Pastor Bobby Gilles preaches the gospel of God’s Kingdom. We learn that Christ has rescued us so we could participate in his perfect work of representing God as stewards of his creation and representing all of creation as we worship God. So be image conscious, because image is everything. Just not your image. Lector: Lindsey Blair
Pastor Bobby Gilles preaches the gospel of God’s Kingdom. We learn that Christ has rescued us so we could participate in his perfect work of representing God as stewards of his creation and representing all of creation as we worship God. So be image conscious, because image is everything. Just not your image.
Lector: Lindsey Blair
For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. 30 And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified. – Romans 8:29-30
Act 1
Good morning, my name is Bobby. I’m one of the pastor’s here. Peace be with you. We exist to reach people with the gospel, build them up as God’s church and send them wherever God leads to be champions of truth, beauty, and goodness.
Even if you’re not a Christian there’s probably something about this sense of purpose that resonates the first week of January, when we think about resolutions and goals. Maybe this is the year people finally see us as the responsible one, or the fun one or the witty, the strong, the creative one – whatever we imagine a desirable person to be.
We are an image conscious people. We want to convince others – and most of all ourselves – of our worth.
Where does this drive to make ourselves look good come from? Why does it often seem to make us more miserable, especially when we’re comparing ourselves to others? Why are we so image conscious?
Our lives have been marked by a very real failure, of ours and all our ancestors from the dawn of time. This failure is not just that we do bad things or forget to say our prayers at night. So, what is it? How do we fix it? What does it have to do with being image conscious?
We’re about to take a sweeping tour of the Bible, written by many people over thousands of years. You might think, “What do these old stories have to do with us?” Give it twenty minutes and you may see a connection – and a way forward – that you’ve not quite seen before.
Act 2
So God created human beings in his own image.
In the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
Then God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.”
In the ancient near east, anyone hearing a story about a god building something in six days or stages would think, “This story sounds like stories about temples - homes for the gods.” The original readers and hearers of Genesis would have noticed the connection between this creation story and temple stories.
In this story, all the earth is the temple of the Israelite God, and the Garden of Eden is his inner sanctum. When ancient people built temples, the last thing they did was put an image to the god inside. As the Israelite tribes first heard the Genesis story while they camped in the wilderness, newly freed from slavery in Egypt, light bulbs in their heads went off when Moses said, “So God created human beings in his own image.”
Their God made his own image. But not an idol of wood, silver, or gold. The people themselves were in God’s image, and he placed them in his temple. When anyone or anything in creation, including other people, looked upon a human being, they were supposed to see a representation of what God is like.
Another way to say this is that humans were to be priests. Adam and Eve were to be priests in the Garden, representing God as stewards of his creation and representing all of creation as we worship God. As Jennie Riddle writes in her song, “With all creation I sing praise to the king of kings.”
And Psalm 8 picks up the aspect of stewardship over creation:
what are mere mortals that you should think about them,
human beings that you should care for them?
Yet you made them only a little lower than angels
and crowned them with glory and honor. (remember this word “glory”)
You gave them charge of everything you made,
putting all things under their authority—
Psalm 8:4-6
God intended us to govern according to his values. This would mean a world of harmony, peace, love, humility, where everyone and everything flourishes and there is no poverty or oppression, no unimportant people – a world where every human being is as much a priest and image bearer as the rest.
The biblical concept of sin, then, is not just that we do various bad things and need to be punished. N.T. Wright says, “Called to responsibility and authority within and over the creation, humans have turned their vocation upside down, giving worship and allegiance to forces and powers within creation itself. The name for this is idolatry.”
Long after the Creation story, long after the fall of Adam and Eve (and with them, all humanity) God turns to Israel – twelve related desert tribes that he frees from slavery in Egypt. In Exodus 19, where God is telling them how to construct a new sacred space – not the Garden of Eden but the tabernacle -- he says:
And you will be my kingdom of priests, my holy nation.’
This job is not just to be set apart from the world, but eventually to bless the world by showing them how to stop being image conscious in their own power and wealth but to be image bearers of their Creator.
The rest of the Old Testament shows Israel’s own idolatry and their resulting exile. This was bad news for the whole world. The firefighters sent to put out the fire have themselves been engulfed in the flames.
Adam and Eve had failed as priests and image bearers. But instead of killing them God sent them into exile. Now Israel has failed but instead of wiping them off the planet God sent them into exile.
Not only did he spare them, but he promised the exile would end one day. A rescuer would lead a new exodus to freedom, just like the exodus out of slavery to Egypt.
This is unjustified mercy. If God is just, if he is a good judge, then he must justify this mercy. God is not unjust; he cannot look the other way. We all know this is how it must be. When we see injustice, when we hear of a criminal getting away with evil, our hearts scream for justice.
Act 3
So how does God get humanity back on track to be his image bearers, his priests representing God as stewards of his creation and representing all of creation as we worship God? How can he pardon humans, while also showing himself to be a righteous judge? He becomes a human himself, in the person of Jesus – fully human and fully God.
The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being,
Talk about an image bearer. We are like God, but Christ is the exact representation of his being. He is the eternal Second Person of the Trinity and has become fully human. During his sinless life, he proves himself to be the true Image, the High Priest, and Israel’s long promised, saving king.
He fulfills their obedience to God’s law, draws all their sin upon himself and satisfies justice upon his own body. In doing so, he, the faithful Israelite, does for humanity what Israel was supposed to do for them. Justice has been served and we have been justified.
The exiles can come home to God, sins are forgiven, and new life is offered to the world. The Gospel writers show that Jesus is leading a new exodus, not just from a human oppressor but from Satan, Sin, and Death. The apostle Paul draws his analogy even further back in time than Israel’s deliverance, saying:
For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.
In God’s true image-bearer, Jesus the King, he has rescued us so we could participate in his perfect work of representing God as stewards of his creation and representing all of creation as we worship God. This was the plan all along. Maybe being image conscious isn’t so bad … depending on who’s image you’re conscious of.
But how could we do it successfully after the cross, when we messed up so bad before the cross?
Act 4
For that, we turn to Paul’s letter to Christians in Rome. Throughout Romans there is a thread of glory – remember I said to pay attention to the word “glory” in Psalm 8, which describes the authority humans have in this world as “crowned with glory and honor.”
The Greek word for glory is doxa. It can also be translated “majesty.” It mostly refers to honor and authority that come with exalted status.
The “glory” narrative in Romans begins with humanity forsaking the glory of God, meaning we forsook our identity and job as image bearers:
For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him -- Romans 1:21
We neither glorified him by representing God as stewards of his creation, nor gave thanks by representing all of creation as we worship God.
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
Falling short of the glory – a more literal translation would be “lacking” the glory -- means more than lacking moral perfection, although that’s true as well. Remember Psalm 8 – God crowned us with glory. Romans 3 is saying we lost that crown. Where is your crown? The one God gave you? You gave it to idols, to Sin. Your instincts know something is wrong which is why you’re so image conscious, trying to make something of yourself.
The narrative of glory in Romans continues with the promise of God’s people sharing the glory of God again:
And we boast in the hope of the glory of God.
the Spirit you received brought about your adoption … Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.
After Christ suffered, died, and rose from the grave he ascended to heaven where he was enthroned as king. He sent the Holy Spirit to those who give allegiance to him, sealing our adoption into God’s family and enabling us to embody the values of his kingdom until that kingdom comes in its fullness.
the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.
The result of the final, complete glorification of God’s children is that all of creation will be renewed and clean. This is why “the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God” in Romans 8:19.”
As God’s Spirit conforms us to the image of the Son, we find more and more that we no longer want to pillage and plunder the earth and its inhabitants. We want to live like Jesus: in love, humility, service, so that everyone and everything flourishes, and no one needs to grasp for power or be image conscious to make themselves look better than others.
Paul’s point is that, in Christ, God will make the broken image bearers whole again, once more having the honor associated with stewardship, sharing in the glory of God.
Now we arrive at the verses Lindsey read to us in the beginning:
For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.
And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.
Romans 8:29-30
God’s plan all along was for us to be conformed to the image of God’s Son, justified by him despite all we’ve done, and glorified. This means more than floating on clouds in a disembodied state.
We share in Christ’s inheritance, his reign over the earth as a righteous king, not like the rulers of this present world who abuse others and create structures for their own protection, who pillage the planet and who are driven to an image conscious existence.
We are rescued by Christ to be a royal priesthood, filled with the Holy Spirit to experience union with Christ and receive the strength to take up our cross, a suffering yet joyful witness that causes others to wonder what it is about us that enables us respond to adversity with hope and trust.
This means that suffering – everything from head colds and first breakups to our eventual funerals – is part of the Christian life. And this means that fierce resistance from evil as we seek to do good is part of it too.
Willingly taking up our cross is part of the way in which the Spirit works in us to conform us to the image of the Son, to make us like him and cause us to depend on him, to experience fulfillment, purpose and meaning that enables us to survive hard times and cling to hope. And in making us more like Christ we become less image conscious of ourselves and more like whole images of God toward others.
One day suffering will be over, and we will rule the earth with Christ. Our task now is not to rule – to force people into a Christian ethic. It’s to help people long for the coming Kingdom.
“We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.” – Madeleine L’Engle
Act 5
And he’s doing it through millions of us by the power of the Spirit, so you don’t have to make anything happen and be a big deal. You’re the only you, who goes where you go, does what you do, and has the specific interactions you have.
Our stewardship of creation involves embodying the values of the kingdom and pointing to the king.
Monday Challenge:
My Monday Challenge is actually a 2022 challenge. Since this is the first Sunday of the year, I’m not giving you a small thing you can do tomorrow – I’m giving you a big picture way of framing your mission all year: Be image conscious because image is everything. Just not your image. His.
Write this down and stick it on your bathroom vanity mirror, your fridge, your car dashboard, or your desk at work. In 2022, resolve to be conscious of God’s purpose for you as an individual and for all of us together. And if you focus less on how you look to others, and accept who you are in Christ, you’ll feel a greater sense of purpose in 2022 than ever before.
Be image conscious because image is everything. Just not your image. His.
Communion:
We’ll end this time together with a look at the end of all our struggles, as the prophet of Revelation sees redeemed image bearers gathered to fulfil their proper function for all eternity, because of Jesus:
And they sang a new song, saying:
“You are worthy …
because you were slain,
and with your blood you purchased for God
persons from every tribe and language and people and nation.
10 You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God,
and they will reign on the earth.” - Revelation 5:9-10
So now we’ve gone from Genesis to Revelation, and it’s the same story! It’s not a theological dictionary, a rule book, helpful tips, or disconnected morality plays. It’s one story, with one purpose for you and me. And the hero is Jesus, because on the night that he was betrayed, he took a loaf of bread like this one …