Day 32: How Do We Share God’s Image and Likeness?
This week, we have been thinking about who we are as human beings, created in the image of God the Creator. Today, we return to where we started and consider how we display the image and likeness of God in our design.
Genesis 6:6
And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. {ESV}
Romans 11:34
“For who has known the mind of the Lord,
or who has been his counselor?”
Notice in the passages above, God is presented as having both a heart (a deep, core, inner self) and a mind (the place of thought, wisdom, intellect). As we have seen and understand, we too have these “spiritual organs.” As we move through this study, we are going to talk a lot about our hearts and minds, so it is important that you understand what we mean when we talk about these things.
The primary thing that we want you to understand is that God has designed and desires for our hearts—the source of our lives—to be completely dependent on Him to produce the same quality of life that He Himself possesses and expresses. He has also designed our minds to work like His. He designed us to be completely captivated by His Truth, Goodness, and Glory in all that we are so that we could also express those same things.
There is one last thing that we want you to understand about your inner self as it relates to your heart: you do not have direct access to your heart. You have access to your Heart through your Mind, but you do not have direct access to it; your heart is very “deep” within you. When you think, “I don’t know where that thought, emotion or desire came from,” you are realizing the depth of your heart. Only God himself can work and deal with your Heart directly. This is because He has reserved this deep inner part of us for Himself. Your Heart is that deep place at the core of your being designed by God to be captivated and illuminated by His Truth, Goodness, and Glory.
Many years ago, Augustine—one of the great theologians—wrote:
You have created us for yourself O Lord,
and restless are our hearts until they find their rest in You.
{Augustine, Confessions}
Each and every one of us desires to be a full and whole person. The only way we will ever become who we desire to be is through a living relationship with the Father God who created us. He has sent His One Unique Son Jesus to show us the way back to our Heavenly Father. He has also sent His Spirit to enable us to find Him and know Him.
In our first unit, Recovering the Master Story, we discussed the true nature of Father-God’s love for us. His love is not smack “love”—He is not going to beat us into submission. His love is not candy “love”—He is not going to bribe us to love Him. His love is genuine, divine love, given freely in the hope that we will love Him freely. His love for us is ultimately expressed in all that Jesus has done for us. As we think about all of this throughout this study, we will find that this love “surpasses knowledge” – it is too marvelous to fully “get our minds around.”
This is also a good place to review your LifeMap. We discussed the LifeMap HERE if your have not completed one yet.
Before you move forward, think about all the major events you have charted and think about the question, “How was Father-God present in these situations drawing me to Himself?”
*You can find a complete list of all the MilktoMeat readings here.
