bible and theology on Picturing God

Put another way, what you think about God will shape your destiny in life. If you think of God as homophobic, racist, and mad at the world, this distorted vision of reality will shape you into a relig...

My friend and colleague Keas Keasler, who teaches a class on spiritual formation, recently asked the class to close their eyes and picture God. After a few moments he had them open their eyes and, if ...

My friend Scot McKnight is a New Testament professor in Chicago. For years, he taught a class on Jesus, and he would start every semester with two surveys. The first was a set of questions about the s...

A student of mine, Josiah Brown, oversees the student outreach team. He and some of our students go to youth groups to teach the youth about Christian spiritual formation. They talk about what formati...

Among HIV patients better immune functioning is found among those who have an image of God that is more compassionate and loving than those who have images of God as more judgmental and punitive…Chang...

The temptation to sculpt God according to our expectations and presuppositions, to make this God much like another, is strong with us. You see it all down through history: in the Middle Ages it seemed...

When we can see the image of God where we don't want to see the image of God, then we see with eyes not our own.

To image God is to work and rest as God worked and rested.

In former times, God, who is without form or body, could never be depicted. But now when God is seen in the flesh conversing with men, I make an image of the God whom I see. I do not worship matter; I...

This is the beautiful community that Herman Bavinck gets at when he writes, The image of God is much too rich for it to be fully realized in a single human being, however richly gifted that human bein...

Have you ever been told that you’re like someone else, someone you admire and respect, someone you’d love to be like? I had that experience many times while growing up. My family and I were members of...

By the way, I have terrible eyesight. When I don’t have my glasses on, I can see shapes and forms and colors, but not much else. And that’s sort of what I think it’s like to look at God without Jesus....

This sense of being made in God’s image calls us all constantly to look for it in others and to do what we can to help them acknowledge it and to realize it by joining in worship. We thereby carry to ...

If everyone could see the image of God in his neighbor, do you think we should still need tanks and generals?

Gracious God, sometimes I am so caught up in my failures, in all the ways I am not like you, that I neglect the deeper truth, the earlier truth of Genesis 1. You have made me, as a human being, in you...

Our defining narrative says that we’re made “in the image of God,”[i] but also: we’re made “from the dust.”[ii] Image and dust. To be made in the image of God means that we’re rife with potential. W...

Gracious God, again we thank you for creating us in your image. Today, we are reminded that your image is not captured fully in the solitary individual but also and necessarily in human community. In ...

The author squares man's depravity with still being made in the image of God with this word picture. A vase that has held beautiful roses though now broken, will nevertheless hold something of the...

The more a person loves, the closer he approaches the image of God.

Heavenly Father, forgive us for delving so much into our own lives that we forget the love and purpose with which you have created us. When we are faced with doubt and despair, help us to turn to you ...

We are not God. We are simply the image of God and our task is gradually to discover that image and set it free.

Almighty God, You created us in your image, each of us in your likeness. Help us to worship You alone, Lord, and never bow to any created thing. We see your handiwork in every one of your works, b...

What do you hear when you imagine the voice of God singing? I hear the booming of Niagara Falls mingled with a trickle of a mossy mountain stream. I hear the blast of Mt. St. Helens mingled with a kit...

Everything in the universe is all jumbled together. So God begins to do some creative separating: he separates light from darkness, day from night, water from land, the sea creatures from the land cru...

We should exercise that far higher privilege which appertains to Christians, of having “the mind of Christ;” and then the two worlds, visible and invisible, will become familiar to us even as they wer...

We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.

I look at a person as an image bearer of a holy God and I am not in any way spooked by whatever worldly identity that happens to be attached to that image bearer.

We are not to reflect on the wickedness of men but to look to the image of God in them, an image which, covering and obliterating their faults, an image which, by its beauty and dignity, should allure...

Almighty God, we too often live in fear. Fear drives our self-preservation, our self-centered decisions, and prevents us from comprehending the wonder of your presence among us. Like Peter, we would d...

A student of mine, Josiah Brown, oversees the student outreach team. He and some of our students go to youth groups to teach the youth about Christian spiritual formation. They talk about what formati...