of the author of life. You and I have a grand opportunity to not only to worship the Lord ourselves through our gifts that he's given us in writing, but we have an opportunity to help lead others through the front doors of these books and into the grand halls that the Lord wants us to lead worshipers into. And so I want to just encourage you that just like Huram, who it says was extremely talented and skillful, you and I, in our own ways, are extremely skilled and talented based on what God's given us. He's given us gifts in writing and numerous other things. I mean, many of you have many gifts. And I just want to say that we have an opportunity to.

Magnify the Lord through those gifts and to worship. This is our form of worship that we offer our lives today. And the Lord wants to use us. He wants us to write words that outlive us. And we're in some interesting days, and I'm probably going to be talking more about that even in future videos. But we are living in what I believe are the last days. I believe with all my heart that there should be an urgency in each one of us to share in our writings, gospel messages that the Lord allows us to tuck in there.

To write beautiful words about who this Jesus is and what he's done for us, and to point people towards salvation in Christ. We have that grand opportunity to help lead people to their Creator and allow them to enter into a right relationship again, to have their sins forgiven, to know that when they take that last breath, they're with the Lord. And so I want to encourage you there. This is our form of worship. This is the way that we as people in the Kingdom of God have been commissioned, just like Hurom was commissioned, to display his art and his craftsmanship. You and I are called to display our writings for a watching world that's hungry and looking for words of life. And so, Shelley, I don't know if you want to at least pray for us and. And then we'll just move on to the next section here.

Yeah. So I often say door or books are door openers. You know, like these, these pillars were the entrance, the welcoming. But our books can be door openers for people. And it was the way that our housekeeper came to salvation in Christ was just giving her a couple of our books and it started a conversation. And so your books, God has purposes for them beyond what you can see. And he sees all the painstakingly details that are going into your writing, your editing, your researching all of this stuff, steps of publishing and marketing. And so he sees you. He sees you. Kingdom writers don't give up and keep going. The enemy wants to shut you down, but God is cheering you on and we are too. So Lord, we just thank you today that you are the author of life, that we are the priestly pens in your hands and that we can be your messengers and our books can be conduits of your message. And so we just pray. I pray for each person listening right now. I pray for courage to rise up. I pray for your spirit to just flow into them, Lord. I just pray that they would continue the work that you've called them to do, that their messages would impact many lives. And Lord, that we would be careful to give you all of the glory, all of the honor and all of the praise for what you do through our books. And we just pray this in Jesus powerful name. Amen.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Kingdom Writers. We believe that you as a Christian writer have a specific role to play in the kingdom of heaven to impact lives for eternity.

And because of this, we choose to pour out our lives into encouraging writers like you to not only tell your stories, but to take the courageous step of self publishing your stories in books that will outlive you and leave behind a powerful legacy. This podcast is sponsored by Christian Book Academy where we help you give birth to your books. We invite you to join our community of Kingdom writers.