Actually what he was talking about when he wrote to the Ephesians was something like this. When a man or a woman commits themselves to what we call biblical faith, the faith which was passed on to us by Jesus himself, they become new creations. Literally, the word Paul used could be said to be an artistic masterpiece. Now that gets my attention because I am one who decided many years ago to become a Christ follower, and to be called an artistic masterpiece leaves me a little bit amazed. My wife and my children will tell you and a few of my friends that it seems to them that I am anything but an artistic masterpiece on certain occasions, and yet here are the scriptures telling me in the words of the old apostle himself that in God's eyes, you and I are artistic masterpieces.

Some years ago, I had a friend I met for the first time in a retreat where a group of men were coming together for a few days to share their lives. He was a brand new follower of the Lord and we spent a lot of time talking about our lives and the mutual commitments that we were trying to make and live up to. As I got to know this man, I learned that he was a man out of the trades. He was a laboring man. His hands showed that. The marks in his body and his face showed that he had worked very, very hard over the years to earn a living. In one of those conversations, I said to him, "Ted, what are your great dreams in life? What do you want to do in the future?" or another way of putting it is, "What do you really want to be when you grow up?"

I'll never forget his answer to me. He said, "Gordon, I really want to be an artist. I really expect one of these days to leave the building trades and open up a gallery and sell art."

I had a rough time not wanting to laugh out loud because I saw this man as anything but an artist, and yet that is what he said he was. Within a year he quit his job and the next thing I knew, he had opened up a gallery and I went to visit one day and I saw some of the most magnificent pieces of art that he had painted. I just couldn't imagine it. Before long, as I went into various people's homes in our community, I began to see examples of his art hanging in people's living rooms, and the prices went up and up because people valued very much what he was doing.

One day we had breakfast together and he said, "You know, I am a follower of Jesus and I'd really like to find ways to tell people about that, but I'm not very good with words like you seem to be, Gordon. How do you think I could do that?" And we began to talk about the ways in which he could express his faith publicly, that he himself was a Christ follower.

One day he called me and he said, "I've got it, at least this is the first thing I am going to do. I think that every time I turn out a piece of art I'll sign my name in the lower left-hand corner and I will always end my name with a cross."

Sure enough, that is exactly what he began to do, and I discovered that every piece of art that I saw turned out that came from his gallery that people now were paying good money for, always the name was there and always the cross. It was the mark of an artist. I've thought about that many, many times as my friend's art has become more and more valuable as it has been distributed, literally, now across the world. If you wanted to buy one of my friend's pieces of art today, you would probably pay in the neighborhood of $10,000 or $15,000 for just a small painting that he does. People value it that highly. But if you talk to him about what is most important, he would say, "Beyond my art the most important thing I want to convey to people by the way I do things is that I myself am a work of art. I made a choice long ago," he said, "to follow Christ and that has made all the difference and I want my art to be marked with my artistry and I want people to know that I am a mark of God's artistry."

Well, you go back to that verse of scripture that St. Paul wrote to the Ephesians and suddenly it comes alive with new life. When I began to study that phrase a few weeks ago, I took out the Greek New Testament in my study and with the help of a few books, because I am not that good at Greek, frankly, I learned this. That when Paul wrote that original phrase, he set the words up to make a very, very candid and blunt point. If you read it in the original Greek language it goes something like this, "His artistry we are." What Paul was trying to tell the readers in Ephesus and beyond them, telling all of us who read the Bible, was when a man or a woman decides to follow his Son Christ, from that very, very moment we start being marked with the artistic work of God.

I went on from there and I thought about the fact that really God has been in the business of making human beings in two different ways. First of all, he made us when He created us. Scripture says in many places that we are created in the image of God, and you see that all over the world. When humanity wants to do so, humanity can really reflect the artistry of God. The man or woman who sits at the piano and plays a beautiful Mozart piece gives us something of the beauty of God's artistry. The one who does a very difficult surgery and saves a life is showing us part of God's artistry. The one who can write a piece of literature or poetry that sends us away just thrilled and exploding with all kinds of images and understandings is showing us God's artistry. The person who can throw a long pass and connect with a wide receiver in a most magnificent way is showing us something of God's artistry. Yes, you can say in a million different ways humanity is capable of showing the artistry of God.

Unfortunately, scripture has some bad news to add to that, however, because the artistry of God has been deeply damaged by the problems of sin and evil. Just as on occasion someone who has been crazed has gone into an art museum or a gallery and has sliced a valuable picture in pieces, so sin has entered into the world and it has taken this beautiful artistic thing which God has done and greatly impaired it and destroyed it. And so while we can talk about the beauty of humanity in doing all these things, we have to be fair to history and talk about the ugliness of humanity also, the ugliness that can kill and rape and ravage and abuse and corrupt, all of these great, great tragedies that show that in one way or another, humanity has destroyed, deeply hurt, polluted the artistry of God when He made human beings like you and me.

But God, St. Paul says, did a second work of art and that is what that verse of scripture in the Book of Ephesians is all about. I suppose one could say that God as the divine artist could have walked away from all of this tragedy that humanity has created.

As one person said to me one day deep in a jungle in South America who was thinking about these things for the first time, "I don't know why God did not walk away from humanity in deep disgust and just forget all about us." But the good news of the Bible is that God chose not to do that because the Bible tells us that God is a loving God, that He is a redeeming God, that He is a caring God, and so He created us in a second way and He did that in Christ. The Bible says that God sent his only Son into this world and that those who choose to believe upon Him and to follow Him would not perish but have everlasting life. Those are words that suggest the same thing that St. Paul was trying to say to people when he wrote Ephesus, for to be part of God's artistry is not only to be made in His image, but is to be loved so deeply that God has come back a second time and He is willing to remake us and in that story is the great lesson of hope, the great message that the God of heaven and earth, the God of the Bible loves us so dearly and He pulls us to Himself for the purposes of making us once again an artistic production to which He can sign His name.

Let me tell you another story. I wish I knew the names; I know it's a true story. It happened in England, down in the south of England along the Atlantic Ocean. There was an English pub one evening filled with drinkers and outside there was a raging storm, and the worse the storm got the more people came in for shelter and, of course, they got to drinking and eating. It was pretty wild that night. In the midst of all the melee of people moving around and laughing and gesturing, there was a waitress who came along with a tray, holding it high with cups of ale, I suppose, and cups of coffee and tea, and someone didn't see her coming and in the crowd they jostled her rather dramatically and the tea and the coffee and the ale went flying and, unfortunately, some of it splashed all over a newly painted wall, and in a nanosecond the wall was just splotched with all of its liquid running down.

The proprietor of the pub was instantly angry because he had just painted the wall and now it looked awful. And all the crowd became silent to see how he would act and, of course, the humiliated waitress stood there wondering what would happen next, and in that silence, suddenly from the corner of the tavern or the pub, a man spoke out. He said, "If you will permit me, perhaps I can do something about that." And he stepped forward and he opened up a little case that he was carrying with him. Quickly people saw that in the case were a lot of small artist's brushes and paints, and they stood aside and the man went to work on this wall that was so stained with all of this wet that was now there. He began to sketch with charcoal and then with paint and other things that an artist would do and -- you can rapidly tell that I am not an artist -- but I can only imagine what must have happened.

And as the moments went by the crowd grew stiller and stiller, quieter and quieter, and when the man was through forty-five or fifty minutes later, they suddenly saw a wall which had been made ugly with all these blotches, now it was a beautiful thing to behold and the blotches had been turned into something that was absolutely magnificent. And when the man was through, he stepped back and he looked and everyone with him. It was almost as if all gasped together in the beauty of what they were seeing, and then the man who was the artist took a piece of charcoal in the lower left-hand corner, he signed his name, quickly wrapped up the tools of his artistry, and went out the door into the storm. And when the people looked at the name, they suddenly realized they had been watching one of England's greatest artists at work, and they had seen him take something which was ugly to behold and turn it into something absolutely beautiful.

I think St. Paul would have loved that story because that was exactly what he was trying to say to people like the Ephesians and people like you and me, people who look across the years of their lives and say, "It started out beautiful but it became ugly. I've made mistakes; I've dropped the ball a thousand times; I've hurt people; I've succumbed to temptations and things in life and, yeah, there have been the good moments but all these bad moments, can God ever look at me and say, `I am proud of this artistic production?'"

Yes, because Jesus Christ did what that artist did. He took something which others thought to be ugly and He turned it into something beautiful, and for all of those who follow Him, the hope is that this can be the same experience. That has been an experience that I have hungered for. I trust that that will also be your experience. We are His creation, created in Christ. May God help us to find joy and hope and understanding in that great promise.

Floyd Brown: Gordon, we enjoyed your talk. It's wonderful.

Gordon MacDonald: Thank you, Floyd, very much.

Brown: But I have to be a little bit humorous and one line that came to mind when you were saying that we are a piece of art, I've had people say to me, "Well, you are a piece of art!"

MacDonald: They say that to me, too.

Brown:  As Christians, as individuals, most of us are growing and always learning and we feel we are a long ways from being perfect. As a minister, how would you say to us, how can be grow, how can we really be a piece of art to God?

MacDonald: Well, of course, one of the phrases you often hear in the artistic world, especially in the world of literature, is the phrase, "works in progress." And artists and authors and composers like to talk about a work in progress and they are saying, "Well, it's pretty good now but, boy, three months from now it's going to be award winning." That kind of thing.

I think that is a biblical perspective also. The man or woman who comes to faith, understands themselves as a work in progress. The Bible makes a very astounding claim that I think we have to face rather carefully and candidly. The Bible says there is no such thing as a perfect person. Now the psychologists would tell us there is no such thing as a healthy person, and the sociologist would say there is no such thing as a healthy system, and the doctor would say there is no such thing as a healthy person. These are standards of perfection when you use those words.

Well, the Bible would say there is no such thing as a perfect person. We were created to be perfect, but humanity has corporately and consistently made a decision to reject God's laws to one extent or another, and the Bible starts with the bad news, we are all sinners, so that when we come to faith in Christ, what God is doing is reversing that and He is saying, "I am going to make you into a brand new creation." St. Paul said that by the way, "If any man be in Christ, any person be in Christ, he is a new creation." So Paul was looking at two levels. He was saying, "In God's eyes you are that perfect work of art already." But in the real time situation, we are a work in progress, and the Bible concludes with this wonderful message, that some day Jesus is going to come again and when He does, and when you and I see Him face to face, the perfection job will be complete and we will be award-winning works of art in heaven's eyes.

Brown: I know we can change through God's grace, that we grow and do things, but you and I are grandparents and it's a marvelous time of life and earlier you were saying that grandparents have a tremendous impact on the lives of their grandchildren. What are you going to say to your grandchildren as they come along? How are you going to express their growth and their ambitions and their goals and tell them the path to go?

MacDonald: Well, you know it is interesting you would ask that question, because from the moment my grandchildren, one by one - I've got three of them; I think you have four - I have had the privilege of holding each of my grandchildren in my arms within the hour that they were born. And then, each of the three occasions I have found myself holding them and whispering into their ear, "Jesus loves you; Jesus loves you," and every time I hold these children, I keep saying, "Jesus loves you; Grandpa loves you; Jesus loves you; Grandpa..." I want them to hear that as the first major message from their old grandpa.

You and I were talking about how when we were parents, we had a lot of anxiety about bringing up our kids. You know, to do things right, make us proud of them. I think grandparents, on the other hand, give their grandchildren their souls. We take time for these grandchildren and we don't sweat the small stuff, and I think the great joy of being a grandfather is I convey to my grandchildren the family story, but most important, I give them my soul. I want them to know that Jesus love them, that grandpa has had a lot of pain in his life. He's made a lot of mistakes. He is not proud of the mistakes he has made, but hopefully, learned from them all. I want the grandkids to know things like that.

Brown: Jesus loves you, and He really appreciates that fine message you brought to us today.