You reflect a part of God that no one else can reflect. It is part of the mystery of God’s design of your life that reflects back to Him the image of delight. As His keep-sake, you bring to the earth a poetic message from heaven, a “word” sent from His mouth that will not return to Him void. You will accomplish the very thing God has wonderfully chosen for you to accomplish. The Master Artist has wasted not even one stroke with your life. So don’t judge the canvas before the art is finished.
He is asking us to be the chief bearers of His likeness in the world. As spirit He remains invisible on this planet. He relies upon us to give flesh to that spirit, to bear the very image of God.
Worship changes the worshiper into the image of the One worshiped.
I daresay we’ve heard a bit about original sin, but not nearly enough about original glory, which comes before sin and is deeper to our nature. We were crowned with glory and honour. Why does a woman long to be beautiful? Why does a man hope to… be found brave? Because we remember, if only faintly, that we were once more than we are now.
Sin comes when we take a perfectly natural desire or longing or ambition and try desperately to fulfill it without God. Not only is it sin, it is a perverse distortion of the image of the Creator in us. All these good things, and all our security, are rightly found only and completely in him.
The first and the great work of a Christian is about his heart. Do not be content with seeming to do good in ‘outward acts’ while your heart is bad, and you are a stranger to the greater internal heart duties. See that your chief study be about your heart; that there God’s image may be planted; that there His interests be advanced; that there the world and flesh are subdued; that there the love of every sin is cast out; that there the love of holiness grows.
All of us were created to be a reflection of Father’s love, and God is at work transforming us into His image. His seed—His DNA, His genetic code—lies within us, and everything inside of us is being conformed to the image of love (see 1 John 3:9). When God took up residence in your heart when you were born again, He elevated your spirit to its rightful status. You were created to rule over all of God’s handiwork; you have been crowned with His glory and majesty; your spirit was made to rule over all things—and that includes your own soulish realm.
It does not follow, because the love of ourselves is lost in the love of God, that we are to take no care, and to exercise no watch over ourselves. No one will be so seriously and constantly watchful over himself as he who loves himself IN and FOR God alone. Having the image of God in himself, he has a motive strong, we might perhaps say, as that which controls the actions of angels, to guard and protect it.