Sermon quotes on the image of god
Hermann Bavinck
So the whole human being is image and likeness of God, in soul and body, in all human faculties, powers, and gifts. Nothing in humanity is excluded from God’s image; it stretches as far as our humanity does and constitutes our humanness. The human is not the divine self but is nevertheless a finite creaturely impression of the divine. All that is in God-his spiritual essence, his virtues and perfections, his immanent self-distinctions, his self communication and self-revelation in creation – finds its admittedly finite and limited analogy and likeness in humanity.
J. Budziszewski
Trying to understand man without recognizing him as imago Dei is like trying to understand a bas-relief without recognizing it as a carving.”
John Calvin
…this insolence was turned by the providence of God to a very different purpose; for the face of Christ, dishonoured by spitting and blows, has restored to us that image which had been disfigured, and almost effaced, by sin.”
John Calvin
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 us to love and embrace them.
John Calvin
We are not to look to what men in themselves deserve but to attend to the image of God which exists in all and to which we owe all honor and love.
Marva Dawn
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 others the answer to their inmost longing, a yearning for union with the Trinity, a thirst to respond with adoration to the God who made them.
Robert Farrar Capon
We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great. That is the inconsolable heartburn, the lifelong disquietude of having been made in the image of God.
Martin Luther King Jr.
The whole concept of the “image of God ” is the idea that all men have something within them that God injected. .. . And this gives [man] a uniqueness, it gives him worth, it gives him dignity. And we must never forget this. . . there are no gradations in the image of God. Every man from a treble white to a bass black is significant on God’s keyboard., precisely because every man is made in the image of God. One day we will learn that. We will know one day that God made us to live together as brothers and to respect the dignity and worth of every man.
C.S. Lewis
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 as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.
Martin Luther
Leave the works in one class. Consider one as good as another. Fear God, and be just, as has been said. And then do whatever comes before you. This way all will be well done even though it is no more than loading manure or driving a mule.
Martin Luther
The more a person loves, the closer he approaches the image of God.
James MacDonald
To disrespect a person made in the image and likeness of God is a lot worse than desecrating a flag. We should be offended and repulsed in the same way when God’s image bearers are desecrated – abused, beaten, neglected, discriminated against, and not loved and taken care of as they should be.
Christ-Centered Biblical Counseling: Changing Lives with God’s Changeless Truth
Thomas Merton
We are what we love. If we love God, in whose image we were created, we discover ourselves in him and we cannot help being happy: we have already achieved something of the fullness of being for which we were destined in our creation. If we love everything else but God, we contradict the image born in our very essence, and we cannot help being unhappy, because we are living a caricature of what we are meant to be.
Thomas Merton
To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love.
Mother Theresa
If everyone could see the image of God in his neighbor, do you think we should still need tanks and generals?
Michel Quoist
We are not God. We are simply the image of God and our task is gradually to discover that image and set it free.
Richard Plass and James Cofield
We are relational beings because we are created in the image of a relational God.
Taken from The Relational Soul: Moving from False Self to Deep Connection by Richard Plass and James Cofield, Copyright (c) 2014, p.15 by Richard Plass and James Cofield. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com.
Vaughan Roberts
Someone might say of a son, ‘He’s a chip off the old block; he’s the spitting image of his father.’ That is not to say he is identical, but he does bear the family likeness. You can see his father in him. It is similar with us and God. One writer has expressed it well: ‘Man is a creature because he is made by God. But he is a unique creature, he is made like God.’
Taken from God’s Big Picture by Vaughan Roberts. ©2003 by Vaughan Roberts. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove IL 60515-1426. www.ivpress.com
Marilynne Robinson
The truth about Obama’s birthplace or Trump’s relationship with Russia will never be established to the satisfaction of everyone, but Christians know truth of another order, that human beings are created in the image of God. They are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights–that is, unalienable claims on our respect. This is the truth that has made us free.
Richard Rohr
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.
Francis Schaeffer
The ironic fact is that humanism which began with man’s being central eventually had no real meaning for people. On the other hand, if one begins with the Bible’s position that man is created by God and in the image of God, there is a basis for that person’s dignity.
How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture
Francis Schaeffer
People today are trying to hang on to the dignity of man, but they do not know how to, because they have lost the truth that man is made in the image of God. . . . We are watching our culture put into effect the fact that when you tell men long enough that they are machines, it soon begins to show in their actions. You see it in our whole culture — in the theater of cruelty, in the violence in the streets, in the death of man in art and life.
Escape from Reason: A Penetrating Analysis of Trends in Modern Thought.
Fulton J. Sheen
Why is anyone lovable – if it be not that God put His love into each of us?
Richard Rohr
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.
James Bryan Smith
We are made in God’s image, with original goodness, which cannot be marred by our sin. But we are also made in God’s likeness, which we distort every time we choose to sin.
Taken from The Magnificent Story by James Bryan Smith. Copyright (c) 2018 by James Bryan Smith. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Jesus loved manhood so much, that He delighted to honour it; and since it is a high honour, and indeed, the greatest dignity of manhood, that Jesus is the Son of man,”
Theresa of Avila
Each of us has a soul, but we forget to value it. We don’t remember that we are creatures made in the image of God. We don’t understand the great secrets hidden inside of us.
A.W. Tozer
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 fragrance it once contained.
A.W. Tozer
The yearning to know what cannot be known, to comprehend the incomprehensible, to touch and taste the unapproachable, arises from the image of God in the nature of man. Deep calleth unto deep, and though polluted and landlocked by the mighty disaster theologians call the Fall, the soul senses its origin and longs to return to its source.
A.W. Tozer
We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.
A.W. Tozer
The widest thing in the universe is not space; it is the potential capacity of the human heart. Being made in the image of God, it iscapable of almost unlimited extension in all directions. And one of the world’s greatest tragedies is that we allow our hearts to shrink until there is room in them for little besides ourselves.
Miroslav Volf
Because the Christian God is not a lonely God, but rather a communion of three persons, faith leads human beings into the divine communion. One cannot, however, have a self-enclosed communion with the Triune God- a “foursome,” as it were– for the Christian God is not a private deity. Communion with this God is at once also communion with those others who have entrusted themselves in faith to the same God. Hence one and the same act of faith places a person into a new relationship both with God and with allothers who stand in communion with God.
Rick Warren
One of the ways we reflect God’s love and bring him glory is to accept each other just as he accepts us. This means we accept others’ quirks and look past theirfaults in order to see a person created in the image of God.
John Wesley
To live was to enjoy – when every faculty was in its perfection, amidst abundance of objects which infinite wisdom had purposely suited to it… when he was at full liberty to enjoy either the Creator or the creation – to indulge in rivers of pleasure, ever new, ever pure, from any mixture of pain.
N. T. Wright
Knowledge has to do with the interrelation of humans and the created world. This brings it within the sphere of the biblical belief that humans are made in the image of the creator, and that in consequence they are entrusted with the task of exercising wise responsibility within the created order. They are neither detached observers of, nor predators upon, creation. From this point of view, knowledge can be a form of redeeming stewardship; it can be, in one sense, a form of love…To know is to be in a relation with the known, which means that the ‘knower’ must be open to the possibility of the ‘known’ being other than had been expected or even desired, and must be prepared to respond accordingly, not merely to observe from a distance.
The New Testament and the People of God, Fortress Press, 1992.
Ravi Zacharias
What does it mean to be human? It means we are created in the image of God for the glorious reality of being in permanent fellowship with Him.
Rosaria Butterfield
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.
Gordon and Gladis DePree
Has God’s face ever been on a coin? We are the coin that bears the living likeness of God. Giving of ourselves with whatever that may include, is the only legal currency of the kingdom of heaven.
Dixie Fraley
We’re most like God when we’re giving.
A.J. Swoboda
To image God is to work and rest as God worked and rested.
John Mark Comer
The theology of the image of God in Genesis was, and still is, subversive and stunning. It claims that all human beings — not just those of royal blood, not just the oligarchy of society, not just white men — all of us are made in the image of God.
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