Content Creator or Gardener?

If your family is like ours, you likely can't count the number of photos taken that we've stored on a flash drive, or in the cloud, or printed out. In the Digital Age, we’re all “content creators.” What used to be a select group like architects or painters now includes anyone with a smartphone. You can make and publish your creation all around the world, mere seconds after the idea pops into your head. 

This ability to insta-create is exhilarating…and also exhausting. The pressure to be constantly creating for an audience is a burden you and I weren’t intended to handle. The image of God involves more than just using our imaginations! Humans also are called to the key task of stewarding, which isn’t as glamorous in the 21st century. 

Kevin DeYoung points out our role as “sub-creators. We are meant to tend the garden.” Think about that. We toil in the garden, but planning, planting, and ensuring a harvest isn’t on our shoulders. Only God is the true Creator of the garden, and he takes full responsibility for this world from beginning to end.

That truth influences not only how we labor, but also how we lament, as in Psalm 80. Here's what I mean: when trials come, are you more prone to work than to worship? Yes, the Lord commands us to be faithful, but avoiding him as we process our pain is faithless. Calling out to God affirms that he is sovereign, and that we cannot dig our way out of trouble.

You can see how that drives the psalmist’s request: “Have regard for this vine, the stock that your right hand planted, and for the son whom you made strong for yourself” (Psalm 80:14b-15). God’s people had been uprooted, but the foreign powers were just the tool. It was the Lord who caused that judgment to fall on them (vv. 5-6), and they recognized that only he could restore them. Our hardship is in his hands.

Don’t miss one other factor here: God acts for himself. When he rescued the nation from Egypt, his name was magnified (Jeremiah 32:20). When he sent Jesus the Messiah to save his people from their sins, the result was “according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace” (Ephesians 1). The Lord saves and then gets the praise, again and again.

If God is all about his own glory, shouldn’t we be, as well? Think through some ways that the gospel frees us from vainly chasing our own fame.