We have become his poetry… Eph 2:10 (TPT)

His Poetry – The Storyteller Series – Part 3

Go to PART 1  |  PART 2  |  PART 3  |  PART 4  |  PART 5  |  PART 6  |  PART 7

Within the Divine story that Christ is retelling throughout the universe, a story of connection, unity, and redemption – “gathering all things, everything, and everyone, under Christ” – we are his poetry.

In most of our modern translations, this verse reads “we are his workmanship.” But when translated from the original text, many scholars and theologians agree that the words ‘poem and poetry’ hit what Paul was trying to communicate to the Ephesians more closely…

At the time Paul wrote this letter, some of the most respected people in society were poets. They were educated, philosophers, shapers of culture, carriers of history. I studied Classical Societies and Cultures in High School (Hi Mr. Pirie!), and I loved learning about the poets of this era and how they've influenced our modern world. You would have heard of some of them too. Virgil wrote his ‘Aenead’ around the time Jesus was learning to walk. As did Ovid. He completed his work “Metamorphoses” around 8 A.D. The great poets Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Euripides and more were the countries heroes and forefathers. It is believed that in Greek and Roman culture, the singing of hymn-like songs had been a cultural tradition for around 800 years before Christ. Poetic verse sung in gathered community. Poetry was how history was remembered. The ancients across many cultures set their legacies to poetry… lines that had rhythm, and could be memorized and passed down the ages. Genesis begins with one such poem, the story of creation told in beautiful imagery and wondrous language so that we would remember not just the event, but the nature of the God who began it all.

For Paul to say that we are God’s poetry, was (is) to say that we are how he expresses his intrinsic nature to the world. We are the overflow of his creativity.

Fast forward to today and poetry permeates our lives more than we know. In music, speeches, stories, liturgies… it’s there in the muck and middle of life, expressing what cannot be expressed, giving form to the unimaginable and wings to the heavy and the broken.

“Poetry is thoughts that breathe and words that burn.” – Thomas Gray.

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” – TS Eliot

“A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.” – Salman Rushdie

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” – Rita Dove

“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.” – Mary Oliver.

We are HIS poetry. We are the expression of his life, the rhythm, and rhyme of his grace; we are his words manifest, taking bodily form, rising out of the dust to display his divinity and love. He writes his story into the world, each of us a word, a phrase, a portrait, a brush stroke…

We are his history and legacy, a picture painted in blood and bone and breath, the retelling of Christ himself and his power at work within us. Connected to what we can’t explain, expressing what we cannot comprehend and outworking a mystery we have not the capacity for.

Let God's poetic grace work into the marrow of your being… the parts you can’t communicate, the things you dare not utter. And as this collision of humanity and divinity takes place in your heart, you become the poem.

Allow yourself to be written into the world.

“We have become his poetry, a re-created people that will fulfill the destiny he has given each of us, for we are joined to Jesus, the Anointed One.”

How do you see the poetic nature of life itself? Leave us a comment below.

Go to Part 4 – Warrior and Worshipper »

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