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We’ve begun a new sermon series together called believe. We’ve looked at together at the early church, who had a belief that was so strong that for the first 300 years of Christianity to follow after Jesus, it would have cost you or could have cost you your life. What is it? The early church found that they believed so strongly that they were even willing to go to death, to take a stand for what they had trusted in. You know, in today’s society, I get a little tired, especially in America, of people telling us what it is we need to believe to fit their ideology or religion. And we find throughout America, many people are burnt out on religion because it’s man made ideas of worship that has chosen to, in their way, please God. We study the Bible together. We discover that God isn’t about religion. What God is about is relationship. And Jesus said, as clear to the woman by the well as it is to us today, that he who worships him must worship him in spirit and truth. We can never worship God for more than we understand him to be. And so it’s significant for us to discover truth together, something for our lives to rest solely upon. And let me just tell you this morning, it is all about him. See, here at our church, we don’t encourage you to be about our religion or to be any particular way that we tell you to be.
What we ask you as a body of believers coming to Jesus is just look to him. If you’ve given God your life and you’ve surrendered to him, he’ll direct you and where to go. Life is all about a relationship with him. There is a belief that is solid for us to follow, and trusting in him to find out and see that he is faithful to us. We’ve looked at God exists in the beginning. We’ve looked at his character and his attributes together. But maybe as God has revealed himself generally in revelation through through creation, God has also come to reveal himself more specifically to us in His Word. God speaks. God has spoken. Today, that’s why we open up our Bible to learn about him. What was his true 1500 years ago when God directed the early prophets to write? His word is still true today because God’s truth is timeless. This morning, as we also begin to look together, what we’re going to investigate and see is that God is also imaged. God is imaged in us as human beings. And what exactly does that mean? What is a human being? My favorite idea that always comes to mind when I think about what it means to be a human being comes from a question I would often hear of mothers in inner city Baltimore trying to raise their young teenage sons. It’s more an African-American type setting, but but when you you see these young kids playing in the, in the in the streets or in the playgrounds and they do something wrong and mom steps in with that snap of the finger, oh, no you didn’t.
Who do you think you are? Get in there. You think for a moment that kid, whenever he was involved in activity, probably thought he was amazing. But all of a sudden, mom now in front of him asking that question, and he’s now thinking, you know, I don’t know who in the world who did I think I was? You know, uh oh. Who are we as people? When you look in the mirror, as age progresses and gravity wins, who are we? Have you done the pretend facelift before pushing back some of those wrinkles, remembering what that face looked like. So a few years ago, right? Maybe the front porch is getting a little bigger and the hair is starting to get a little bit grayer. Who are we at the birth of a young child? The laughter of a small kid. Who are we when we go through emotional experiences in this world, and we have deep longings within our soul that sometimes we can’t find satisfaction for. Who are we? In history. In the past, if we had simply asked that question, even around the time of Jesus, people would have identified themselves through groups. I live in this country. I’m a part of this family. I live in these relationships, this tribe, this ethnicity belongs to me.
Some cultures today even still define themselves through a family type setting. For instance, the country of Japan, when the tsunami hit and the nuclear reactors were destroyed, you saw many people on the news, Japanese individuals who wanted to go into that nuclear plant and serve their country and even if need be, die for their country because they found their identity in who they were as a group collectively. In America, we think a little differently. We see ourselves more as individuals. Some of us view ourselves apart from who God is and see life in light of everything, that we are separate from him. Maybe that heightening of this teaching was received through the the psychiatrist Abraham Maslow, who taught about the hierarchy of needs and the self-actualization of you and encouraged us to be the best we or us that we could be apart from anything else. From that we receive words like self esteem, self-love, self respect, self Self-Identity. Be the best that you can be. The power of positive thinking. The warning to us this morning is that when we omit God from the identity of who we are as people, we are robbed from the very joy in which God has created us. For without God, we typically fall under two categories. As individuals, we either lead a life of pride or despair. We enter into a life of pride when we see ourselves apart from God, and we elevate ourselves beyond the the, the ability that God should have in reigning and ruling over us.
And we think how great we are. But pride cometh before the fall. And when we see ourselves as God, clinging only to the needs that we have, when devastation enters into our lives, we are engaged in a place of despair. What greater thing in us do we have to trust in? Because all we were trusting in was self. What does the Bible reveal about the origin of man. If you brought your Bibles with you this morning, I would encourage you to turn to Genesis chapter one. And we’re going to just simply spend a larger portion of just this small question this morning. What is the origin of man? What does the Bible reveal about the origin of man? This is going to work as a springboard for us to answer a few more questions about who we are as individuals. Genesis chapter one and verse 26 is where we’ll begin together, as God outlines for us the creation of who we are as human beings. Verse 26, he says, Then God said, let us make man in our image, according to our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the sky, and over the cattle, and over the earth, and over everything that creeps on the earth. Verse 26, what we discover is that we are created by God different than atheism. Atheism teaches that we invented God and that God is just, just simply a figment of our imagination.
But in the Bible, very early on, it tells us that God created us as human beings. And the second part of that verse revealed that we are to have dominion over the things in which God created on this earth. We exercise as human beings authority. Verse 27. The Bible goes on and says, God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him, male and female. He created them. And creating both male and female together, God created us equal, different, but he created us equal. We can see in the beginning of these verses and through other scriptures, reference that God is not gender biased and God simply has no gender. If God had a gender, God would have both genders. He created us in his image and formed us both male and female. Jesus later took on flesh. It tells us in John one the word became flesh. Never before had God come in flesh, but Jesus engendered himself. But when God made us, he made us men and women in his image. Verse 28. It goes further and says to us, God bless them. Let’s stop right there. God blessed you in creating all of this earth in which we exist upon. He stops after creating us on the last day and he bless us. Meaning we’re under his special protection, different and apart from all the rest of creation.
Might, I suppose. And we’ll begin to see the evidence of this as we interject into the rest of the verses which are ahead. But God created us and blessed us, because God’s desire is to love us first. John told us that God is love, not that God is loving, but that God is absolute love. In our own lives, we tend to love as people on a smaller scale, because our love tends to depend on how we feel. It shouldn’t, but nevertheless it does. However, God is love, and what we discover in first Corinthians 13 is that love is about giving itself away, and God in his love created you and blessed you as the pinnacle point of his creation to manifest his love upon you. God blessed us in verse 28. It continues forward and said, And God said to them, be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth. God’s desire wasn’t just to create you and and love you, but he wanted you to experience him through this world as you play out your life. He says, be fruitful and multiply. Well, we discover in this passage is that God created us for relationships. Be fruitful in this world and multiply and subdue this earth. Create a family and go out into this world and produce a healthy life with your family.
God created us in this way. And for this reason he says, as we read on all the way down into verse 31, And God saw that all that he had made, and behold, it was very good. As we just examined in Genesis chapter one, it gives us the six days of creation. It’s as if the Bible is doing a panoramic view of everything that took place in the early part of history, and when it comes to your creation, it’s God in this moment stops and he says, everything to this point was good. Everything went well. But when it gets to your creation, God says, and now it’s very good. As you read on in further passages of Scripture in chapter two, after God does this panoramic view of all of his creation, he gets to chapter two, and it’s as if he begins to hone on us as in who we are as people. He says in verse seven, then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being. You notice when God created his his design in this world and this universe and everything that exists, it tells us that God spoke and it came to be. God spoke and it existed. But when it comes to us as people, God pauses here in this moment and it says he takes the time to form us. It gives the Hebrew expression as if a potter is coming before his clay to create within us the express image of our identity as human beings.
God was intricately involved in your creation. The pausing here and the creation rather than God just simply speaking, but forming to you, is to suggest to us as people that there is something special taking place with the creation of you as a human being. It tells us in the second part of this verse that God breathed into you His Spirit, different than any other creation. You now possess the Spirit of God, different than any other being. You can now connect to God in a spiritual way. Excuse me? To worship him says in verse 15. Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden, to cultivate it and to keep it. Believe it or not, before sin entered the world there was work. God desires for us to work. In heaven there will be responsibilities. But don’t worry, it won’t carry the pain and the suffering that work has today. Part of the curse came along with it when God cursed the man and said, by the sweat of your brow you will labor. God created us. It tells us in Ephesians chapter two and verse ten for good works. God designed you to reflect Him in His image and things that you do. In verse 16 it says to us, the Lord God commanded the man, saying, from any tree of the garden you may eat freely, but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat.
For in that day that you eat from it, you will surely die. The Lord God commanded us as people, this suggests to us that we have morals. In the beginning, from the time in which God created us, we have the ability to choose from right and wrong. And God says to Adam, if you eat of this fruit, you will surely die. As we read later on in Scripture the death, we’re going to study the judgment of God next week. It’s going to be a real positive sermon. But as we look at the promise in which God gave to Adam and Eve, what we find later on in Scripture is that man, at the point that they ate the fruit, died spiritually, and eventually would die physically, all because of the disobedience to the moral commandment which God has given us. Verse 18 God goes further. Let me click ahead and it says, then the Lord God said, it is not good for man to be alone. I will make him a helper suitable for him. So far within creation, what we have is God above. For man to look to creation below him for man to govern over. But he has no one beside him. God in creating us as beings that replicate or resemble him. We ourselves desire to love, to give ourselves away.
It tells us within this desire that we have for community and relationship, God took it to the furthest extent by giving to us a helpmate, a wife, or to the woman a husband. Tells us in this verse that he would make a helper suitable. Adam would receive a helper suitable for him. A helper is a good term. Many times people look on this as a downplaying of women. But let me just tell you, helper is a good term, ladies, because it implies that your your spouse needs help, right? We don’t have to go far into the day to discover that five minutes watching my child on our own and it’s a miracle we survived, right? He makes a helper suitable for him, inferring that we need help. It also is interesting to see within scripture that God refers to himself in our lives as our helper. The Holy Spirit is referenced in Scripture as our helper. It’s often said, I think even in that the famous was the movie Jerry Maguire, where he gives the famous line to Renee Zellweger, you complete me. Right. God made man and woman equal. But he made us different. And to the point within the marriage relationship that we find that as we are designed, we complement one another in our abilities. This doesn’t mean everyone has to be married. In fact, Paul encouraged it in certain points of Scripture that if it were possible to be single, he encouraged those who had the gift to be single.
This week, one of the tragedies for me took place. I was watching the news and across the very bottom on a Christian network. It said John Stott had passed away at 90 years old in England. John Stott was an amazing man for his entire life who lived as a single individual. He wrote the book Basic Christianity, which is one of the one of the premier books, I think, in Christianity today. But nonetheless, God created a helpmate for those who desire to be married. In verse 19, it goes on and says, out of the ground, the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. Adam, again, is exercising authority over the creation that God has placed him over. That’s resembled in the fact that Adam gets to name every animal in the world, even like complicated names, I guess. Adam came up with Duckbilled platypus, I’m not sure, but he exercised that authority. It goes on in verse 20. The man gave names to all the cattle, and to all the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him. I’m glad he did not find a helper within those animals. It says in verse 21, so the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept.
Then he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. God now begins to to design the woman. I like the fact that God took the rib from Adam’s side to create woman. It says to us that again, that she is equal because she’s created from the very same substance that the man was formed from. I like that God in these passages said, that woman came from his side, suggesting to us that the woman isn’t in front of man. Like feminism teaches, the woman isn’t behind. Man like chauvinism teaches, but the woman resides next to man as an equal. As you ever wonder why at night, sometimes with your spouse you just maybe want to cuddle with them? She just came right there, man. Just put her arm around you and say, welcome home, right? Woman is taken from the rib. I like what it says in verse 22. The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib, which he had taken from the man and brought her to the man. This is a big day. First impressions mean everything. And in the same way that God operated in the life of Adam and Eve, he still operates today. For you who desire to be married one day, if you’re still single, begin as verse 22 says, to pray for that helpmate that God has for you. And when God brings her to you.
Thank God for the lady or the husband that’s in your life. Verse 23, it goes further than the man said, let me just stop there. These are the first recorded words that man that we have, that man said in all of the Bible. And the cool thing about it, and you guys have heard me do this before, but it’s a song. And I’ve looked over this verse over and over, and I’m trying to figure out what Adam was doing when he sang this song. This, by far, was the best song to ever be sung. I mean, this is like crushes. Anything Justin Bieber’s done because you think about this. Everyone in the world attended this concert. That’s how great it was. I see it as a rap song. You can see it, however, but I think I think it goes bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she comes from the man. Right. I just like that. Yeah, but he sings to her. And guys, the important part is when when you see your wife and she’s just looking so beautiful every day. She never has a dull moment in her life, right? Every day she’s just drop dead gorgeous. You just sing to her and sing to her. Everywhere. I do it to Stacy in the house all the time. I Will Be Your Hero is like our theme song. I am Enrique Iglesias.
All right, I gotta I gotta cut that out. And here’s what takes place. Verse 24 for this reason. Did that embarrass you, sweetheart? I’m sorry. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. The Bible tells us in this passage that there’s a process to that relationship. Specifically, a husband and wife leave their parents, a husband and wife are married, and then their desire is to become one flesh. In verse 25, it really points the significance of this. Think about this for just a moment. This is before sin entered the Garden of Eden. Think about the relational unity that existed between God and man and God. Or excuse me, in man and wife there is no division because there is no sin there, living in perfect relational harmony with one another. Whenever we have difficulties within our relationship, the reason any difficulty, any tension, any whatsoever lack of unity is built within our relationship is because of sin. It should be an indicator for us as people. As we reflect on this in our relationships, we think to ourselves, this, this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. What God created us for as people is as he loved us. He desires for us to love in return and to experience the relational unity not just in marriage, but really in all of our relationships.
Ultimately, marriage goes to the furthest depth that a relationship can. But God desires relational unity with one another. God desires relational unity with him. So the question is, how did God create us to relate to our world as His people. The first simple answer to that is God created us to relate to him. God breathed into us His spirit. God’s spirit resides within us as people. That we as people, may connect back to him and experience the very purpose for which he created us, to worship and enjoy him for all eternity. Second, God created us to relate to one another. The Bible says it’s not good for you to be alone. You think about the importance of just that phrase, not in marriage, but in just the church. I’ve heard some people say, you know, I don’t want to go to church. I’ve pretty much learned the whole Bible, if that is your thinking, that is not what church is about. Yes, you come to church to to learn about God’s Word. But the important part about the church is that it’s all about relationships, your relationship to God and how that relationship plays into the life of other people. If it’s just about knowledge, then God wouldn’t have any need to create a church. We could just sit at home and read our Bible. But we understand as people, God created us with a desire to connect to one another and love each other and to live in unity.
If everything is without sin and worship and truth. Second reason why God created us as people is God created us to relate to, to creation. God called us to subdue it and to govern, and to rule over it, and to be fruitful and to multiply upon this earth. After God created man, he put him in the garden and told him when he’s in the garden. Okay, now take care of the Garden of Eden. And then he created woman within the garden. Take care of the Garden of Eden. Us as people, we have the opportunity to take care of the world in which God created. And as we are caring for the needs of this world to its finest, finest detail, to its greatest feat and Bay watch Whale Wars to its greatest feat. Uh, God has called us to care for it. And as we care for its need, we can just stand in all the glorious things in which God has made. Maybe fourth, we could say that God created us to relate to ourselves, to understand the importance of who we are as human beings. God created us to display to us his glory through his love. As we think about creation, let’s be more specific and say to us, okay. God created all of this, and God exists in this world. What is our place as human beings in relation to God and all of this creation? Psalm eight answers that beautifully for us as people.
It says you. Yet you have made him a little lower than God. Talking about us. And you crowned him with glory and majesty. Wonderful. Because God has made us in his image, you make him to rule over the works of your hands. You have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes through the paths of the sea. O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. A normal response. A common response when we see the glory for which God has created in this world. But we recognize in this passage of Scripture that God has created us, and he has placed us under his authority. And while we reside under his authority, God has put us over his creation to care for its needs. We bear his image in that way. Maybe we could ask more specifically, what does it mean for us as human beings to bear the image and likeness of God? What does it mean that we are in God’s image and likeness? I would propose this that when God said he would create us in his image and likeness, it didn’t mean that God would create us in his image and likeness in every way. We have ways in which we can never relate to who God is. Bible tells us in Isaiah 43 and verse ten.
Isaiah 44 and verse six and eight. There is only one God. Before him there was no God formed. Neither will there be after him. There is only one God. This passage isn’t suggestion that we are exactly like God. After declaring there is only one God, Isaiah said in chapter 48, he says, for my own sake, for my own sake I will act, for how can my name be profaned in my glory? I will give to no other. Referring to God image doesn’t mean exact image. If we were to go to Washington DC and I were to take you before the Lincoln Monument today, we would look at the Lincoln Monument and we would say, you know, this Lincoln monument was made in the image of Lincoln, but it’s not Lincoln. The same thing with your pennies that we tend to throw away sometimes. Pull that out. Look at the image on the front. That is the image of Lincoln. But it’s it’s not Lincoln. In the same way we as people have been created in the image of God, but we are not exactly like God. I mean, we can relate to God through our communicable attributes, which we talked about last week, ways in which we as people reflect him. God is spirit. We have a spirit. God is holy. At times we can live holy. God is love. We can love when we feel like it sometimes, right? Though it should be all the time.
God is joyful in our lives. We experience joy. God is truth for the most part. We like to think as people we can follow and obey truth. God is just we. We hope as people we can reflect in justice. God is merciful. God is beautiful. God is patient. God is kind. In those ways, we relate to God. In those ways we reflect his image. God gave us the ability to make moral decisions when he told Adam and Eve, listen, don’t eat of the fruit. God gave us the ability to govern and rule much like him. Though God is ultimately sovereign over all things, we have the ability to govern and rule in small things. We have intellect. We can think we have an immortal spirit. Though it had a beginning, you have creative ability as we see God in His creation. You appreciate beauty as God appreciates the beauty of the things that he has made. In that way, we reflect the character of God. But we are unlike God. See, God is omnipresent. He’s everywhere at the same time. God is omniscient, meaning he knows all things. God is all powerful. You being a creator and being yourself requires you to come into existence by a being greater than you. By very definition of the word, all powerful. It’s impossible to be because something bigger than you has designed you, and so in every way you are not like God. God is eternal.
He has no beginning. You have a beginning. God is immutable. He doesn’t change and we change with every breeze that comes by. But we diminish the glory of God being created in the image of God when we devalue our humanity that was made in his image. God gave us a mind to think. God gave us a heart to experience. God gave us a soul to connect. God gave us strength to rule and to reign over the areas of responsibility. Modern counseling and psychology that exist today within America has the tendency to to take away aspects of man and just develop one area rather than all areas. Evolutionists believe in a body but don’t see the need for a spirit. We have a mind, and so they would say that that makes us what a human being is. We take away from human beings when we only address the emotional needs that we have, but we do nothing to work on our spirit or our soul. Sometimes we look at individuals who who have had a horrible life and then produce a horrible life. And we say, you know what? If we had just changed their environment and let them speak out of their emotions, they would have been different people. It’s their environment’s fault. But we never stop to ask the question, well, who in the world created the environment? Us. It’s important not just to understand our emotional need, but we need a spiritual need as well.
The reason we as people act sinfully is because our soul needs redemption. We are sinners at heart. It’s all our faults. We all stray from God. We all bear and hold responsibility before him. We take away from us as beings when we only address our spirit, and we see no need for the physical and emotional excuse me, the emotional part of us as human beings. But Jesus, when he came into this world, Jesus the great healer, when he talked about how we are to love as people, he said, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength, everything that you are. Jesus can heal and everything that you are. God desires to address you totally as a 100% human being, made in the image of God. What does it mean that we are made in his image? If you were to look later on in passages of Scripture, we are like God, but not in every way. It says in Genesis chapter five and verse one, the second half of verse one says, in the day that God created man in the likeness of God made he him. Male and female created he them, and blessed them, and called their name Adam. Interesting. The name Adam derives from the word to produce or from the soil. We’re like God and reflecting him, but we’re unlike God because we’re still made from dirt. We are creatures in that day.
It says we were created in Genesis two seven. It says, then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground. We reflect his image in this world. God created you with His Spirit to reflect the goodness of God. In this world. We are like God in that way, but we are not like God in every way. Question we ask them. Who best images God? Who best images? God? You know, we have the tendency as human beings to compare ourselves to others, to test ourselves, to see how good we’re doing. They did that. I only did this. I’m a little bit better, so bump me up on the God scale. But the question we really need to ask ourselves, if we’re going to compare ourselves to something who best resembles God. I hope you see where this is going. It tells us in Corinthians four six For God who said, let light shine out of darkness is the one who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God. Look at this in the face of Christ we talk about the image of God, and we talk about the example that we are to lead as human beings. It is one that reflects Jesus. Colossians chapter two and verse 15. It says he, referring to Jesus, is the image of the invisible God. And we can say, wait a minute, wait a minute. Okay, we’re the image and Jesus is the image.
Does that make us the same? Are we just on the same playing field as Jesus? And if you read on throughout the chapter, it begins to describe Jesus as well. Beyond us. Jesus is God, and in verse chapter two and verse nine, it says, for in him all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form. So you are not like God, but Jesus is God. Jesus became flesh and he dwelt in this world to be a living example to us as to how we should live as people. God is our example. Jesus came not only just to to be an example for us, but to also die for us, to redeem us of our present need and sin. We look to Jesus to see how we radiate the glory of God, and in so doing, we respond. I like what Jesus did with his disciples in the Gospels. He looks at them and says, pray that the Lord of the harvest would send forth laborers. Want people to go out there and work? And then the next verse he says, okay, now go. These guys that thought, okay, yeah, Jesus, that sounds good. We’ll pray that God will send people to do these spiritual things that you need done. Sounds great man. And then the next verse, Jesus looks at him and says, okay, now that you prayed for it, the answer is you. Now go. You know, God is is a miraculous God, but God is a very simple God for us.
I think in many ways he blows our minds, but he he makes things simple for us. God created you in his image to reflect you into this world as his image bearer, to display to people what Jesus is like when he told his disciples to pray to to meet the needs of the world. And then he said, go into this world. They were the answer to prayer. And that’s the way that God works in all of our lives. God desires for us to represent him to this world, to bear that image, to be him. And we ask ourselves then who best reflects that image? And the answer to us is Jesus. And so the question, the last question we want to ask this morning is how do we really begin to bear that image? The Bible gives all sorts of references for that. Second Corinthians 318 it says, but we all with unveiled face leading up to this, Jesus or Paul had been saying to the believers, listen, you thought maybe you knew what truth was, but there was a veil over your face when you were reading the Bible. It wasn’t making sense to you because you didn’t know Jesus as your Savior, and it was like you were being blocked from understanding what was going on. But when you came to trust in Jesus, we all who trust in him with an unveiled face for the first time, looking to the Bible as God has described it to us, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord the spirit.
The answer to being the image of God, to bearing the image of God, is to reflect upon the face of Jesus. God gave you his word. We said that when God created, he spoke and things came into being. The Bible tells us in Timothy that God breathed his word. He spoke it into being. This is literally God’s breath breathing upon us. And as we gaze upon the face of Jesus throughout this Bible, we are transformed from glory to glory for the sake of Christ. Romans 829 says, for those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son, so that we would be the firstborn among many brothers. God is conforming us to the image of His son, to those who trusted in Jesus. That is God’s goal for your life. And it tells you in Colossians 319, do not lie to one another. If we want to bear the image of God, it’s important that we speak truth and we speak it in love for each other. Since you laid aside the old self with with its evil practices and have put on the new self which is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the one who created him.
Listen, God created you to reflect him. We have characteristics that resemble God love, patience, kindness, gentleness. But we as people were sinful. Rather than make life about others and God, we tend to make it about ourselves. And when we’re offended, we react in a negative way. And what Paul is saying in this passage of Scripture is that, listen, the old self was everything that you were apart from Jesus. And listen as people, you’ve got these habits ingrained into your life to to live a life contrary to Jesus, to live a life opposed to him, to think about you instead of why you were designed. Let me tell you, if you’re doing that, you’re being robbed of joy. But Paul says this get into this habit. Take start pulling. Root up that old self and let’s start putting back onto it the new self of everything that you are in Jesus, in truth, understanding for who he is. And it says in first Corinthians 1549, just as we have borne the image of the earthy, we will also bear the image of the heavenly. He’s referring to Adam in this passage, if you were to see it. And Jesus, listen, you were created in God’s image. And yes, we became sinful and yes, we have fallen away from God. But if we’ve accepted Jesus as our Savior, not only are we bearing the earth anymore, but we begin to bear the image of Christ. Who are we as people? God created you and said it is very good.
God took the time as he spoke everything else into existence, to pause when he comes to you and just form you. God created you to bear his image, to have the characteristics of His Spirit, to connect back to him. God created you because he loves you. God is love and the very nature of love, its desire is to give itself away. And God loves you because his desire is that you, as people created in his image, would love and reflect him and return in this earth. And the question you ask this morning is what kind of image are you bearing? I love the famous slogan, I’m not always in favor with cheesy Christianity. Things that we can buy for ten bucks at the Christian bookstore, but the phrase WWJD is just to me just puts a nail on the head, man. That’s what it’s all about. Pausing in every moment of every day, with every challenge we face and just saying, what would Jesus do? Regardless of anything that you’re going through in this world, whether it’s young or old, rich, poor, happy, sad doesn’t matter. In all of those things, you can continue to reflect the image of God because Jesus can be reflected in any moment of any day. God created you to know him, to enjoy him, and to live for him both now and for all eternity. Let’s close in a word of prayer.