While praying and musing at a monastery chapel high and hidden in the mountains near Long’s Peak God spoke into my inner spirit, “poetry of love.” I was startled and confused for it seemed so foreign and out of context. It didn’t fit at all with what my mind was thinking about at the time. It almost seemed as if He had bypassed my mind to touch my heart. I asked for a bit more clarity and I was greeted with silence (I hate when He does that).
I just couldn’t get those three words off my mind. I was doomed to ruminations, meditations, and inner questions for days. The answer came from the Word of God, through a conversation and discussion with one of the Mountain Springs pastors I was reminded of a verse.
Paul, in writing one of his most intimate letters to a church that he deeply loved, wrote,
For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:10)
The word “workmanship” riveted my imagination and served to wipe away the cobwebs of my past study. Workmanship is derived from the word, poieema, from which we get the English word “poem.” In the Jamieson, Fausset, Brown Commentary, this word is described as “a thing of His making,” His “handiwork,” a “spiritual creation.” John Calvin writes of this phrase:
When he says, that “we are the work of God,” this does not refer to ordinary creation, by which we are made men. We are declared to be new creatures, because, not by our own power, but by the Spirit of Christ, we have been formed to righteousness.[i]
God is saying that each of us are a unique and beautiful poem. As a new creative poem, He is writing His sonnet upon the fabric of His book of poetry. It’s His book but we are the verses. He’s the poet and we are living His verse. We are living, loving poems. We are the poetry of God.
What is poetry? Throughout the centuries, there have been many attempts at a definition. Poetry is “the art of uniting pleasure with truth” (Samuel Johnson)[ii], “the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself” (William Hazlitt)[iii], “the music of the soul” (Voltaire)[iv]. T.S. Eliot once said of poetry, “It is not the assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.”[v]
William Wordsworth may have captured our meaning best when he wrote, “the poet is the rock of defense for human nature.”[vi] Similarly, Coleridge wrote, “[the poet] brings the whole soul of man into activity.”[vii] God is the poet and it is through His Spirit that we come to discover our true nature, our whole soul moved to creative energy. We are the poems of the Poet.
Dylan Thomas once commented that “a poem on the page is only half a poem.”[viii] You see, a poem is only half alive until the words on the page are spoken. They must be spoken into the hearts of other people. Our life in the Spirit is a wildly jumbled creative, unique blend of verses that have a rhythm that touches everyone around us. But we must live, really live.
Albert Einstein said that truth is “that which stands the test of experience.” We are a creative energy of God mirroring the Master Poet with all of our poetic experiences. Sometimes we are a poem of pain, sometimes a poem of joy, sometimes a poem of endurance. But with each experience, His poem is crafted, rewritten, and more deeply edited by the love of God.
Jesus said,
No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you. You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain, that whatever you ask the Father in My name He may give you. These things I command you, that you love one another. (John 15:15-17)
We are not just any run-of-the-mill poem. We are poems being written by the love of Jesus. We are the fruit of His love. We are in a love relationship with the Poet. He is writing His words, His purposes into the fabric of our heart.
You can tell much about a poet by his or her poems. The poetry of Emily Dickinson is vastly different from Robert Frost. The works of Coleridge stand in major contrast to John Keats. We are the sheet poems, the unfinished poems of God. We are being crafted and written by the hand of God, through the Spirit, in the blood of Jesus. If we will let Him, if we will stop resisting, God will write us. We are His poetry of love.
Receive the point of His pen.
[i] Calvin’s Commentaries
[ii] A Treasury of the World’s Best Loved Poems, Crown Publishers, New York, p. v.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Gerard Kelly, Spoken Worship, Zondervan, p. 13.
Steve Holt 
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