Creative Crosshairs

A few weeks ago I was able to go to the Catalyst West Coast Leadership Conference. This is a conference in which church leaders from all over the nation come and hear messages about leadership from some of the best speakers in the nation. It's such a great thing to be a part of and it feels like your are drinking from a firehose of information because all of these men and women are way smarter than you and they blast you with a lot of things. Its great but I am always mentally exhausted afterward.

What does this have to do with being creative? Well, one of the speakers, Matt Chandler, said something that truly stood out to me.

“Satan targets the creative people because he knows the influence they have on others.”

The crosshairs are aimed directly at us.

How true this is. Being creative means you have the power to influence people with your creations. Whether it be a video, a painting, a set piece, a poem, a song, a story or anything else you can create. Your words or image can touch many people at one time all in different ways.

I think of the popular Christian worship band Hillsong United. They are undoubtedly talented songwriters and musicians who play all around the world and lead people into worship. They played here in LA a few weeks ago and sold out the Staples Center…over 45,000 people worshipping God through their creative music and lyrics.

I truly believe Satan sees that and cringes. 1 Peter 5:8 says, “Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”

I believe that it is the creative people that Satan will target more because he knows the influence they have on others around them. He will try to attack by causing writers block, creative dry spells, technical problems for bands and videos and much more: anything to have the focus not on God.

Satan is sly and sneaky and will help you be creative but in ways that can detour ones vision away from who God is, and he loves nothing more than that. He wont have you paint a picture of himself, but without taking caution his goal would be to have something you do or say or write be just theologically off base enough in order to cause others to stumble. He can have you worship the creation rather than the Creator. He can have you take the glory to glorify yourself and not God. That's his goal.

God gave creative people the ability to be creative because he knows that they can use that ability to reach many others in a way that glorifies Him, but Satan is there looking to skew that, even a little bit. So we need to be aware.

Let us pray that we keep our integrity, His wisdom, His Word in our mind as we create and effectively communicate to people through our creations because we know we have a bigger target on out back because the creativeness God has given us.

Let us not take this responsibility lightly. Let us glorify God because He is the Creator or creators.