A Piece of Work(s)
I want to talk a little bit about the name of my website (The Poiema), and what it means to me. So, what is that weird word? Poiema. It’s a Greek word. A long time ago I watched a movie called My Big Fat Greek Wedding and I was informed that pretty much every word ever comes from a Greek root. I’m not so sure that’s the truth, but in this case it happens to be true. This Greek word is used two times in the Bible and one of those times happens to be in the book of Ephesians:
Ephesians 2:10 – For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
Poiema is translated into English as the word “workmanship”. The definition of poiema is as follows: The word signifies that which is manufactured, a product, a design produced by an artisan. You can look at the word poiema and see inside of it the origins of the word “Poem”. So, quite literally, we are a poem created by God. We are each a work of art.
There are a few ways of looking at this and all of them are awe inspiring, and potentially life changing. But the biggest thing we need to realize is that we are more than just hastily thrown together bags of blood and guts. Looking deeply into this travels deep into the realm of intelligent design, but let’s, for now, just allow this to mean that we are skillfully put together with the attention to detail of your favorite poem or short story, or sculpture or painting, or song or movie. Even if you, like me, oftentimes feel like a Pollock painting, if you’ve never looked into the studies on the intricacies of Pollock’s paintings then you would be amazed at the minute detail in what looks to be a mess of splattered paint. Just a simple understanding of this brings great value to yourself, and your life. Later on we can go into more depth on this. Probably much later on, as in, a different post.
We’ve briefly looked at the first part of this verse (“For we are His workmanship,”) so why don’t we move onto the second part:
created in Christ Jesus for good works
I guess the first thing I should point out is that the word “works” (you know, the last word, the one coming after “good”) is a totally different word than workmanship word (poiema). For the record, this root word is “ergon”, which is much like “ergo”, which reminds me of that second Matrix movie. But that’s not really relevant, so – um – nevermind… While we are God’s workmanship (creation), upon our rebirth (born again) we were created in Jesus so that we could perform good works (acts).
This, for some reason, is a little controversial. You get into that whole works/grace argument. There is, amazingly, a lot of contention in the Christian community over whether we should be doing good works. Some say that there is no need to do good works because Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross, and our acceptance of Him as Lord and Savior, is all that’s needed and that nothing more need be done to earn our salvation. Then there’s the other side of the argument which says that we have been saved by grace trough faith and that we don’t need to do anything else to earn our salvation, but we should still be doing the good works precisely because we’ve given our lives to Christ. I will acknowledge that I land in the second camp so my representation may be a little biased. But, to me, it’s not about needing to perform good works, it’s about wanting to because if you have truly given your life to Christ then the want to do these works will naturally flow out of you. And this is just a personal feeling but, if you profess to be a Christian, and you don’t feel the pull of the law of God on your heart to do good works, you may want to do some internal searching and make sure that you’ve have actually accepted Jesus not just your savior, but also your lord.
What’s next? Oh yeah, the part of the verse where we’re told that God has set aside good works in advance for us to do and if we don’t do them then we’re not walking in the path God has set out for us…
which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
It should probably be noted that the “saved by grace through faith” reference comes from directly before the verse in question in this post. Ephesians 2:8-9 says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.” But then this is directly followed by “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” It seems obvious to me (though I admit that this could still be open to other interpretations, I guess…), that we should read the “grace through faith” passage as a whole, and that it should be seen it’s complete context to be saying that we have to do nothing more because Jesus has already done all the work to create us anew, and that He created us to do good works. And if you truly love Jesus, you will get out there and do those good works.
And that’s it. That’s where the title of this page comes from. We are God’s workmanship, and we’re supposed to be doing good things for God, so what work are you doing? We are the poiema so what poem are you living? Is it a poem that glorifies God? I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not always easy. I struggle every day with living that set-apart life. But I give it my best, at least 80% of the time. And every day I strive to make that percentage go up.
So who’s gonna join me? Who will be a part of the poiema? Who is going to be a work of art?
This is a repost which was originally posted at the following location: