We must win rulers; political, economic, scientific, artistic personalities. They are the engineers of souls. They mold the souls of men. Winning them, you win the people they lead and influence.
Creativity
Frederick Brotherton ( F. B. ) Meyer
Holiness is the beauty of the Lord God of hosts. Thou canst not separate the one from the other. To have it, thou must have Him. Nor will it be hard to obtain either; for He longs to enter into thy being. Thy longing is the faint response of thy heart to His call.
Madeleine L’Engle
The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver. In a very real sense the artist (male or female) should be like Mary who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command.
…I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, “Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me.” And the artist either says, “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary.
As for Mary, she was little more than a child when the angel came to her; she had not lost her child’s creative acceptance of the realities moving on the other side of the everyday world. We lose our ability to see angels as we grow older, and that is a tragic loss.
Katherine Walden
The number one way to block your creativity. Dabble your paintbrush in another’s palette. Stop comparing your gift to another person’s gift.
Max Lucado
God must’ve had a blast. Painting the stripes on the zebra, hanging the stars in the sky, putting the gold in the sunset. What creativity! Stretching the neck of the giraffe, putting the flutter in the mockingbird’s wings, planting the giggle in the hyena. And then, as a finale to a brilliant performance, He made a human who had the unique honour to bear the stamp, In His Image.
Clark H Pinnock
Why is there a creation at all? God does not need it, yet paradoxically it exists. Perhaps we can answer this question with another: Why do paintings and symphonies exist? We do not need them either—not the way we need food and drink. Such things exist because of a creative impulse. Works of art flow freely and overflow out of a rich inner life. They arise from celebration and sheer delight in existence. In a similar way, the creation exists as a work of art in which God takes pleasure and through which he gives pleasure. God is like the artist who loves to create and who delights in what is made. Creatures in turn share God’s delight when they are struck by the giftedness of their own existence.
Evelyn Underhill
The Christian is the person who sees every time and every situation, however dreary and repetitive, as God sees it – a fresh creation from his hand, demanding its own response in perhaps a wholly new and creative way. Under God he is free over it. He has won through to a purchase over events; he has risen with Christ.
Teresa of Lisieux
If all flowers wanted to be roses, nature would lose her springtime beauty and the fields would no longer be decked out with little wildflowers.
Pete Greig
God loves beauty and creativity. He has made for us a world that is visually spectacular. When we read in Genesis that we are made in God’s image, the only thing we know about him is that he is an artist, a Creator! Similarly, the first man in the Bible to be described as being filled with the Holy Spirit is not some great king or prophet. It is a craftsman called Bezalel, anointed by God to decorate the prayer room—the tabernacle (Exod. 35:30–33).