Image Bearers

Well, good morning and welcome to Salt Church. Yeah, we can clap. Good morning. We all made it.

Dodge marathon runners, all sorts of street closings. Love living at the oceanfront to be here, but it's a good day to be in the house of the Lord. There is no doubt about that. I want to thank Seth for coming up and praying. I am a native Texan, for those of you guys who don't know.

Texas is the greatest state on the planet. Well, it's not even really a state. We are our own. I'll leave it at that. But I've got family and friends that are down there dealing with what's going on, and I know firsthand from their accounts of it that it is just devastating.

And so I'm grateful that we've got multiple prayer warriors and a prayer team that I know has been praying for that. Well, this morning, I am going to dive in to the proverbial deep end. And I was really counting on about half this many people being here so that if I really messed this up, only half of you would be able to go to Leon when it's over. I called my dad about halfway through the week, and Leon let me know on Monday. He's like, hey, man, can you cover for me next week?

I need a break too. I said, all right. He said, do you mind preaching? I said, sure. He said, you can have a stand-alone, do what you want.

And I knew immediately the Lord had been laying some things on my own heart over the last few months, actually years, that deal with us being created in the image of God, being image bearers. And so I called my dad up, and I gave him the scripture that I'm going to be going through today. And there was this long pause on the other end of the phone. And my dad thinks before he says any words. And so I knew from the silence that his thoughts were, son, you have gone in way too deep.

And we had some long, good chats about this conversation. And what we're going to be talking about today is something that I believe gets skipped. It gets missed. We kind of leave it out a lot of times as a church. We like to jump straight in to the fall of man, followed by the redemption and the salvation through Jesus Christ, and rightly so.

But there are these other two parts of God's word, the creation, which is what we're going to really hit hard today, and the end, the final, the revelation. And I believe that part of it is we just don't know how to reconcile the middle with the beginning and the end sometimes. And we're really afraid sometimes to dive into really deep stuff. It's just not easy. And I would be lying to you if right now I didn't tell you my stomach is in knots.

I did not sleep at all last night. I was tossing and turning because when I get up here, as I've told you guys before, the thing that weighs heavily on my shoulders is presenting God's word to you in truth. And so I'm going to do my best to do that today. Being created in the image and the likeness of God. Let me ask you guys a question.

Raise your hands. Who in this room is immortal? One right answer. Everybody raise your hand. There is not a person, not a human, not a being on this planet that is not immortal.

You are going to one of two places for eternity. When you're done on this earth, you go to heaven or you go to hell. But you will live eternally in one of two places. In eternal goodness or eternal damnation. And I think sometimes we walk around and we forget who we are walking around with.

We forget who we're sitting next to. We're sitting next to immortals. Immortals that were crafted, that were created by God in his image. Think about that for just a moment. When you look around the room, please take just a second.

Look around the room from what you can see. I know it's kind of dark. Look around, look at the people next to you, behind you. We're pretty diverse in here. Thank you.

There's people I know that you look in here and you go, that is a weirdo. You can point at me. It's okay. We have a couple self-proclaimed weirdos in the back. I hang with them.

Those are my peoples. And sometimes we start making judgments. We start seeing people. We start assigning a value to people. based upon this physical suit.

And we forget that everyone that we walk by was created by God in his image. That means everyone. The reason that this has been laid on my heart is because the question that I cried out to God on multiple occasions over the last two or three years, I called a very good friend of mine. His name is Rodney. He's a pastor in Saskatoon, Canada right now.

He's about to plant a church very soon in South Baltimore. He is from the ghetto in South Baltimore. Grew up fatherless, single mother home, judged constantly, even now as a pastor because of the color of his skin, because he wears Jordans, because he doesn't look the part often times. And I called him one day, and I had some really crazy dreams, and I told him, a race war is coming. Why?

And he and I had a long conversation, and I was weeping on the phone because this is my brother, and I'm watching what's going on in the news. Why is it that we have such problems with people? People that are not like us, whether it's our race, whether it's somebody who has a different sexuality than us, whether it's somebody who makes less money than us, whether it's somebody that we think might not have the same education as us, what is it about us that just can't grasp that the other person we're looking at and judging and dressing down is a creature created in God's image? I want to read a quote to you. I promise this is going to get real encouraging here in like 20 minutes.

Pastor and author Kent Hughes writes, consider this, though you could travel a hundred times the speed of light past countless yellow-orange stars to the edge of the galaxy and swoop down to the fiery glow located a few hundred light years below the plain of the Milky Way, though you could slow to examine the host of most young stars, luminous among the gas and the dust. Though you could witness a star's birth in all your stellar journeys, you would never see anything equal to the birth and wonder of a human being. And that is because God created us in his image. We cannot forget, church, that the thing that should drive us, the vision that my brother gave you today of people coming to Jesus, thousands upon thousands upon thousands coming to Jesus, we should be motivated by the fact that everyone we see and meet is an eternal, immortal soul. And they have one of two places to go.

And the way that we interact with them, the way that we reflect our God's love, the way that we talk to them, we're helping them go one way or the other. I don't care what political party you vote for. I don't care if you live in the nicest house on the north end or Atlantis off Norfolk Ave. They are all images of the most high God. So where I'm going to start today, that is my preface for you.

Because as I read this to you and as we try to dive in deep, I want you to take that thought, that understanding, that reality as we go through this and let this really sink in to your heart. Because what my hope is, is as we leave today, we leave with two things. When we look ourself in the mirror in the morning, we think differently about who we are. And when we sit down next to somebody at the mall, or we get, we see somebody get angry, or we're watching the news and we're getting angry at people because of the way they're acting, that we think about the reality of the judgment we are making upon someone who is an image of God. God says, as you do to the least of these, you do unto me.

And the reason for that is he created every human on this planet in his image and for his purpose. Let me pray. Lord, I pray right now that you would speak through me today. Move my flesh out of the way. Move my personal opinions out of the way and allow truth to be spoken through your word today, Lord.

I pray, Lord, that we would all be open, including myself, to hear what you have to say through your word today. In Jesus' name, amen. I'm going to be starting here with Genesis 1, 26 and 27. This is the end of the creation. And then I'm pretty much going to stick to this.

I'm one of those people who loves to have a whole lot of scripture, and we run through the Bible like crazy. But today, I'm going to stay right here. And I'm going to hit this one scripture hard, and we're going to digest this scripture. Because I think so many times, how many people here know the creation story? Like really well.

It goes something a little like this, and God said, and it was created, and God said, and it was created, and God said, and it was created, and he created them out of the dust, and it was done, and he said it was good. And then Adam and Eve did something real stupid, and fall of man, rebellion, redemption, and then, well, we all know how the story ends. And I think sometimes that we need to go back, and I know it's hard, because when you start getting into Leviticus, it gets hard. It's like the middle of the book where you're like, it just got real slow, Lord. Do I really have to keep reading?

But we need to study it out. We need to understand it and know it, because every part of God's word is useful. And if you skip the beginning, and you don't fully understand and grasp the beginning, then you have set a faulty foundation for the rest of the book. So we need to understand and grasp the creation. Genesis 1, 26 or 27, this is the ESV.

That's what I usually read out of. Then God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them.

When we read this, the first thing I want us to pay attention to is the difference between every other part of creation. Verses 11 through 25 in the creation of man. Through the rest of this chapter, it is God said, and it was done. And he made them according to their kind. That is a phrase you will hear 10 times in Genesis chapter 1, verses 11 through 25.

He made them according to their kind. This is very different than let us make man in our image and our likeness. That is very different. That sets us apart. That takes this last little chunk of creation and It says, this is something different.

The other part here that we can see immediately is that we see that everything kind of slowed down, and it's no longer just God said, it is let us. Now this is a group decision. The triune God, God, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are now together creating man. Let us make God in our image. That's important.

That's an important thing to see and to think about. We are not just another creation. We're not just kind of slid in with the rest of the creation, the creeping things, the birds, the fish, the beast, the cattle of the field. We're not just slid in there. We are the crown jewel of His creation.

We are the last thing. Another thing that we notice, and this goes, jumps forward to Genesis 2-7, is that with every other thing, they were made and they took off, right? He made them, created them. Now they're beings. Genesis 2-7 tells us that when He created man, He literally breathed life into them.

God breathed His own breath into us to create us. He didn't do that with anything else. With nothing else that was created, it doesn't say God breathed life into them. God created them out of the dust, and they went into being. With us, we were created out of the dust, and then in order to bring the life, in order to bring the image that God wanted from us, He literally breathed life into us.

There's just something that makes that different. When the very breath of the Almighty God is what created us. Now I know I have been a part of Reformed churches. I've been a part of Pentecostal churches. I grew up in a Baptist and then non-denominational charismatic church.

And so I know, coming from especially a Baptist and a Reformed background, that we can harp really, really hard on just how bad we are. And I have a disclaimer here in just a minute for the rest of my message that I am going to throw at you. This message is really deep, and I could really honestly probably do four months worth of messages on this in a theological, doctrinal, let's dig real deep kind of thing. But that's not what God told me to do. But I need us to understand something.

And that I feel, what the Lord impressed upon my heart is that so often we come in here, and let me tell you, I know that I kind of lead the pack as far as Salt Church is concerned, bringing the hammer. It's kind of like, Leon gets up there, and he brings this nice, encouraging message. Brother John gets up here, he brings a really nice, encouraging message. And then Chris comes up, you know, three, four times a year, and he brings the sledgehammer to, like, make us all feel bad. That's not this message.

This message is to encourage you. It's to make you stop and think and understand that you are not just another creature. You are different from your dog. Your bird, your cat, I don't care, cat people, how much you love your cat, you are better and on a different playing field than they are. All we have to do is read Genesis and understand that God created us differently and that he gave us dominion over them.

And that's one of the first things that Adam is given when he's done is he's given charge. God calls all of the beasts to him, everything to him in the Garden of Eden and says, now, Adam, I want you to name them. God could have named them. It would have been real easy. God could have done it like that.

But he didn't. He created man in his image, put him somewhere, gave him dominion over something, and then gave him charge and responsibility. We're different. Here's your first three blanks. And we don't have a whole lot of blanks today because I just, I'd just rather you listen.

When God creates the animals, he saw that it was good. We all know that, right? We know that word well. It was always good. When God creates man and woman, what does he do?

He blesses them. He doesn't just say, oh, that was good. He blesses them. At the end of the sixth day, this is right after the creation of man, all of a sudden it goes from, and it was good, to it was very good. You see, when God created man, he saw that what he had done in putting himself, putting his image on this earth, was not just a good thing, but a very good thing.

It is so important for us to get the significance of this, to see the intrinsic value that God himself placed upon us, and from the beginning of creation. Theologian and pastor Anthony Hokema says this. In describing us as the image of God, he said, it describes not just something that man has, but it is something that man is. How different would it be if we grasped this, and when we looked in the mirror in the morning, dealing with our depression and our anxiety and our self-doubt and our issues upon issues because of the hurt and the pain that we've dealt with because of sin. We looked in the mirror, and instead of seeing this broken, hurting, worthless person, we saw the image of God staring back at us.

The image of the image of the most high God is staring back at you in the mirror. They have the image of God. In the morning, he made you wonderfully and fearfully, and he made you in his image. Here's the disclaimer, and I actually put this in red, because I want to make sure that we understand this. What we're doing is diving into the deep end, and I'm catching just the shallow end of the deep end.

And to really go into this, like I said, would take weeks, but we do need to understand that the fall of man affected the image that we portray. It affected it. It tainted it. It corrupted it. And it required sacrifice of his only son to bring redemption in order to bring that image back into what it was truly created to be.

And so I don't have the time to go way down this trail and really, really describe to you the inner workings of this, but I need you to understand that there is a relationship between the fall of man and sin and what it has done to our world, and it's different. When Adam and Eve sinned and brought sin into this world, it brought sickness, it brought death. But this is a capital B-U-T. We may be broken, we may be tainted, and we may deal with sin, but we are still created in the image of God. When Noah, God is talking to Noah and he's giving him the rules after the flood.

Do you know what the rule and why the rule for murder was taking someone else's life? God said to Noah, if someone spills someone else's blood, his blood must be spilt because I created man in my image. It didn't stop. God has created you in his image, and while it may be broken, it may not be the image that God originally planned for. It is different than it was when it was perfect that day in Eden, you are still created in his likeness.

You are still made to reflect the very image of God. Paul says in Colossians 3.10 and Ephesians 4.24, that it is by the gospel that the image of God in us is renewed or made new. And so that is the relationship, and I know this is hard to grasp.

I was trying to figure out how could, what type of image could I give you to kind of explain this to you to make it more simple, but all I can tell you is you can go study this out more to fully understand it. But we are still the image of God, and it is by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and salvation that that image becomes perfect again. Now we're going to jump into how God created us, and I'm going to go through this really quick because I need to get to the final two points that I have for you guys today. God created us to be like him, intelligent beings. Guys, your intelligence, that's not just something that like God was up there rolling the dice.

You know, maybe I'll make this one real dumb. Maybe I'll make this guy, well, he's okay. He'll get bees in school. This dude over here, he is just full-on smart. We are created with an intelligence that no other animals are fully created with.

God created us with his intelligence. Why? Because we had a purpose. When he put us on this earth, he gave us dominion over it. He didn't just like throw us on the earth.

He gave it to us to cultivate. One of Adam's first charges was name the animals, and then it was to cultivate the land. Because of sin, our intelligence has been used for all sorts of really bad stuff. But the intelligence that you're created with, your mind was created in the image of the mind of God. Inside that intelligence is creativity.

You ever wondered, man, how do we create things? How do we come up with these things? Just look back at our God. He created everything around you. It's his creation.

Our image reflects that. It reflects who our God is. God created us to be like him, spiritual beings. We're spirits. We're not just flesh.

When our flesh rots away, we will still live on eternally as spiritual beings. It does not say that about any other thing in the Bible. No other creation is talked about as a spiritual being except God and us. We were created to be like him, spiritual. We must worship our God in spirit and in truth.

God created us to be like him, emotional. I know there's men in here right now. I know at least one who's like, yeah, right. God didn't give us emotions. We don't need emotions.

But let me tell you why he gave us emotions. First of all, what is God? God is love. God is love. God is love.

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God is love. God Emotions, because we had to be able to feel empathy, sympathy, mercy, grace. If you can't feel those things for another person or towards a God, you cannot live in relationship with them. Can you imagine living with a person for the rest of your life as a husband or a wife, and there are marriages like this, and just pray. Where there is no love shown, no mercy, no grace, no empathy, no sympathy.

It's just two beings in the same house. That's not relationship. So God gave us emotions. How many times throughout his word do we see him showing grace, showing love, showing mercy, and at times righteous anger. And the reason, and these may be a little out of whack from What's On Your Thing.

I'm sorry, I was moving stuff around this morning as God was speaking to me about 2.30 in the morning. God created us to be like him, relational beings. He did not design us to be alone. Do you know who he designed us to live in relationship with?

Him. We were created and put on this earth so that we could live in the perfect relationship with God. His design was to live here with us. When you look back before the fall, what did he do with Adam and Eve? He walked with them through the garden.

He lived in relationship with them. That was his design. That is why there was a requirement for a sacrifice after the fall is because he had to come up with a way in order to reconcile with us, because he could not be around sin, to live back in the perfect relationship. And he desires for us to have that relationship with him and with each other. God himself is not alone.

It tells us, seated at his right hand is who? His son. Here it says, let us make them in our image. He made us like him, a relational being. Can you imagine, just for a second, living in the perfect relationship with our God?

Walking through the garden with God, uninhibited by sin, sickness, death, living eternally with our God. That was the design. And that is what we are headed towards again because of salvation and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. But that's what he designed us for. Relationship, love, care, sympathy.

We're still designed for that. It's a broken design. Our desires are broken. The way we see things are broken and tainted by sin. But God still designed us for that.

You are still a reflection of the very image of God. If you go do a word study, and I'm going to hit this very shallow. So please, I'm sure there's going to be some people who are checking off there like, oh, theologically, this dude needs help. This is very quick. If you do a word study on image and likeness, you will find out that part of those two words and part of the things that they actually annotate is that our posture towards God is actually facing him.

The image that he puts on us, the likeness that is also part of our posture is towards him, looking towards him. And the fall created us in a way that our posture changed, and we no longer look towards him. Ecclesiastes 3.11 tells us that eternity was set in our hearts. What that means is that as long as we're on this earth, there is this thing in our hearts that desires perfect fellowship with God.

And that we will go searching for this perfect fellowship until we find ourselves in eternity. You wonder why people are looking for things. You wonder why they look towards drugs, towards alcohol, towards sex, towards relationships with other human beings. You want to know why you keep trying to fill that void with boyfriends or girlfriends or addictions? It's because what has been set in your heart from the beginning of time was eternity.

And the only thing that can fill that void is the perfect relationship with Jesus Christ. And as long as you're on this planet, even when you are a Christian and you have a personal relationship with the Lord, there is still going to be this yearning, this desire for something more as God draws us closer and closer and closer to him. And one day, one day we will get to live with him in perfect relationship again. And that yearning, that desire, that emptiness, that hold that we feel is gone. But he placed it in us so that we would never stop looking for him.

That we would never stop running towards him. The problem is, sin took over, it tainted our view, it tainted our image, and now we look towards everything else. I want to give you a quick picture of who God is. You can run as fast and as far as you want to run. And God is pursuing you.

There's this thing where we say, oh, I found Jesus. You didn't find Jack. He's been chasing you and chasing you and chasing you. Oh, we led five people to the Lord. You didn't lead anybody to the Lord.

The Holy Spirit's been drawing them and God's been chasing them from the beginning of time. And he finally had their eyes opened and drew them to the Savior who then brought them to God. But God never stops chasing us from the beginning of time, the moment that sin entered in. God never stopped chasing. His people kept running, kept rebelling, and God was always there chasing them.

Seeing them, desiring to have the relationship that He created us for. And it only requires one thing. We know that someday we will get to live with Him in perfect relationship, in perfect unity, in a perfect place if we give our hearts to the Lord. The other option is not so good. And I'm not saying that if there is somebody here today who is not giving their hearts to the Lord, I am not trying to scare you.

I'm trying to motivate the people that are sitting next to you. I want to read a quote by C.S. Lewis, who I like, I love reading, and as I was studying for this, this quote literally hit me between the eyes. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses.

To remember that the dullest, most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which if you saw right now, you would be strongly tempted to worship. Or else, a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only a nightmare. All day long we are in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with this awe and this circumspection proper to them that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another. All friendships, all loves, all play, all politics, there are no ordinary people.

You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, these are mortal. And their life is to ours is the life of a gnat. But it is immortals to whom we joke with, work with, marry, divorce, snub, and exploit. Immortal whores or everlasting splendors.

When we interact with other people as a Christian, as a son, as a daughter of the Most High God, as one who is created in the very likeness of the Most High. Every person that we see, every person we interact with, that person you got angry with and wanted to knock out, that is an immortal being who was created in the image of the Most High God. Fathom that for a moment. The things that you do to the least of these, you do unto me, because what you do to the least of these, you are doing to someone who was created in the very image of me. And that should motivate us.

That should motivate us when we interact with every person every day. We know they're going to one of those two places. It should make us love. It should make us care. It should make us reach out, pray, and share the gospel with every last person that we meet.

And it should make us want to show so much mercy and so much grace to every person that we talk to. Because we know that our actions with them are helping them go in one of two places. My daughter the other day, I'm not a good driver. At all. Bobby will tell you this.

I drove him and his wife Lisa through Boston. And it scared him, I think. Just a little bit. And I had my daughter in my truck the other day, and it was a really, really long day coming back. And if you've been coming back at like 5 o'clock from Richmond back into Newport News, into Hampton, through the tunnels, you know, right?

And I was not in a good mood. And as I was weaving and bobbing and cutting people off and getting angry, I hear this little voice from the back. Hey, Dad. Do I have a Salt Church sticker on the back of your truck? Ooh, into the slow lane.

See, it's because I'm representing Salt Church. And I can just see me cutting somebody off and them looking up at saltchurch.org when they got home because it's right there on the back of my truck. No, hey, look. That guy preaches.

But see, that's how we should feel every day. We are the bearers, the image bearers of God. And when people interact with us, what they see and who they see is God. We did a marriage class a few weeks ago, and he talked about being an image bearer. And he talked about what that meant.

And he said, it's not just a bumper sticker. It's not just raising your hand and saying, I'm a Christian. He said, it is literally living a life understanding that everything that you do is a reflection upon God because you were created in his image. Just, man, I hope it hits you guys to understand this is not a joke. This isn't some, like, sci-fi movie where we're all little gods and goddesses and immortals.

This is real. You are an immortal being, and you will go to one of two places as an immortal being. And everyone around you, everyone you talk to, regardless of their skin, where they're from, doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what they did in the past. They were made in the image of God.

And they are going to heaven or to hell. And with your help, with your love, with your extended hand from God, you might reach them. Two last points. Matt's about to unplug me. One of them is a, these are both blanks for you.

I, I want you to look yourself in the mirror over the next few days. When you look at that person looking back at you, I want you to remind yourself, I am an image bearer of God. That has two massive implications. The first one is this. You are valuable.

I know that it's real like, I don't know the right word for it right now. It's kind of a fad to self-deprecate how bad we are, how horrible we are as people, bang ourselves over the head with our sin. You are so horrible. You are so bad. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I am here to tell you today that God made you valuable. When you look at yourself in the mirror, I don't care what has been done to you by other people, how much you've been hurt. I don't care how worthless you feel. I want you to look yourself in the mirror and over and over and over again say, I am an image bearer of God and I am valuable. God made you special.

You are the crown jewel of his creation and you were made to reflect his image. I know there's other people in this room who deal with what I deal with, which is depression and anxiety, PTSD. I look myself sometimes in the morning and I don't even want to wake up. I wish I could just die. And after reading this quote, I have looked myself in the mirror for the last couple of months.

And every time I felt like that, I said, no, no, you are the very image of the most high God. And it doesn't matter how bad you're hurting. It doesn't matter what's happened to you or where you're at. It doesn't matter if you feel like you're a failure or not. If you feel like you hate your job, if you don't know where you're supposed to be going, you're an image bearer of the most high God, and God made you for a purpose.

Secondly, all of humanity, all of them, every last one is made in the image of God. God, I don't care what they do to you. I don't care what they've done. I don't care what their political stance is. I don't care.

Any of that matters. None of it. They were made in the very likeness of God. And that requires us to show them grace and mercy and compassion and love and forgiveness. If you have heard my personal story, it's online.

I deal with that daily. And the last year, as I've been stewing over this and praying over this, and then the last couple weeks studying this out, I have been so convicted about my thoughts toward another human being because there's days I want him dead. And God has said, no, he is mine. He is mine. And he was created just like you in my image.

That requires us. That requires a response from us. Guys, we can skip to the rebellion and the redemption and to the end of the story really fast, but if we forget who we were created to be and the purpose that God had for us and why he created us the way that he did, if we forget these things, then our motivation to share God's love and share the gospel will not last long. It will come real fast, real quick, that we will be able to judge and pass judgment and look at people the wrong way. They're too far gone.

It will come quickly. Man, as I'm closing this out, I'm realizing this was another sledgehammer. I'm sorry. I really want to encourage you guys today as I close with the thought that you first are created in the image of God. That you're so valuable.

Each and every one of you was created by God before you were a sparkle in your parents' eyes. And no matter what has happened to you, no matter what you've come from, no matter what you've done, you are still created in the image of God. God, and he has a purpose and a plan for your life that will blow your mind. And second is that as a church, that should motivate us to chase after every person we come across with a love of God and understanding that they, just like us, are reflecting the image of God. Lord, let's pray.

Lord, it is no small wonder that we were created in your image. And Lord, it is no small wonder that despite sin, despite the fall, you continue to chase us day after day after day because you love us and because you value us. Lord, I pray today that as we leave here, we would leave encouraged about our own value, about who we are and about the people around us. Our friends, our family, the people that we have the hardest time accepting and dealing with. They are in your image, Lord.

And we love them. Lord, I thank you again for the word. I thank you for taking us deep today. I pray, Lord, that your word has effect on all of our hearts and our lives. In your name we pray.

Amen.