I want to talk a little bit about the name of this site, and
what it means to me. So, what is that weird word? Poiema. It’s a Greek word. A
long time ago I watched a movie called My
Big Fat Greek Wedding and I was informed that pretty much every word, ever
comes from a Greek root. I’m not so sure that’s the truth, but in this case it
happens to be true. This Greek word is used two times in the Bible and one of
those times happens to be in the book of Ephesians:
Ephesians 2:10 – For we are His
workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared
beforehand that we should walk in them.
Poiema is translated into English as the word “workmanship”.
The definition of poiema is as
follows: "The word signifies that which is manufactured, a product, a design
produced by an artisan". You can look at the word poiema and see inside of it
the origins of the word 'Poem'. So, quite literally, we are a poem created by
God. We are each a work of art.
There are a few ways of looking at this and all of them are
awe inspiring, and potentially life changing (which really shouldn't be that big of a surprise since, you know, the Bible...). But the biggest thing we need to
realize is that we are more than just hastily thrown together bags of blood and
guts. Looking deeply into this travels deep into the realm of intelligent
design, but let’s, for now, just allow this to mean that we are skillfully put
together with the attention to detail of your favorite poem or short story, or
sculpture or painting, or song or movie. Even if you, like me, oftentimes feel
like a Pollock painting, if you’ve never looked into the studies on the
intricacies of Pollock’s paintings then you would be amazed at the minute
detail in what looks to be a mess of splattered paint. Just a simple
understanding of this brings great value to yourself, and your life. Later on
we can go into more depth on this. Probably much later on, as in, a different
post.
We’ve briefly looked at the first part of this verse (“For we are His workmanship,”) so why don’t
we move onto the second part:
created in Christ Jesus for good works
I guess the first thing I should point out is that the word “works”
(you know, the last word, the one coming after “good”) is a totally different
word than workmanship word (poiema). For the record, this root word is “ergon”,
which is much like “ergo”, which reminds me of that second Matrix movie. But that’s not really relevant, so – um – nevermind… While
we are God’s workmanship (creation), upon our rebirth (born again) we were
created in Jesus so that we could perform good works (acts). This, for some
reason, is a little controversial. You get into that whole works/grace
argument. There is, amazingly, a lot of contention in the Christian community
over whether we should be doing good works. Some say that there is no need to do good works because Jesus’s
sacrifice on the cross, and our acceptance of Him as Lord and Savior, is all
that’s needed and that nothing more need be done to earn our salvation. Then
there’s the other side of the argument which says that we have been saved by
grace trough faith and that we don’t need
to do anything else to earn our salvation, but we should still be doing the
good works precisely because we’ve
given our lives to Christ. I will acknowledge that I land in the second camp so
my representation may be a little biased. But, to me, it’s not about needing to perform good works, it’s
about wanting to because if you have
truly given your life to Christ then the want to do these works will naturally
flow out of you. And this is just a personal feeling but, if you profess to be
a Christian, and you don’t feel the pull of the law of God on your heart to do
good works, you may want to do some internal searching and make sure that you’ve
have actually accepted Jesus not just
your savior, but also your lord.
What’s next? Oh yeah, the part of the verse where we’re told
that God has set aside good works in advance for us to do and if we don’t do
them then we’re not walking in the path God has set out for us…
which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
It should probably be noted that the “saved by grace through
faith” reference comes from directly before the verse in question in this post.
Ephesians 2:8-9 says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that
not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should
boast.” But then this is directly followed by “For we are His workmanship, created
in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should
walk in them.” It seems obvious to me (though I admit that this could still be
open to other interpretations, I guess…), that we should read the “grace
through faith” passage as a whole, and that it should be seen it’s complete
context to be saying that we have to do nothing more because Jesus has already
done all the work to create us anew, and that He created us to do good works.
And if you truly love Jesus, you will get out there and do those good works.
And that’s it. That’s where the title of this page comes
from. We are God’s workmanship, and we’re supposed to be doing good things for
God, so what work are you doing? We are the poiema so what poem are you living?
Is it a poem that glorifies God? I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not
always easy. I struggle every day with living that set-apart life. But I give
it my best, at least 80% of the time. And every day I strive to make that
percentage go up.
So who’s gonna join me? Who will be a part of the poiema? Who is going to be a work of
art?
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