God's Image Bearers

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But today we are continuing our study of Genesis.
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For those of you who have been here, that is something that you know we have been in and for quite a while.
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We started in September, October of last year and we spent several months just looking at the first five verses of Genesis and asking a lot of questions and going over some of the debate around the origins of the text and what it means, and what it means when it says that God is the creator of everything, of heaven and of earth.
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And how long did it take God to create the world and how long ago was it? Those were all questions that we looked at, those were all questions that we sought to answer from the text.
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And today we are going to continue that study and we are going to look at something that really is the fulfillment of the purpose of creation.
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Because as we have seen so far, there have been six creation days and those six days correspond three and three.
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The first three days, God is giving form to formlessness.
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The Bible says when He first created the world, it was formless and empty.
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And in the first three days, He gave form to the formless.
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He gave light, which separated light from darkness.
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He gave a firmament, what we call the atmosphere, and He gave the atmosphere to separate the water above from the water below and to give us a sky and a breathable atmosphere that we can, that's not too much pressure and not enough pressure, it's just enough around us to give us what we need to live and survive.
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And on day three, He separated the waters from the land, thus providing a place for land, animals, and people to dwell.
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So days one through three was giving form to formlessness.
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And then in day four, He begins to fill that which was void.
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Remember, it was formless and void.
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Void means empty.
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He took that which was empty and He filled it.
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First He filled the heavens with the stars and the sun and the moon.
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The heavenlies, the light-bearing bodies were formed on day four to fill the heavens.
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On day five, He filled the skies with birds and He filled the seas with fish and with swimming creatures that swarm in the sea.
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And then on day six, He created the beasts and He created man.
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Today we're going to look at the creation of man.
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But before we do, I want to make an important point that I haven't made yet.
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As I was thinking about the things that I've said so far, I said, you know, there's a very important note that I need to mention before we move on.
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In the creation, days one, two, three, four, five, and six, God is creating and He is establishing His primacy over everything.
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In the ancient world, men would worship the sun.
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The Egyptians worshiped Ra, the sun god.
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Other ancient people would worship the moon.
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Some would worship animals and we've seen this.
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We've seen people who carve animals into idols.
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Even the people of Israel took the gold and turned it into an idol, the calf.
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When God, through Moses, tells us how He created the world, He shows us that He is creating the world and it is not divine.
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It is creature.
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He is divine.
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He is creator.
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God does not share His authority with the sun.
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God does not share His authority with the moon.
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And God does not share His authority with anything else.
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He is God and everything else is creature.
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Everything else is part of creation.
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So that the ancient ones, when they would look on these texts, they would say, see, our gods are the sun.
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Our gods are the moon.
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But the God of Israel is the God of the sun and the moon and the stars and the animals and everything else.
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He is the God of all.
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So that's what we see in the beginning of Genesis.
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The establishing of the primacy, the superiority of God over all things.
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And we see a distinction between Him and His creation.
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But then we see another distinction.
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A distinction between all of creation and one very specific and particular creation.
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Man.
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Only man is given the distinction of the image of God.
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And so that's what we're going to study today.
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What does it mean to be God's image bearers? Let's stand and read the text to give honor and reverence to it.
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And we're going to read verses 26 and 27.
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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.
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So God created man in His own image.
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In the image of God, He created him, male and female.
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He created them.
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Father in heaven, I thank you for your word.
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May you now keep me from error as I preach, for I am a fallible man capable of preaching error.
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May you open the hearts of unbelievers to hear and understand and believe your word.
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And for those who are believers, Lord, may they be encouraged.
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May they be challenged.
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May they be called to repentance and a closer walk with Christ through this message today.
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In Christ's name, amen.
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I'm often amazed at how God works in regard to the timing of my messages.
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As most of you know, I preach verse by verse.
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So it's very hard to plan out, well, this is going to be a special day and so I'm going to preach a special message on this special day.
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If you go verse by verse, you're sort of at the mercy of the text.
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And there have been times in the past where on Mother's Day, I preached on hell because that's where I was in the text and it made for an interesting Mother's Day.
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The point is, though, you know, I preach through books of the Bible for the most part.
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There are times when we go off, but for the most part, we're preaching through books of the Bible and right now we're preaching through Genesis.
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But it just so happens that there are times when God orchestrates very interesting collaborations between the relevance of the world, what's happening in the world and the relevance of the message.
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Messages are always relevant because they're always from God's Word, but sometimes because of what's happening, there's an extra bit of relevance that is introduced.
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And the reason why I mention this is because, as Mike already said in his prayer, today is Sanctity of Life Sunday.
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When you came in this morning, hopefully you were handed a card.
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We didn't stuff them in the bulletin because we didn't have enough to go in all the bulletins.
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If you did not get a card, I'll make you a photocopy of one.
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What that card is, is it's the nest.
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It's a woman's center that we as a church support.
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And this being Sanctity of Life Sunday, we wanted to remind you that we support the women's center and encourage you to do the same.
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You can do that on your own.
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You can support them through the church or you can support them through your own way, whether it's some kind of a financial donation or even maybe going and offering volunteer service.
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They're always in need of people who can help.
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And I mention again, this is Sanctity of Life Sunday.
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What does that even mean? Well, it's a reminder.
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It's a reminder of the Holocaust that is happening all around us in abortion clinics every day.
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On January 13th, 1984, President Ronald Reagan issued a proclamation designating January 22nd as the first National Sanctity of Life Day.
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Why did he choose January 22nd? Because it was on January 22nd, 1973, that United States Supreme Court legalized abortion on demand in all 50 states.
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So churches all around the United States today are using this Sunday to celebrate God's gift of life, to commemorate the millions of lives that have been lost to abortion, and to commit ourselves yet again to the protection of human life and the preaching of the sanctity of life at every stage, as Mike has already so well said, from the very moment of conception.
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So what better day to talk about the image of God? What better day to preach on this subject than on the day that we're looking at this important event in the life of the church? And I want to say this from the outset.
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Today's sermon is not about abortion.
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I preached on abortion before.
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I preached on the horrors of abortion.
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In years past, I've dealt with that subject.
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We did a whole entire ethics class in our Sovereign Grace Academy, and one of the nights we looked at was life ethics, and we looked at the ethics of abortion.
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And so if you're interested in that, we have plenty of audio that you can go back and listen to.
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Today is not a sermon about abortion.
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It's about the image of God.
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But if there is one reason why we should denounce and decry abortion, it is that it is an attack on the most helpless of God's image bearers.
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It is an attack against the smallest and helpless of God's image bearers and those that are still in the womb.
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The very reason that our land is plagued by this violent, atrocious sin is because we no longer believe as a society that men and women are made in the image of God, that we are created to glorify Him, and that human life is sacred from the very moment it is created in the world.
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The reason for the rise in abortion is because of the devaluation of human life.
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So really, today is about understanding what it is we bear as human beings that makes us different, that makes us unique from all of creation.
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Dare I say what makes us special? Now, it is not going to be a self-help message, nor is it going to be one that tries to build your ego.
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But you are unique among all of creation because you, as a human being, bear the image of God.
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You may love your puppies and your kittens.
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They don't bear the image of God.
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You may love your goldfish.
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They don't bear the image of God.
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You may love the trees and the forests.
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They don't bear the image of God.
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Only one part of God's creation was known as God's image-bearer, and that was man.
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So today we're going to ask two questions.
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I don't have points today.
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I have questions.
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I'm going to ask two questions that I'm going to seek to answer.
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Number one, what does it mean to bear the image of God? Because people say it.
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People repeat it.
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People, I think, often get it confused.
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So we're going to ask the question, what does it mean to bear the image of God? And number two, who is it that bears the image of God? You might think, well, that's an easy one.
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Hopefully by the time we get there, you'll understand why I'm adding that as a second question.
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So number one, what does it mean to bear the image of God? Number two, who is it that bears the image? So let's look at the first question.
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What does it mean to bear the image of God? Well, we see it in the text right here.
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All it says is that God said, let us make man in our image.
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Now we're going to deal with the plural pronoun in a different sermon.
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I've already sort of dealt with it earlier when I talked about the Trinity as being the triune God who created all things.
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So don't want us to get hung up on that this morning.
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You know me.
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I'm not going to just bypass it.
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I'll be back.
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But it says, let us, God speaking, make man in our image and after our likeness.
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And it says he made man and woman in his image.
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So we know that this is something that didn't belong to just Adam, but it was Adam and Eve.
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But what is it? What is, in Latin it's called the imago dei.
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You might hear me say that a few times.
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The image of God, the imago dei.
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What is it? Well, some people, some, I would call them crass literalists.
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Some people believe that God looks like us.
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And when it says that we bear the image of God, that we're literally bearing his image, that God looks like a man.
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You say nobody believes that.
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There's a name for it.
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Anthropomorphite is the word.
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It's believed in the Mormon Church.
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It's believed in some other cultish groups.
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It is believed God has a figure and form of a man.
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And when he made us in his image, all that means is he made us look essentially like him.
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Arms, legs, eyes, ears, and so on.
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I want to be kind and say that's baloney.
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That doesn't sound very kind.
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Let me say it again.
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That's not right.
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The Bible doesn't indicate that we look like God.
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The Bible says God is what? Spirit.
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And those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.
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And so to say that the reason why we're made in the image of God is because we look like God, I think is not only crass literalism, I think it's childish interpretation.
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And it misunderstands the true point of what is trying to be stated.
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I want to give you a thought.
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The image of God is not something that we bear on the outside.
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The image of God is something that we bear on the inside.
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And it expresses itself in our human nature.
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The image of God is not what we look like, but the image of God is what we are like.
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It begins, I'm going to give you a few things.
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I'm going to write them on the board.
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Brother Dan went to all the trouble of bringing me my board.
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I might as well use it.
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You guys know that I like to sometimes use the white board.
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I'm going to give you three categories that express the image of God in man that we see in man that we don't see in the rest of God's creation as we see it in man.
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The first that we see is personality.
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Now, when I say personality, you might think, well, you've got a good personality and you will.
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No, you have a great personality.
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Everybody loves you.
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No, that's not what I mean.
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Personality indicates the ability to differentiate and distinguish and understand self, to understand personhood.
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Personality refers not just to how you behave, but the fact that you behave at all.
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Rocks don't have personality.
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Personality is made up of three important components, intellect, emotion, and will.
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Your intellect is how you know things, your emotion is how you respond to things, and your will is what you do in response to things.
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Your intellect, emotions, and will is what separates you.
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It's what makes you personal.
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You are a personal being.
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Guess what? God is a personal being.
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Some people believe in what is called deism.
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Deism says that there is a God who created all things, but he's impersonal.
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You can't talk to him, and he won't talk to you.
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There's no interconnection between you and God.
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God is simply a deity who formed the world.
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This is what happens when people pursue something called intelligent design.
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You've heard of intelligent design? Intelligent design says, yes, there's an intelligence that created the world.
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It has to be because there's so much order in the world, in this cosmos.
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It's not chaos, it's cosmos.
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There's order, and we see in this order a demand for a creator, and because there's a demand for a creator, he must be powerful.
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But we don't know who he is, so he's impersonal.
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Some of our founding fathers were deists.
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Not all of them, but essentially they believed that there was something that created the world, but they didn't know what, and they didn't think that he was a personal God.
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Many people, in fact, the modern expression of faith, if you talk to young people today, most young people are not Christians.
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Most young people are deists.
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Yeah, I think something created everything, but I don't know what it is, and I don't know who he is, and I really don't care.
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But maybe when I die, I'll go to heaven, if I'm good.
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That's the religion of modern man.
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It's moralistic, therapeutic deism.
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If I'm moral, I'll feel good, and when I die, I'll go to heaven, if there's a heaven, and if he cares.
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It's not the God of the Bible.
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The God of the Bible is personal.
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The God of the Bible loves.
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The God of the Bible has wrath.
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The God of the Bible is able to commune with his people, and he chooses to commune with his people, so much so that he sent his son into the world to demonstrate who he is.
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Jesus said, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father.
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I always tell people, if you're having trouble knowing what God is like, look at Christ.
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If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.
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He's God in the flesh.
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God is personal.
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You're personal, and this is one of the ways in which you bear the image of God.
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It's simply through personality.
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Not your personality quirks, but your personality.
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Who you are.
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You bear the image of God.
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The second thing, and this one is even more important, is your morality.
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This is where we really begin to distinguish ourselves from the other beasts.
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Man is essentially made up like the other beasts.
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You know, I went to the zoo yesterday with my children.
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It's amazing how many things that we share in common with the apes, as far as the way that we look, and the way that our hands move, and the way that we move around, and the way we interconnect with our families.
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And I can see how someone based on that could come up with the idea that, well, maybe we're in the same family as the apes, and maybe we are just a higher expression of that particular family of animal.
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But as I said last week, and if you weren't here last week, I said, isn't there such a tremendous difference between man and ape? I mean, they say there's only a 1% difference in our DNA, but in that 1% we go from throwing scat to going to the moon.
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It's a huge 1% difference.
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And here's the point.
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One of the things that drives our difference is our morality.
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Man has an inherent sense of ought and ought not.
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Do you realize Adam and Eve understood ought and ought not even prior to the fall? You say, wait a minute, Pastor.
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The Bible says they didn't know evil until the fall.
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That's right.
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They didn't know it experientially, but they understood right from wrong, because when Satan tempted Eve, he said what? He said, eat of this fruit.
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And she said, no.
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God said, on the day I eat of it, I'll die.
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She understood consequence.
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She understood ought and ought not.
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She had an inherent sense of righteousness and unrighteousness.
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That's part of the image of God.
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You know dogs don't have that.
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Dogs operate off of instinct.
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Man operates off of conscience.
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Animals operate.
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This is why there's no such thing as rape in the animal kingdom, but there's rape in the human kingdom.
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Because among men, we know that it is wrong to force onto someone else something they don't want.
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Animals do it every day.
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It's how species are propagated.
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Nobody goes out and tries to take a gazelle to court.
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Well, maybe they do.
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But you understand the point.
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Man is given a morality that's different, and we understand righteousness and unrighteousness, and we are distinguished from all other created beasts by virtue of morality.
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Now, the third thing is even more important.
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As I said, it gets even further.
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Because you say, well, my dog has a personality.
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Well, maybe.
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He has intellect, emotion, and will, but really doesn't.
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He doesn't have instinct.
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He doesn't have morality, and he certainly doesn't have the last one, spirituality.
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Now, when I use the word spirituality, I have to be careful.
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Because there's a lot of people today you go out witnessing.
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Can I tell you about Jesus? I don't want to hear about Jesus.
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I'm spiritual.
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Demons are spiritual.
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Be more specific.
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I'm serious.
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I mean, I'm spiritual.
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What does that mean? The truth is if you don't have Christ and you haven't been born again, you're not spiritual.
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You're spiritually dead.
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The Bible says we are dead in trespasses and sin until such time as God gives us a new heart, and in that new heart we become spiritually alive.
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You see, on the day that Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they died spiritually.
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And while they maintained personality and they maintained a sense of morality, spiritually they were dead.
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And every one of us is dead spiritually until such time as God gives us regeneration, a new heart.
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And when we get that new heart and God awakens our dead spirit, we are then able to commune with him in a way that we couldn't before.
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The Bible says that the unbeliever is not in a relationship with God where there is communion.
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In fact, the relationship is confusion.
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You go to 1 Corinthians and what does it say? The unrighteous cannot receive the things of God because they are foolishness to him.
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Because his spirit is messed up.
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His morality is messed up.
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His mind is messed up.
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Every part of him is messed up because of sin.
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So we have three things that designate the image of God in man, personality, morality, and spirituality.
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And these separate us from all other beings in the universe.
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Now, I want to add a couple of things.
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I'm not going to write them on the board, but if you're taking notes and you're interested, here's a few other things that separate us from all other things that define the image of God within us.
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Creativity, I think, is a mark of the image of God.
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The ability to create is a product of the fact that we were made by the best creator in the universe.
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We were created by a creator who was a genius, and therefore we see some of his genius seeping out into the creators in this world.
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Even atheists, y'all.
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I remember R.C.
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Stroll said this one time.
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Man, it cracked my skull when he said it.
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He said, do you realize when the atheist painter paints a painting that is beautiful, he's doing it because he bears the image of God in spite of the fact that he doesn't believe in God.
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When the man who writes the song that is beautiful and wonderful, even if he doesn't believe in God, he's bearing the image of God in spite of himself.
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What a thing to consider that even men who hate God glorify God in the act of creating because they're demonstrating that they're made by the greatest creator in the universe, the one who created the universe.
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So creativity, relatability, is also something that we share.
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We can relate to one another.
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Sometimes we don't relate to each other well.
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But the ability to relate to one another, to feel for one another, to hurt when another hurts, to be joyful when another is joyful, to love.
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I would say to love is one of the grandest of things that we have as bearing the image of God.
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We are able to love because God has put his image within us.
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And that part of that is the ability to relate and love.
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Lastly is rationality.
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Is man rational? Well, not always.
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Oftentimes we do things based on anger or emotion.
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But we have amazing ability to rationalize.
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This is why we can be so creative.
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This is why we can build hospitals that make medicines that heal people.
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Because all of these things are part of that rational mind that God has given.
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And God has given some amazing minds to some amazing men and women to do amazing things.
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And isn't it a shame that some of those men and women do not glorify the very God who gave them the mind to do it? Rationality, intellect, that is a part of the image of God.
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What a thing we should be thankful for.
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What a thing we should glorify God for.
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Now I want to bring up another, as we're talking about what the image of God is, I want to talk about what the image of God is not.
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Because we ask the question, what is the image of God? I would say the image of God is God's mark within us that separates us from all other creation, and we can see it bared out in our personality, in our morality, in our spirituality, and furthermore in our creativity, our relatability, and our rationality, and on and on and on and on.
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The things that we see that make man unique is not 1% of our DNA.
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It's the image of God that is stamped on us from the moment we are conceived.
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Now, what would be a wrong understanding of the image of God? I'm going to give you one today to really consider, because this I think is very important.
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There are people who believe that being made in the image of God means that we are little gods.
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Maybe you've heard little God theology.
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There's people on television, some very famous bad teachers, who will tell you that because you are made in the image of God, you are a little god.
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In fact, I want to quote one.
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Why do people have such a fit about God calling His creation, His man, not His whole creation, but His creation little gods? If He's God, what's He going to call them but the God kind? I mean, if you as a human being had a baby, you'd call it a human kind.
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If cattle have cattle, they call it cattle kind.
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So, I mean, what's God supposed to call us? Doesn't the Bible say we're created in His image? That's the argument.
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By the way, that was Joyce Meyer, if you're wondering.
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She'll tell you you're a little god.
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And I've heard him on television, man.
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I heard that one guy.
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He said, God says I am, and I say I am too.
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I'm like, step away from that lightning bolt, my friend.
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But let me just add something to that.
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Here's the reality.
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God says I am, and you're not.
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Because while you may be made in His image, you are not divine.
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The very heart of divinity in God is His absolute holiness and His absolute independence.
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You are neither holy nor are you independent.
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You're unholy.
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God had to make you and declare you holy by the work of His Son.
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But you're also not independent.
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You realize every moment of every day, of every hour, of every minute, your heart is beating because God is the one who's causing it to beat.
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One day, that's going to stop.
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But until that day, your heart will beat at the command of Almighty God.
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You are not independent.
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People express this, I'm independent.
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No, you're utterly dependent.
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And the more you understand the Christian faith, the more you will understand how absolutely, desperately dependent you are.
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This is why we worship.
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We come to the God who made us and we say, Thank you for making us.
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Thank you for saving us.
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Thank you for sustaining us.
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Because without you, I wouldn't even be dead.
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I would not be.
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God is required for me to even exist.
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Without God, I wouldn't die.
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Without God, I would be nothing.
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To say that you're a little God is an absolute repudiation of what the Bible says about God.
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God says in the book of Isaiah, Before me, there was no God formed.
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And after me, there will be no God formed.
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God is absolutely unique.
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And though we bear His image, we are not.
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So, what does it mean to bear the image of God? Well, we've seen how it is expressed in us.
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The mark of the image of God is expressed in these things.
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But then, what does it not mean? It doesn't mean that we are God's ourselves.
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And now I want to move to the second question.
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And that is the question of who.
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Who bears the image of God? And some of you say, well, that's an easy one.
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Everybody.
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Well, think about the time of Moses when this was written.
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Remember, Moses isn't writing in a vacuum.
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Moses lives in a situation where there's other people around.
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And these scriptures are going to go to the Israelites.
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But these scriptures are also going to make their way into the hands of other nations.
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And in the other nations in the ancient world, it was not readily assumed and believed that all men were created in the image of God.
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In fact, the only one who bore the image of God was the king.
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The only one who bore the image of God was the ruler or the emperor.
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He was God's image-bearer.
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No one else.
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Think about later in history, during the time of Nebuchadnezzar.
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What did Nebuchadnezzar do? He set up a statue to himself.
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And he said, well, do you come worship the statue of me? Why? Because I'm divine.
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The pharaohs believed themselves to be incarnations of the divinities.
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So Moses comes along and he pins this writing and he says, see, it is not just the king who bears the image of God, but it's man and woman and all of them.
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This is a major attack against the bad theology of the ancient world.
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And it's expressing the truth of God's creative power to make beings, reproducible beings that would all bear his image as they are produced.
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God didn't make two people who bore his image.
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He made a race of people to bear his image that began with two and became all of you.
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By the way, you all have the same mom and daddy.
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You go back far enough, you all got the same mom and daddy.
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No matter what color you are.
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We're going to talk about that in a sermon in a few weeks.
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We're going to look at the idea of race.
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There's one race.
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No matter what color you are.
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No matter what gender you are.
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And there's only two of those, by the way.
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But the point, we all hail from one family line.
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We're all sons and daughters of Noah.
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Nobody else survived the flood.
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And Noah was a son of Adam and Eve.
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Or a descendant of Adam and Eve.
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So, we're all image bearers, right? Well, there are some who don't believe that.
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There are some who believe that at the fall, Adam and Eve forfeited the image of God.
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And when they fell, the image of God was removed from them.
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And now the only people who bear the image of God are people who have been redeemed.
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I'll give you a quote.
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This is R.L.
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Dabney.
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R.L.
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Dabney is a very famous Presbyterian minister.
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And he said this.
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He said, The image of God has been lost in the fall and regained in redemption.
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Hence, it could not have consisted in anything absolutely essential to man's essence because the loss of such an attribute would have destroyed man's nature.
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So, basically what he's saying is this.
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The image of God is not essential in man because it was lost at the fall.
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So, there can be men who don't bear the image of God.
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I do not believe that.
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I do not teach that.
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And I don't believe the Bible teaches that.
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I believe the Bible teaches that every man bears the image of God.
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I'm going to give you two scriptures to use.
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If you want to look these up, you can go with me now.
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I'll show you two passages that I would use to make this argument that every person bears the image of God.
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The first is in Genesis 9 and verse 6.
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In Genesis 9 and verse 6, this is right after the flood.
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Noah has come off the flood and God is giving Noah the command for capital punishment.
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Isn't that amazing? Capital punishment goes all the way back to the post-flood epic.
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The situation that happened right after the flood.
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And this is what God says to Noah.
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Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed.
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For God made man in his own image.
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So, what is the argument? Why is murder wrong? Why is abortion wrong? Because you're attacking an image bearer of God.
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If a person doesn't bear the image of God, then this text is telling us essentially that the death penalty is unrighteous.
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God gives the death penalty to the person who murders a human being.
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Why? Because they have attacked an image bearer.
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They've attacked one who bears his image.
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Now, later in scripture in the book of James, chapter 3, it says this.
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Chapter 3, verse 9, if you're taking notes.
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James 3, verse 9, it says this.
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It's talking about our tongue.
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Noah was talking about something serious, about capital punishment, right? But James is talking about something serious, too.
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He's talking about how we use our tongues.
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What do we do with our tongues? We hurt people with our tongues, right? We talk, we speak evil against people with our tongues.
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And James said this.
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With your tongue, or with our tongue, we bless our Lord and Father.
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And with our tongue, we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.
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So what does James say? Watch how you talk to people.
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Watch how you speak to people.
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Watch how you use your tongue against your brothers and sisters.
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Because when you speak against someone, you're talking about an image bearer.
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That ought to kick us right in our gossip trousers.
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There's a quote.
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Every time we've got to open our mouth against someone, we ought to consider the fact that we're talking about an image bearer of God.
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No matter how scoundrelly they may be.
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No matter how much of a person of ill repute they may be.
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When we open our mouths against them, we are speaking against an image bearer of God.
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Keep that in mind with what we say, is James' point.
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So no, I don't believe the image of God was removed.
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But I do believe it was hurt.
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I believe the image of God was marred.
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I believe the image of God was maligned.
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I believe the image of God was damaged.
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And the illustration I give, and if you were in our systematic theology class, you've heard this because I use this in that class.
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When I was a kid, I used to draw.
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I still draw, but I really, boy, I used to just love to draw.
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This was before iPads.
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I had a pad of paper.
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And I used a big pen and I would draw.
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I'd go to work with my mom and I'd draw all day.
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And I remember when I was a teenager, my dad took me to a place called Ready Arts.
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It's a place downtown.
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It's an art store.
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And I was so fascinated because never in my life had I seen all of the different types of art canvases and paints and pens.
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And I bought charcoal pencils.
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And I went home because I knew with charcoal you could draw differently than you could with other mediums because with charcoal you can draw and then you can take your finger and you can smooth the lines and you can make shadows.
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And you can create art with charcoal that you can't do with other mediums.
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And I remember drawing with a charcoal pencil for the first time.
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And I had this beautiful picture.
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And then as I drew with it, I was laying my hand down on the paper as I drew.
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I didn't realize I had to lift my elbow and use my wrist.
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But I had my hand resting.
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And as I drew this beautiful side, I lifted up my hand and it had totally smeared the other side.
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You could still see the image.
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But the image was marred by my hand going over the charcoal.
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Beloved, the image of God is in every man, but in every man it has been marred by sin.
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The image of God is in every man, but it has been damaged by sin.
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But that is why we're so desperately in need of Christ.
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Because Christ came as the perfect image bearer.
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He bore the image of God perfectly without sin.
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And from the very moment of His conception to the moment of His resurrection and ascension, and even to this day, He continues to bear the image of God perfectly on our behalf.
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You see, as a sinner and as a broken person, I'm desperate.
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Because I've offended God.
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I have attacked the Almighty with my sin.
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God could righteously send me to hell, and I would be very worthy of it.
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No good thing that I've ever done has paid for even one of my sins.
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But God sent Jesus, and Jesus perfectly bore His image.
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Jesus kept the law from the moment He came into this world to the moment He died on the cross.
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He never broke one law.
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He never lied.
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He never cheated.
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He never stole.
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He never hated.
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Without cause, He never sinned against God.
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And when He died on the cross, He died and took my sin on Him.
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And He gave me His righteousness.
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And now I know that while I have marred the image of God, I have one who stood in my place, who perfectly bore that image for me.
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So my question to you is very simple.
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Have you trusted in Christ? And has He bore the image for you? As the Bible says this, it says something very simple.
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It says either we are in Christ or we are in our sins.
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If we are in Christ, we stand before God as righteous.
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Not righteous in ourselves, but declared righteous.
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Or we stand outside of Christ.
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And we stand worthy of His punishment.
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You have the image of God within you.
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That marred image is still there.
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But beloved, the one who bore it perfectly has extended grace.
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And He says to everyone who believes in Him, they will not perish, but will have everlasting life.
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Do you believe in Him this morning? Have you come to Him in faith and repentance? Have you trusted in Him as the perfect image bearer of God? Let us pray.
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Father in Heaven, I am so grateful.
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I'm grateful for the fact that You sent Christ into this world.
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I'm thankful that though we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
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I'm thankful for the opportunity to sing songs to You.
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Because Lord, I know that this is what You've commanded of us.
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Your Word tells us.
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Praise the Lord.
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Praise Him in the Heavens.
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Praise Him with instruments.
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And Lord, we do that because You are worthy.
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And Your Son is worthy to be praised.
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Father, as we consider this morning, what it means to be made in Your image, not only is it blessing, but it's also responsibility.
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Lord, may we understand it.
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May we live for it.
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May we trust in Christ, who is the only one who truly bore Your image perfectly.
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May we understand that apart from Him, there is no salvation.
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I pray all of this, Lord, in His name and for His sake.
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Amen.
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I want to invite you to stand with us, and we're going to sing Wonderful Maker as we prepare our hearts to receive communion.