The Thriving Christian Artist

What Feels Like Delay May Be Divine Direction

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

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What if you’re not behind at all—but right on time for what you were made to carry? We take a hard look at slow seasons and flip the script: delay isn’t punishment, it’s purposeful formation. Through real stories, scripture, and practical reflection, we explore four hidden purposes behind God’s timing that build resilient, joy-filled creative lives.

First, we talk about capacity. Strength comes before spotlight, and endurance widens the heart to hold influence, relationships, and resources without cracking under pressure. James 1 becomes a lens for growth that happens on the inside long before it shows on the outside. Then we sit with protection. Not every open door is meant for you. Some “no’s” are shields in disguise, sparing you from opportunities that look right but would fracture your focus or outpace your maturity.

Next, we dive into alignment. When work becomes worship, striving gives way to flow. We share the moment everything shifted—repenting of copycat strategies and returning to the specific path God outlined. Colossians 3:23 reframes creative practice as an offering, and momentum follows clarity. Finally, we step back to see the larger weave. Romans 8:28 and Ephesians 2:10 ground the conviction that your story is threaded into something bigger and better than personal success. You’re invited to cooperate, not perform; to notice what the Father is doing and join Him step by step.

If you’ve been watching the clock, ready to quit, this conversation offers a gentler measure of progress: peace, presence, and faithful practice. You’ll leave with reflection prompts to spot development in past “delays,” language to discern real God-doors, and a renewed desire to create with God, not just for applause. If this spoke to you, subscribe, share it with a friend who needs the reframing, and leave a review with the one insight you’re taking into your studio this week.

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SPEAKER_00:

What if you're not behind in your creative journey? In other words, what feels like God's delays? What if those are actually a gift from God and actually a shortcut to his very best plan for your life? Well, you know, I've seen that play out in my own creative journey and in the lives of hundreds of artists that I've mentored over the years. But when you really start to understand what God is doing in the waiting, everything changes. Listen, today I'm going to show you four hidden purposes behind God's delays. And by the end, you're going to be thanking the Lord for these slow seasons in your life. Well, hey, friend, I'm Matt Tommy. Super glad that you're here. Listen, I want you to get this really down deep today. What feels like God maybe trying to stall you is not what's happening right now. When God is delaying your journey and when it seems like it's taken a little bit longer, it's actually because God is strengthening you on the inside. See, God's heart behind the timing of our journey that we don't always understand is not about stalling you and making you wait just for the sake of waiting. It's actually about walking you through a process that is enlarging your capacity to be able to hold more influence and more opportunity, more resources, more relationships. He's forming inside of you the character that it takes to be able to walk in the incredible promises and abundant life that He has already planned for you before you were ever born. Now, you know, I love to jump into scripture and in James 1, 2 through 4 in the New Living, I love the way it says this. It says, Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles of any kind come your way, right? Anybody relate troubles of any kind, delays, things take longer. When they come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow. I love that, right? So just let it grow. For when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and need nothing. You'll be you'll be complete. Listen, I love that. Again, when things are taking a little bit longer, when we don't understand it, our endurance is being fully developed. Our inner capacity to be able to hold and experience and walk in everything that God has for us is being expanded and is being fully realized inside of us. See, this is a huge kingdom principle. Everything that happens externally starts internally in the kingdom. And so these seasons of delay are not wasted times. See, God's not always just about taking you and me to the next level and getting us to the next accomplishment or the next prize or the next victory, the next destination. His purpose for us in our life is yes, that we'd walk in abundant life, we'd thrive in everything that God has for us, but his purpose is not that we get to the destination, is that we can stay in the places that he takes us. And that is a whole different conversation and why some things take a little bit longer than we'd like. Paul even reinforces this in Galatians 6 9. And again, I love it. It says, Let us not become weary in doing good. For the proper time we will reap a harvest if what? If we don't give up. Now, what is that proper time? Well, I don't know about you, but I'm always looking at my watch. I'm like, the time is now, right? I'm ready to step into it. I'm ready to walk in everything that God's got for me. I've got a dream, I've got a passion, I want to walk in that. But God's like, no, no, no. Listen, Matt, I love you. I've created good things for you, but I love you too much to allow you to step into those things in a timing that's too early. Why? Because the enemy is always looking around for opportunities to destroy us and distract us and deny us. But God is looking for opportunities to dig deep inside of us and prepare our internal nature, our internal person to be able to walk in and stay in and flourish in every good thing that God has for us. Listen, these seasons of waiting, the first thing I want you to get today is that they're almost like weight training for your soul. All right. Sometimes at first they're like, oh, this is this is this is hard. This doesn't feel good. This is a little bit uncomfortable. But I'm telling you, when you choose to trust God in the middle of these things that are taking a little bit longer than you think, instead of getting frustrated, everything changes. Your perspective begins to change. And what's happening little by little, day after day, is what? You're getting stronger. You're getting stronger, and you're building that spiritual muscle that God needs to be at work and active and healthy inside of you so that again, you can walk in the good plans that He's prepared for you. So I want to encourage you this week, take five minutes and think about, you know, in this season of maybe delay that's taking a little bit longer. What is it that you think God might be developing inside of you? What character trait? What is he trying to teach you? What's he trying to teach you to learn to steward? Uh, and maybe even look back at your life. I know I've done this before. This is super helpful. Look at seasons of your life that you thought, wow, I thought that was a delay. But man, when I look at it and actually examine what God did in that, wow, it was super, super fruitful. Maybe go back and look over the last five or 10 years and see if you can find a pattern in what looked like delay, but it was actually God's development. And here's the cool part. In just a few minutes, I'm going to be sharing with you why some of those things that seem like delays might actually be God protecting you from something that you didn't even see coming. Hey, and by the way, if this is resonating with you today, I want to make sure that you hit the subscribe button so you don't ever miss any of the great content that I'm producing right here on the Thriving Christian Artist, where I'm helping artists just like you gain clarity, confidence, and creative freedom in Christ. So, number two is all about God protecting us from opportunities that may seem like Him, but are not really. Not every open door is God's open door for your next step. And I know that that can be confusing and even a little bit frustrating sometimes because, you know, I love to read scripture like Proverbs 16, 9 that talks about, you know, in his heart, a man plans his way, the Lord orders his step. I've taught for years, you know, and everything that I do that God has a place for us, co-laboring and dreaming with him, stepping out in faith and and walking and believing that he's gonna guide us as we walk. And that is absolutely true. But then you also read a scripture in Proverbs as well, like Proverbs 19, 21, that says, Many are the plans in the in a man's heart, in a person's heart, but it's the Lord's purpose that prevails. And so there's this tension that we walk in in the kingdom. That that's a good tension, right? It's not a stressful or anxious tension, but you just have to realize that not every open door is a God door, and not every setback is actually God trying to, you know, hurt you. And he's never trying to hurt us. He's a good father. He delights to give good gifts to his children. And so sometimes those setbacks are actually his divine protection. I don't know about you, but I can look back at so many things in my life that at the time I was praying for. I want to get in that show, I want to make this sale, I want to have that person buy this commission, I want to get that studio or this next opportunity for my art. And it didn't work out. And man, I banged on the door and I was praying for it, and I was like, I mean, but it didn't work out back in 2009, 2010, when God moved us from Atlanta to Asheville, North Carolina. I really thought in my heart that because God had given me supernaturally an art gallery in Atlanta, that He was going to do the same thing when we got to Asheville. And so I found a building. Man, I was in faith for it. I started believing. I started literally gathering artists to pray in this building. I'd go down and prophesy over that building. Man, I was like, this is my building. I'm receiving it by faith. I mean, I'm I'm just trying to walk in everything that I believe that God had for me according to what he had done in the past and according to what I was feeling in my heart. But after about a year of that, you know what the Lord told me? He said, Matt, I need you to go down by the river to where this, where this uh building was. And he said, I need you to give this building to me. And he said, You build the people and I'll build the building. And he actually had me prophetically take a piece of rock that was a broken part of the foundation and from that building and throw it in the river, just as this sort of sort of release to him. And you know, I was really frustrated with that. I have to say, I was like, God, this is not the plan that I had for my life. I thought that, you know, you did it once, you're gonna do it again. But had we gotten that building, it would have completely overwhelmed me. It would have set back what God was trying to do in my life. It would have been a focus at that time that was not the focus that God had for me. But listen, in my heart of hearts and to the best of my ability, I believed that that building was the next step. But what? God knew better. He was protecting me from something that was not a bad thing necessarily, but it wasn't the best thing that he had for me. You know, you think about Joseph. I mean, all the delays that he had. I mean, he's, you know, betrayed by his brother and he's in the pit and he's going through all of this stuff. But what? He had to walk through those seasons of preparation in order to walk in everything that God had for him and promised for him in the palace. And so I know, my friend, listen, I I've been through it just like you do. When we walk through these seasons, we don't realize many times that these are seasons of refinement, these are seasons of preparation, these are seasons of protection that God is keeping us and not allowing us to walk in the thing that we are fully convinced is the next thing, in order for us to be able to be protected and prepared for the really great thing that God has for us. And I'm just telling you, if we can, if we can really allow our heart to trust the Lord in the middle of these things, it changes everything and it allows you to walk in a level of peace that's striving and banging on the door trying to get it to open, that that will never ever bring you in your life as an artist. All right. So the third way that God uses these seasons that seem like delay is that He's using these to align our heart with His. Now I want to I want to pause for a second and kind of share something a little personal, a little, a little stinging still in my life. I remember years ago when I was starting to build my art business and I was starting to really step out in faith and and go after everything that God had called me to do. I knew that God had told me one way to build my art business, but you know, I I wanted to kind of help God out. I don't know if you've ever felt like that before and just like, well, you know, God, everybody else is doing it like this, and this kind of looks like what it makes sense. And what I felt like God was telling me to do, uh, you know, was not the way that everybody else was doing it. And so, you know, I have to say, my heart was not like, I'm gonna disobey God, but my heart was like, I want to speed this up. I want to get to the end, I want to do the thing that God's called me to do. And so I started building my business. I started doing my art. I started marketing my work and just doing all the stuff like everybody else was doing in a way that made sense to the world, right? I think about that scripture. There's a there's a way that seems right under man, right? That that's kind of how I was I was doing that. And I and I was asking God to bless it in the middle of it. But I remember specifically there's a the show that I went to up in Baltimore, a big American Craft Council show, big show, expensive show. I was expecting to make you know a big amount of money and sell my work and make all these great connections. And honestly, by the end of the weekend, I had I didn't lose money, thank goodness. But it was one of those weekends, like, what is going on? And I had this come to Jesus meeting on the way back, this long drive back. And I was like, God, what is going on? Like you said that you would bless it if I gave it to you and all that, you know, just all of this stuff. And I remember the still small voice of the Lord being like, uh, you want to talk about this? I'm like, uh, okay. And I remember him so gently drawing me back to what he'd originally told me several years before about how he wanted me to grow my business. And man, as he began to do that, it it just you know, it was like a knife to my heart in a good way. It was like, oh, yes, Lord, I'm I'm sorry. And it was an opportunity to repent, right? Because repent means change your mind, right? That's what the word means. Change your mind, go in a different direction. And the Lord gave me this opportunity to change my mind, come out of agreement with the way that I've been doing it, and into alignment with his heart for my art and for my business. And listen, when I did that, that was a marker moment. Everything changed. My sales changed, opportunities changed, my art began to change. Why? Did God get in a good mood? No, I just came into alignment with the good plans and purposes that he had for me all along. It makes me think of that verse. I love it in Colossians 3.23 in the New Living. It says this work willingly at whatever you do as though you are working for the Lord rather than people. In other words, instead of trying to impress everybody, instead of trying to do it the way the world says it makes sense, instead of doing the things that make sense to your own mind or doing things for the accolades, offer your work, your art, whether you're doing it as a business or a hobby or as a ministry or whatever, offer that to the Lord. Because here's the deal when your work creatively, artistically, when it becomes uh worship instead of striving, in other words, when you're starting to create with God instead of for applause and for success and for all the things that the world tells us that we need, that's when the peace of God begins to rule in your heart. That's when you can begin to align with all the good things that He has for you. And that's when you get in this divine flow that you can't and I can't manufacture on our own. You can never manufacture the flow and momentum of the Holy Spirit by just trying to do it by yourself. It's only when you and I come into alignment with God's plans and purposes for our life. And sometimes, just face it, I have to face it too. Sometimes the way God does things just does not make sense to the natural mind. So I just want to encourage you, my friend, if you're in one of those seasons right now that doesn't make sense to the natural mind and you're, you know, kind of wailing around and wallowing around and just like, I need this to make sense. Listen, this is a great opportunity for you just to get with the Lord and say, Lord, even though this situation, this season of my life does not make sense, even though, Lord, I would love for this to be a lot faster and a lot smoother and a lot more linear than it is right now, Lord, I trust you that you are working all things together for my good because you love me and you've called me according to your purposes. And Lord, teach me by your Holy Spirit and by your word how to begin to align my heart with yours so that I can walk in every good thing that you have for me. Okay, so the last thing I want you to remember is this God is using these seasons of delay and these seasons that take a little bit longer as a way to weave your story into his story. I don't know about you, but it is really very encouraging to me to be able to sit back sometimes in prayer in my studio, just put some music on and be like, Jesus, thank you that my story is not just about me. Thank you that I don't have to make it all happen. Lord, thank you that my success is not up to me, that the getting my artwork is is is not out there is not up to me. Lord, this is your story, and you've called me to be a part of it. You know, I love I'm a basket maker, I've I've been a weaver for a lot of years, and the Lord showed me many years ago that my uh my artistic calling and and what I do artistically is really a prophetic picture of what I do in ministry as well, and and taking disparate parts and things that don't seem like they make sense and weaving them into beautiful uh displays of God's glory. And I think about my life and I think about your life, and I think about, you know, the first way that God said he wanted to reveal himself to humanity in Genesis 1 was as a creator, right? In the beginning, God created. And I just I love to think of God as this master weaver who's taking my story and your story and every one of his sons and daughters' stories and weaving them together in ways that we don't yet fully understand how it's all going to come out. And part of us learning to cooperate with him in in our life and and through our art is realizing that even when things don't make sense, even when they're taking a little bit more time, we know, and what is it, Romans 8.28, right? It says this, and we know that all things, in all things, God works for the good of those who love him who have been called according to his purpose. So whether we understand it or whether we don't, whether things are taking too long, we think, or whether they're accelerated, whether we're having moments of breakthrough, or whether we're having moments that seem like we're just hidden on the back end uh of the pasture like David was for a lot of years, you know, we know that God is using all of those seasons for our good and for his glory. We can also look in Ephesians 2.10. It says, For we are God's masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus. Why? So we can do the good works that he planned for us long ago. In other words, this is God's idea. This is God's story. He's got great things planned for us. We don't have to have the pressure of trying to do this and figure this out and make this happen on our own. We just get to get up every day and just do what Jesus said. He said, I just do the things that I see the Father doing. And friend, I if I can, if I can just get that into you today, that God's desire for you is not to perform, not to make it happen, not to try to make your own story and create your own fame and and fortune and influence and impact and all the stuff for him. He just wants you to live and create and co-labor with him in the kingdom. And as we do that, he's weaving us into this incredible story of his kingdom that will affect not only us, but also everybody in the world for generations to come. That's the power of learning to co-labor with him in our creative calling. So, hey, let me pull all this together for you, real quick. What if, what if in six months' time you could look back and you could realize that this exact season that you're in that doesn't really make a lot of sense, it actually wasn't delay. It was actually God's design. What if you realized that you weren't behind, but you were right on time for the bigger thing, the more important thing, the more aligned thing that God had for you? And what if you, what if you could really get in your heart that what felt like delay was not rejection, but it was actually God's divine direction in your life. Listen, when you can start to get that, that God is using these seasons to enlarge your capacity, to protect you from things that are not for you in this time, to align you with his heart for your life and for your art and to weave your story into his larger kingdom story. My friend, you can use these seasons that seem like delay as really divine appointments for you to lean into the Lord and say, Lord, I trust you in this time that you're working all things together for my good. Listen, friend, I want to pray for you right now because I don't know about you, but I need to know that I'm with other people on this journey. I'm so glad that God has brought you here today. Father, I thank you right now that my friend is watching this video. Lord, we know it's not by chance. We know it's by divine appointment. However, they got here, Lord, they're here, they're hearing your voice through the Holy Spirit speak today through my words. And God, I'm asking that you would so resonate a peace within them and contentment for the season that they're in, knowing that you're working all things together for their good because you love us and because you've called us according to your purposes and your kingdom as artists for such a time as this. We thank you for that, Lord, in Jesus' name. Amen. Hey, friend, listen, from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for being with me today. Make sure that you've hit the subscribe button. Also, if you're wanting to grow deeper in your journey as a Christian artist, be sure to check out all the incredible resources that we've got for you here, right here in the description. There's our foundations course that God's using in artists all over the world to help them lay a solid foundation in Christ and really gain clarity in what God's called them to do as an artist in the kingdom. We've got our Thriving Christian Artist newsletter, tons of of my best-selling books for artists, and lots of other great resources that you can take advantage of. So make sure that you check that out before you leave. Listen, I love you, friend. I'm here every week creating great content for Christian artists to help you gain clarity and confidence and creative freedom in Christ. Really honored that you're here. Look forward to seeing you around. And remember, till next time, you were created to thrive. Bye. Hey, my friend, before you go, make sure that you're signed up for the Thriving Christian Artist Weekly. It's my free newsletter full of spiritual encouragement, creative inspiration, and practical tips to help you thrive in everything that God's called you to do as an artist in his kingdom. Every issue is absolutely free, and it includes the latest podcast episode, featured artist spotlights, a worship song of the week, and again, tons of tips and encouragement and inspiration for you to keep you inspired and encouraged in everything that God's got for you as an artist in the kingdom. You can click the link right here in the show notes to join us, and it's a great way to stay connected. All right, love you. Bye.