The Thriving Christian Artist

Creating with God: Being Led by the Spirit

Matt Tommey: Artist, Best-Selling Author, Speaker, Entrepreneur and Artist Mentor

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What if the key to unlocking your creative potential lies not in seeking inspiration, but in recognizing God's presence that's already living within you? Join me, Matt Tommey, as I share my transformation journey from complicating the artistic process to experiencing pure joy and freedom by walking in harmony with God. We'll explore the significance of tuning into His voice, shedding the paralyzing fear of mistakes, and embracing a perceptive mindset that transforms creation into a life-giving endeavor. Together, we'll uncover the diverse ways God communicates, guiding us through the sparks of creativity that reveal His glory and deepen our connection to the Creator.

Let's awaken to the realization that the Holy Spirit resides within us, profoundly influencing our creative endeavors. I’ll share insights on how embracing our passions and unique design aligns with divine inspiration, offering a richer spiritual connection to our work and those who experience it. It's not a call for the Holy Spirit's presence but an invitation to awaken to the reality that He is already guiding us. Through stillness and the pursuit of creative sparks, we can trust that our creative paths are infused with purpose and inspiration, impacting both our lives and those who encounter our art.

Join us inside the Created to Thrive Artist Mentoring Program at http://www.matttommeymentoring.com/artmentor

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Thriving Christian Artist, the podcast, where we hope you connect with God to bust through the roadblocks that have held you back for years, create the work you love and really live the life you know. God created you to live as an artist in His kingdom. I'm Matt Tommey, your host. Let's get started. Well, hey there, my friend, it's Matt Tommy. Welcome again to the podcast. Super glad that you are here. Wherever you may be listening from in the car or maybe even in the studio. Today, I love to do that when I'm listening to podcasts, but wherever you're at, I hope you're having a great day. I want to dive into and maybe this is the first of several episodes. I'm thinking about this whole topic of creating with God. Thinking about this whole topic of creating with God because one of the things I've figured out in my own life and in mentoring artists for so many years is that we are really good at complicating things. Any professional overthinkers out there I see you, I see you, I see those hands. Yeah, I get it. We can really take something that is supposed to be easy and life-giving and really in the flow and make it something that's complicated and make it something that is religious, when I don't think God ever intended for that to be that way. You know, when I take a look back in Genesis and you see God's original intention for walking with humanity in the cool of the day in the Garden of Eden, that for me evokes images of creativity, because that's how a lot of my pieces start is walking in the woods, at least in the, harvesting the materials, ideas and gathering the things that I'm going to put into my work. But I can just imagine learning to walk in the woods with the Lord and hearing his voice, seeing him chuckle, seeing what catches his eye and learning to respond to that. That, to me, is just a beautiful, beautiful way of learning to create with him and learning to walk with him in a place of ease rather than in a place of real pressure. You know I talked about in my book God's Plan for Living.

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When we're learning to hear God's voice, we can often lean to thoughts of penalty rather than perception. In other words, we can often approach hearing God's voice with thoughts of I'm going to get it wrong. What happens if I do it wrong? What happens if I don't do what God said to do? What happens if I don't do the thing that God told me to do creatively. All this fear of penalty and getting it wrong.

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I don't think that in any way represents the heart of the Lord, especially when it comes to our creative journey. Lord, especially when it comes to our creative journey, he is much more, I believe, convinced that we are in the process with him and walking along this journey with him and sharing our thoughts and our heart and learning to hear his voice and learning to feel and sense the movement of his spirit and develop our perceptions, not only spiritually but also creatively as well, so that we learn to do this beautiful thing that he's given us the opportunity to do as artists, which is to release his light and life, his transformative power, both in our life and through our life, both in our work and through our work. So so, the people who come in contact with us every day, whether it be just with us as an artist going to Walmart or going to the art store or somebody that actually touches our work and feels our work and encounters the thing that we do creatively, the whole point of our life and the expression of our life here on earth, is not for us to try to be measuring up to some sort of religious standard, but for us to be this beautiful conduit of the glory of God so that when people encounter us, whether it's through our art or not, they know that they've been with Jesus. I love that scripture. I forget the chapter and verse right now that talks about you know the disciples that you know we're walking along and people said, hey, you know, these were uneducated guys, right, but they knew that they. You could tell by by just being around them that they had been with Jesus.

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I want people, when they see my work, when they come into my studio and they meet me at a show and they put a piece of my work in their home, I want them to know, hey, that guy may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer. I'm not looking for for people to think I've got all these degrees or whatever, that I'm all this fancy person. I want them to know, wow, this guy knows God. This guy senses something deeper. This guy creates with a different place of inspiration. This guy is connected in a deeper way, not only to his creativity but to his creator, in a way that releases transformation in and through his work. I think we all want that and that, for me, is the reason why I'm an artist, and so I want to give you a few things today that I think have helped me over the years of just learning to take this process of creating with God with ease rather than taking it with pressure.

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You know, the first thing I want to just kind of jump into is this whole idea of what it means to hear God in your creative process. I think for a lot of people. You know we all hear God in different ways. God speaks, obviously, in a huge amount of ways. His audible voice is still speaking today. He speaks through situations. He speaks through people. He obviously speaks through the voice of the Holy Spirit internally to us. He obviously speaks through his word. He speaks through the prophetic. He speaks through things that we realize, maybe things that we see over and over and over again. I believe he speaks to the things that prick our heart when you're looking at something and you just notice it over and over and over again. Listen, if you're walking with the Lord, you love him, your life is committed to him. You got to pay attention to the things that are waking you up creatively. Why? Because that's how God leads you, I think, so many times Christian artists separate their creative process from their normal life and normal hearing God, because they're expecting this whole like the, the studio you know to open up and angels to come down and there'd be a golden scroll of here is what you are to create today and we.

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You may laugh at that and say, well, that's not what I do, but. But maybe you are thinking that everything that you feel like God would say to you is going to come in some overt sort of way, and rarely has that ever happened for me in my creative process. Most of the time it's leaning in, listen to that unique design that God has given me, that unique voice, that unique lens of love, that unique lens that I see the world through, that I interpret my creativity through. He speaks and wakes me up and enlivens me as I am doing the thing that I'm created to do. And over time I think, as you get used to saying, wow, this is not just me, this is how God made me, not just me, this is how God made me. And when I lean into the things that I love, you know, for me that's weaving and baskets and nests and pods and nature and colors and all the different textures of the natural world. When I do that and I partner with the unique design and the unique perspective that God has given me, all of a sudden there's a whoosh of the Spirit, not only in my creative practice but also in the way that people see and interact with my work.

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The intention of our work, the inspiration of our work, can be felt. You know that. You've walked into places before galleries or museums or movies or concerts or whatever and even though the music may be really great technically, you can tell there is something icky in here, there's just something weird going on. You can feel that. Likewise, you can also tell when you read a book or when you listen to music or when you see a piece of visual art or you go to a play or whatever. You can sense the life-giving, redemptive nature of God moving in and through things. And I think for us as creatives, there's no better way for us to do that than to lean and lean into the uniqueness of the things that we love in order to get better at translating those through our creative process. So you learn to recognize God's guidance and ideas and themes and the way you approach challenges and the way you approach subjects Not that you're just going for uniqueness, but obviously that develops uniqueness but you're trusting this place of connection.

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You're trusting this place that the things that I love, the things that I'm drawn to, the things that I love to make and create and communicate, those are not just me, they're the way that God has created me. They're the unique package, if you will, that God put on board me and in me when he created me. They're the unique package, if you will, that God put on board me and in me when he created me. And the more I do that, the more that the presence of God is going to be communicated to me and through me. Now, as you're doing that sort of as a normal, you know, kind of part of your life, I think you can also which I do on a regular basis you can also have those overt ways of inviting the Holy Spirit to be with you in this creative process. Now, a little theology, just from my perspective. I'm not a big person, that you know. I don't practice this idea of you know.

Speaker 1:

Holy Spirit, come, holy Spirit, be in this place overtly, because why? I believe that the Holy Spirit is resident inside of me. Right, the Bible teaches that the kingdom is within us. Right when Jesus went back to heaven to be with the Father, sit at the right hand of the Father, he gave the Holy Spirit. We are now the temple of the Holy Spirit, and so it's not necessarily a matter of saying, come, holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit. We are now the temple of the Holy Spirit, and so it's not necessarily a matter of saying, come, holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit's already here. What I want to do is ask the Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit, awaken inside of me. Holy Spirit, awaken my senses, my eyes and my ears, my hands, my heart, everything, my perception, everything about me. Holy Spirit, would you so enliven me that I can sense your presence, sense your leadership and flow with you.

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Today, as I'm creating, as I'm doing, whatever it is, whether I'm doing my bookkeeping as an artist, or whether I'm applying for a show, or whether I'm sketching in my sketchbook or creating a new piece, I want to hear the voice of the Lord, I want to be moved and led by him and just realize you don't have to beg God to show up in the studio. If you love Jesus, if you're saved, if you're walking with him. He's living on the inside of you right now. So the issue is not to beg him to come. The issue is for you to wake up to what's already living inside of you right now. So the issue is not to beg him to come. The issue is for you to wake up to what's already living inside of you, which is the God of the universe and the power of his kingdom. All of that is resident and active and ready for you to cooperate with in your creative process.

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And so part of that for me is taking time on a regular basis to be still and to allow God to inspire my thoughts, to take off on a little tangent if I need to, if I get a spark of an idea and sketch it down, to write in my journal, to take that time to flip through a book or to look on Pinterest for something that is inspiring to me or dig a little bit deeper into an idea. Why? Because I'm trusting that those little jaunts, those little trails, if you will, are not just ADD, as some people would say. Obviously, you can't be doing that all day long, but I learned to trust that when I'm in a moment and I'm feeling inspired or I'm feeling led to explore something, I take time to do it. Why? Because I trust that the steps of the righteous are ordered by the Lord, that the Holy Spirit is the one that's inside of me, moving me and cooperating with the unique design of me so that all of him can flow through all of me.

Speaker 1:

And so inviting you know the Holy Spirit to be awakened and enlivened in you and to invite him to to to move through all of your senses. That's a great thing to do every day and I think you know, for those of you that say, gosh, matt, this is like way off of my radar. You know, as far as um you radar, as far as my experience with walking with the Lord Maybe you come from a denomination or a part of the body of Christ that really doesn't talk about hearing God's voice, doesn't really talk about the intuitive nature of walking with him, about the intuitive nature of walking with him. I hope this is encouraging for you and I hope that this is not overcomplicated for you. But it's just like, as you're reading God's Word and you sense the Holy Spirit speaking to you.

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God wants to do the same thing as you're creating art. He wants to do the same thing as you're sketching out ideas. He wants to do the same thing as you're planning out your year and and looking at your business and what are the things you're going to, you're going to do this year. And you know, pursue this year as you, as you grow your business. That's a normal part of walking in the kingdom is being led by his voice, being nudged by his spirit and learning to respond. That's how the kingdom of God works, and so I just want you to understand.

Speaker 1:

If this is not something that's normal for you, try it, just start the day with Lord. I know you're here, I know you love me, I know you've created me as an artist. I know you're inside of me and you want to move in and through me. Artist, I know you're inside of me and you want to move in and through me, not only so I get transformed in your presence, but so the work of my hands will be transformative as well. My friends, I think if you can begin to come to your creative process and your creative practice with these sorts of intentions in your heart, you will not only take your art making to the next level, you will deepen that place of creating with the Lord in such a powerful, powerful way that's not only going to transform you, it's going to transform everybody that comes in to contact with your work as well.

Speaker 1:

Now, obviously, this is a big, big subject. I'm going to leave it there for today and maybe pick this up in some additional episodes as we continue to walk together here on the podcast. But whatever you're doing today, ask the Holy Spirit to be awakened inside of you and learn to involve him with intention in this creative process. It will not only transform your work, it'll transform your life as well, and everything you do is you walk with the Lord. Father, I pray right now that, as artists are in the studio doing the thing that you've called them to do, holy Spirit, I pray that you would awaken inside of them and enliven all of their senses right now, god afresh, that the eyes of their heart would be able to see, the ears of their heart would be able to hear God, all their senses would be enlivened with your presence so that they know. They know that they know that you are with them, that you are in them, that you are through them, that you are for them, that you desire to create with them in the studio. We thank you for that, lord, in Jesus name, amen.

Speaker 1:

My friend, I love you. I'm so honored that you're here with me every week on the podcast. Be sure to give us a a like, a comment, share this podcast on social media, if you will, with your friends and let others know that this is a blessing to you. Until next time, my friend, remember you were created to thrive. Bye, hey. Thanks so much for spending a few minutes with me today on the podcast. Listen, I hope it's been a huge encouragement to you on your journey as an artist. Hey, also, before you leave, make sure to hit the subscribe button so you don't miss any of the other episodes of the Thriving Christian Artist podcast, and also be sure to connect with me on Facebook, instagram or at my website, which is matttommymentoringcom. Until next time, remember you were created to thrive. Bye-bye, thank you.