Imago Dei

Today is a really important day for us as a church because as a chance for us to partner with Love Life, as I mentioned earlier, Love Life is an organization that's really passionate about creating a culture of families who stop running to abortion centers and start running to the local church in their time of need. And over the past three and a half years or so, which is really as long as they've been around, they've seen God do amazing things. They've seen over 300 churches mobilized, over 60,000 believers praying for God to move into the city. They've seen, I think it was 57 people come to know Christ as Lord and Savior, give their lives to him. I had this number here. I don't want to get it wrong, but they've seen so many babies saved. It's almost 2,000, 2,000 babies saved. And moms receive counseling and mentorship. They've even seen abortion workers leave their profession. They've seen post-abort of moms receive counseling and care, and they've seen God do amazing things. So it's awesome for us. Basically, what they do is they go around Charlotte and other in New York. I think they just launched New York yesterday is what I heard, which is incredible, and I know there's other cities as well, but it started here in Charlotte. And what they do is they try to mobilize churches and unify churches to partner with them for big kingdom work, which is, again, what we talk about a lot here, God's kingdom come and His will be done in Charlotte as it is in heaven. So one week out of the year, we adopt love life, and we pray, we fast, and then we participate with them on Saturday. They're going to tell us more about that. They have some really awesome stories to share. Before they come up and do that, I want to take you to Genesis 1. And I want to talk about the image of God and the sanctity of life. And so if you're there, let's go ahead and read it together. Genesis 1, and we're going to look at verses 26 to 31, and I'll show you where we're going to go with this. Then God said, "Let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." So God created man in His own image, and the image of God He created Him, male and female He created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth." And God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant-yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food as every beast of the earth and every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth. Everything that has the breath of life I have given every green plant for food." And it was so, and God saw that everything that He had made was good, not only good, but it was very good, and it was evening and there was morning on the sixth day. I don't know if you can read that, I'm sorry, I didn't consult Holly or any of our designers before I made these slides, so now that I'm looking at what I could see, that's pretty brutal. I apologize, but modern philosophers and politicians and scientists want you and I to believe that there's nothing more to us into this world than, I guess, an accidental collation or co-location of atoms. We're just kind of a blob that came from a tadpole that evolved into, like, all these other things and eventually an ape and then eventually us. As one notable atheist, Richard Dawkins, put it, "All of life is a happy, chemical accident." Or as Berkson Russell, the modern philosopher, put it, "We are the product of causes that had no prevision of the end that they were achieving. The hopes, fears, loves, and beliefs of our minds are just the outcomes of the accidental co-location of atoms." When the great intellectual Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said this, "Scientifically, I see no reason for attributing to a man significance different in any kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand." In other words, scientifically, we are a little bit more complex than sand and a little bit more complex than baboons, but no more significant. That's what we're constantly told by science and by politicians and by philosophers. But Genesis tells us an entirely different and I would argue an entirely more beautiful story about our world and about you and me as well. Genesis tells us this story that hinges on the fact that when God created us, He created us in a loving and thoughtful and creative way. In a way where He looked at the members of the Trinity and they all said to each other, "Let us create man in our image," is what theologians call the Imago Day. We're created in the likeness of God as little kings and little queens in the world. That's what dominion means. God said, "I'm giving you the whole plan. It's going to be where you rule and reign is my little kings and my little queens." Like creative, work the garden, keep the garden and as you're creating and you're stewarding this, you're going to honor me and as his image bears, we reflected him and we represented him in the world. So unlike grains of sand and unlike baboons, we have this unique ability to reflect God and represent him in the world. We're not just some smarter, more articulate, less hairy visions of the 8th family. I know that's kind of crazy to say these days. We're not just more evolved visions of bacteria, but we're not some pointless conglomeration of atoms. We are reflections of the God of the universe. That's beautiful and that's true. It has a ton of really important implications on our lives and on the world and while we don't have time to look at all of them because there are a lot of them, we can do a whole series on the implications. I want to show you three implications today, that this the theological principle that's really the reality of our world, the emago day, I want to show you three perspectives that it changes or impacts in our lives. The first thing it does is it changes the way that we view ourselves. Every single one of us want to be seen as valuable, could we just acknowledge that? We want to be seen as worthy of love, worthy of kindness, worthy of respect, worthy of celebration even by our peers, we want to be seen as good, worthy. We want to be seen as what the Bible calls glorious. You've heard that word glorious, right? We always talk about how God is glorious. Glorious in the Bible is just another word for important. The Greek word is actually kabode, kabode means weighty and not weighty in like your heaviness, physically or your girth, but weighty in your significance. So if you're a glorious person, you're a weighty person and so when you talk, your words carry weight. We still use that kind of language today, right? So we long to be glorious. We long to be weighty people. When we talk people listen, what we think matters, we're valuable, we're worthy. And so when the Bible says that God is the most glorious person in the entire universe, it means that he is the weightiest person. He's the most significant person. He's the most valuable person. And so when he talks, we really got to listen because he's the most worthy. The point is that all of us want to feel and be seen as weighty and valuable. But most of us think that this is something we have to earn for ourselves, right? Most of us think that if we can achieve enough success in our career or get enough money, or do enough awesome stuff in the world, then people will look at us and say, "Wow, you are worthy of my respect." I don't know if you know the anyogram, the personality test. I have a lot of eight in me, which is like, "Aider is going to eat." We have a hard time with respecting authority. And so like my personality says, "If I'm going to respect you, you've got to earn my respect." Anybody else like that, you feel that way? You can admit it. That's how we view other people. And so we expect people to view us the same way. If they're going to respect you, you've got to earn it. But here's how that is actually really, really difficult, and the flip side is devastating. Because if we have to earn respect from other people by what we do, then what happens when we do bad things? What happens when we fail? What happens when we screw up? Anybody ever screwed up before? Well, if you have to earn respect by doing good things, then when you do bad things, what happens? You lose the right to be respected. If you lose a little bit of your worth, you lose a little bit of your value. This is why in some cultures, it's actually seen as honorable for CEOs to commit suicide if they've been caught and fraud, or if they've done damage to their company. And you read stories of this happening in Japan more often than you can imagine. If you get caught and fraud, if you've been caught and dishonored, then you've lost your worth, and it's better for your company to just take your own life. It's devastating. But the Imago Day teaches us something totally different. It tells us it doesn't matter who you are. doesn't matter what you've done and it doesn't matter how low you have gone, you are worthy of love and respect. It's the image of God. God doesn't make junk and therefore God does not make junky image bears. None of us are bad image bears, no matter how many bad things we have done. I hope you believe that today. We all just confess sin. We do that every week because every week we sin like thousands of times and yet we're still worthy of respect because we are image bears of God. The second implication, the second perspective it changes, it changes the way we view other people. If we are good at judging ourselves a little bit too harshly, we are experts at judging everyone else. You can say amen. I know we're in an old Baptist church, but please let's be a little bit more free than that. Okay. We're experts at judging other people. We might let ourselves off the hook or we might justify our actions because we can see our hearts. We're like, oh, I had really noble motivations when I did that. I met well when I said that, but if somebody else does the same thing, we're harsh. Just think about how you view people on the road. Charlotte is one of the fastest growing cities in the world. The last time I checked 80 people moved here a day, which is staggering. Our roads weren't built for that. You know what I've noticed? It looks like we're getting all the really bad drivers from every other state and every other city in the country. I mean, when we first moved here, I would come home every day and be like, "Someone almost killed me again today." I almost died again. We were going on this one lane highway and this lady just decided to turn and try to do a three-point turn with oncoming traffic going both ways. And it was crazy. I'm like, this is Charlotte. Say, love you. I mean, this is who we are. So much so that according to a recent study by Gas Buddy, Charlotte is sixth nationally in speeding. We are 13th and hard-breaking collisions and we are 11th in aggression and road rage. Now, let me just tell you something that's really crazy. We rank worse than the following cities, Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York city. Charlotte is worse than that. So I'm not exaggerating. We are getting all of the bad drivers from everywhere else in the country, but here's the thing. That includes you and me too, right? I'm not from Charlotte. I moved here and I brought Kerry with me, I brought the suburbs of Kerry and that farmland. I'm like, I'm going to show them how to drive here. Now some of you, half of you are like my wife. Half of you are really good drivers. Half of you obey the law. Half of you are very courteous. Half of you don't even know what a horn is. It's just like this thing that's there. The other half of you are not. The other half of you know what that horn is there for and you are quick and ready to use it. But here's the thing, guys. I'm right there with you. Whenever it's us speeding, whenever it's us weaving, whenever it's us texting on the highway, there's always a good reason, isn't there? If I don't speed, if I don't weave, if I don't drive like Jeff Gordon, he's only an Oscar driver, I know, then I'm going to be late. This past week Caroline call me and she's like, there's a mouse trapped under our stove. You have to come home right now and get that mouse away. There's a reason, right? But as soon as we see someone else speeding or weaving or texting, what is our first response? Instinctively, we want to give them a piece of our mind and instinctively we want to use that horn or give them a gesture or if you're a Christian, a really cold, hard stare. That will show them. How do you treat other people on the road? Or here's a better question because we're only on the road for a little bit of the time. How do you treat people off the road? How do you view other people who maybe smell a little weird, who get in your space, step on your toes, offend you, how do you treat people and view people who sin against you? Here's another question. How do you view people and treat people when they fail? When they sin, when they mess up, when they fall from grace on that pedestal that you had them on and then they're no longer on it. How do you view people when they fall off the rails? James 39 and 10 tells us that since every person in the world, including those of us who sin and offend and fail, which by the way is every single one of us, we are created in the image of God and so we should treat them with a sense of awe, with a sense of respect and love. I know you can't read that, but I'm sorry, but let me read it to you. James 39 through 10 says, "With our tongues, we bless the Lord our Father and with them we curse people who are made in the likeness of God." From the same mouth come blessing and cursing my brothers, these things ought not to be so. Why? Why shouldn't we curse other people? Why shouldn't we hurl abuse and beat people up with our words when they fail because they're created in the likeness of God? So I think one of the best illustrations of someone who demonstrated this kind of love and respect and gentleness and kindness was this past week when we saw the verdict passed down to Amanda Geiger. You know what I'm talking about? I mean, it was all over the news. Every blog, every outlet was writing about it and this woman was cold. And what I could see, cold-hearted, she took Amanda's life and she did what we would call the worst thing possible in the world, right? And yet the brother of this guy that she got up on the podium and what did he do with his words? What did he do with his actions? He said, "I love you. I want what's best for you. I don't even want you to go to jail. I want you to turn to God and I want you to find forgiveness." And then he asked the judge if he could hug her and he hugged her. That is an example of what the people of God are supposed to be like and the way that we view other people because no one no matter how bad of a thing they have done has lost their value or their worth or the right to be respected and loved. It doesn't matter who it is, it doesn't matter what they've done or how low they have gone, their image bears of the king of the universe. That's what the image of God does. It changes the way we view other people and then finally it changes the way we view human rights. This is 9-5-6-6 from his fellow man, I will require a reckoning of the life of man, whoever sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed for God, made man and his own image. Guys, we tend to think that human rights are intuitive, that they're obvious, that everyone recognizes them throughout the world, but that is simply not the case. Without history people have had their rights denied because of their color of their skin, because of the clan of their birth, because of the God of their faith, and so throughout the world human rights are totally up for grabs. In some countries, Muslims deserve them and other countries they don't. When we can see atrocities all over the world of genocide, in some places Christians deserve them and others they don't. In many places the tribe of people who is in power does everything they can to wipe out every other tribe so that they could consolidate their power, denying the human rights of every other tribe. In the 20th century the Germans didn't think Jews were worthy of human rights, Stalin didn't think ethnic minorities were worthy of human rights, the Japanese invaded all of the other Asian countries and totally abused them and denied them of their human rights. The list goes on and on. But even here in the great United States of America, we don't have a great history with human rights either, right? From the Native Americans who were here before we were to the Africans we kidnapped and brought over like cattle, from the years of slavery to the years of Jim Crow, we aren't innocent. What I really want you to understand today is that without the Bible, all of that's okay. Without the Bible, it's all up for grabs. Anything goes. Without passages like Genesis 1, 26, through 28, Genesis 9, 5, 2, 6, there would be no basis for human rights that could hold any ground whatsoever. This is why when Martin Luther King Jr. was fighting for the civil rights of African-Americans, he based his argument on the Amago Day. It talks about it at length in his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, which you won't be able to read and I apologize, but look at his words. You see, the founding fathers were really influenced by the Bible. The whole concept of the Amago Day, as it is expressed in Latin, the image of God, is the idea that all men have something within them that God injected. Not that they have substantial unity with God, but that every man has a capacity to have fellowship with God, and this gives him a uniqueness. It gives him worth, it gives him dignity, and we must never forget this as a nation. 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. So the idea of civil rights comes from the image of God, and we get the idea of the image of God from the Bible, and the Bible is injected into our culture through the church. So what happens when a culture rejects it? What happens when a culture rejects the Bible, and therefore the image of God that's taught in the Bible? While they begin to base human rights on things like capacities. If you have the capacity to reason, then you are worthy of rights. If you have the capacity to choose between right and wrong, well then you deserve protection. If you have the capacity to have preferences of the things that you like and the things that you don't like, okay, well then you count. You're in the circle of this protected group of people with rights. Peter Singer wrote, "Human rights are grounded in capacities." And that's why I believe the Supreme Court was right when they said abortion was right. Because babies don't have the capacity to reason. Babies don't have the capacity to choose or to think between right and wrong or preferences. I like this. I don't like this. They're just there. And the result is that 17,000 babies will be killed every single week in the United States of America. But here's the thing. The Bible tells us something totally different. Genesis 9, Genesis 1 tells us something totally different. It tells us that the taking and the saving of life doesn't have anything to do with capacity and everything to do with the Creator. It has nothing to do with your ability to choose and everything to do with the fact that you are created in the likeness of God. Period. And that is really good news because if it's based on capacity, then the circle gets smaller and smaller. Who else doesn't have capacity? Seen aisle people, people with severe mental handicaps who have no idea what right and wrong is. The circle gets smaller and smaller if people are actually protected with human rights. But if it's based on the image of God and the Creator, the circle becomes so big that everyone is included. No one is left out. No group of people. No color of skin or clan of birth or whatever. Everyone is protected as an image bearer of the king. So what's the church's responsibility of it? If God says, "I made man," and since I made them, they don't just have value, but they also have rights to what's our responsibility as God's people. What are we supposed to do about it? And what actions should we take? I think it really starts with him and maybe even ends with the fact that we stand up for the rights of everyone. Literally everyone. Our circle is big enough for everyone, the exclusion of no one. No matter what they smell like, what they look like, what they've done, who they are, where they came from, we stand up for the rights of everyone. This is really interesting because the first century Christians turned Europe upside down by doing this. Again, human rights are not intuitive in the Greco-Roman world in the first century. They were a lot like we were today. In fact, Aristotle believed that people who were non Greeks were born to be slaves of the Greeks. Human rights were not real. They didn't care about the elderly. They really didn't care about women that much. So infanticide was actually a big deal. They would kill lots of newborn baby girls because they didn't have that much value. If older people or poor people got sick, they would take them out and leave them to die. This is the world that the Bible was written in, that the church was birthed and so Christians came in and they just turned everything upside down. They started loving everyone and caring for everyone, the poor people, the elderly, the senile, women. That's a whole another sermon. But Christians came in and started treating women like image bears of God. Turn Europe upside down. They came in and said abortion is wrong and infanticide is wrong and they started sanding in the gaps for the people who everyone else said had no rights. Eventually Europe actually started adopting this whole idea of the image of God because the Christians came in and turned everything on its head, had a dramatic impact. They showed the culture around them what the love of God actually looked like because they believed in the sanctity of life. Today we need to follow in their footsteps and do the exact same things they did. We need to call abortion what it is. It's wrong. We need to call infanticide what it is. It's wrong. We need to care for orphans. We need to care for foster children. We need to care for those kids that are locked in a system that no one really wants to deal with. We need to come alongside single moms who keep their babies and mentor them and care for them and encourage them and supply them with resources medically and physically and emotionally and all of those things that they don't have. We need to show men and women who haven't kept their babies that they're not defined by their sin, that they're not marked with some kind of scarlet A for abortion. That they don't have to stay locked up in the chains of their guilt and shame. We need to show them that redemption and restoration are possible in Christ. We need to show them that they can be forgiven and made new that God is powerful enough to take their darkest moments and turn them into something good and glorious. That's what we need to be doing is the people of God. The people of God are not messengers of condemnation. We are messengers of the kingdom and the kingdom is a kingdom of transformation. To take all of those who are once lost in darkness into this brand new experience of being children of light. That's your story. That's my story if you know Christ. I was once dead in my sins. Now I am raised to life. I was once buried under my guilt and shame. Now I'm basking in the glory of the king. Look at how the apostle put his own testimony in his letter to Timothy. He said, "This saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the worst." But I receive mercy for this reason that in me is the foremost. Jesus Christ might display His perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in Him for eternal life. To the king of the ages immortal and visible, the only God be honor and glory forever, amen. Why? Because He saves sinners. So as the people of God, that's our message and we want to take that into our city. This is why we're partnering with Love Life because they do this well. Some pro-life organizations don't. I think some pro-life organizations do carry a message of condemnation and can be easily confused with like picketing and hatred and all kinds of other negative images. Love Life is not that. Love Life is passionate about creating a culture of love and of life which is where they get their name from. They come alongside single moms. They give them the care that they need. They help them find the resources they need. They hook them up with mentors and communities that can help them with their kids if they choose to keep them and they provide opportunities with loving homes to adopt the kids if they can't keep them. They don't pick it. They're not yelling. They're not screaming. Do you know what they're doing? They're praying. Praying that the Holy Spirit would move and would save a heal. They don't treat abortionists as enemies. Abortionists are not our enemies. The people who are outside the clinic who are escorting the women in to have abortions are not our enemies. They're people who need Jesus. People who are blinded by the God of this age, lost and darkness. I love how love life doesn't. that view moms and dads who haven't kept their babies as scum because they're not. Their image bears of God, and they deserve the redemption restoration that only Christ can offer them.