GOD'S ROSE OF SHARON

A Covenant Palette:

Coloring Outside the Lines of Religious Dogma

When I was about five or six years old way back in the mid-sixties there wasn’t as much to do as there is today. We had no computer or a nice television set to enjoy so much of my time was spent playing outside in the dirt with my Matchbox cars and doodling. I use to practice what I called scribble art.

What I would do is scribble lines all over a sheet of paper and then very tediously color each shape with a different color. All within the lines. At first these pictures didn’t resemble much but I noticed over time they began to become more uniformed and complimentary with each other. My scribble art was beginning to resemble pretty good pieces of artwork. These were my very first art lessons.

"Sacred cows make the best hamburger." Mark Twain

Over time I began to get bolder and color outside the lines while at the same time utilizing the skills I learned about using colors to paint the desired effects I wished to archive in my art. This pattern is exactly how my Christian walk has played out. When I was first saved thirty-five years ago, I read my Bible the same way I approached my scribble art. Always within the lines of religious authority and structure. It wasn’t until recently that I have began to "color outside the lines" of my faith so to speak. For me, the Scripture has moved along from a literal interpretation of a collection of stories to interpreting the Scripture as a whole in terms of relationship with our creator. In other words, I have concluded the Word of the Living God is a story of redemption and reconciliation sealed by covenant and by doing so have butchered many "sacred cows" along the way.

The Colors on our Palette of the Human Experience:

"I do not think it necessary to believe that the same God who has given us our senses, reason, and intelligence wished us to abandon their use, giving us by some other means the information that we could gain from them." Galileo

I would like to encourage you to listen to the interview I recently done with NewCreation Ministry International. Let it challenge you also to "color outside the lines" of your religious mindset to maybe discover that our God is bigger than any doctrine or creed ever devised by man. There is no doubt that the Scripture speaks of real people and events but it was never intended to be a history book or any text book for that matter. Could it be that God has made us more wondrous and at the same time more complex than we could of ever imagined? Grace is the ultimate sanctuary of all our exploration and artistic abilities in any form that boldly permits us to use all the colors on our palette of human experience.

James Robert Kessler
Because of Him Ministry 2008