December 05, 2021

Genesis 1:26–27 | Hunger for Relationships

34 minutes

Preacher: Joel Fair

Scripture: Genesis 1:26–27

Paul Tripp - Do You Believe?

'Like God' is an amazing thing to declare. 'Made in his image' is a profound announcement. But these are the things God immediately declares upon creating Adam and Eve. In those words he is defining their identity and the utter uniqueness of their relationship to him. Adam and Eve are not just part of the catalog of creatures that God made. They are above, they are special, and they are christened with a dignity that separates them from everything else. We must not ever forget this foundational definition of who human beings are. With these words God names the intrinsic worth of people. This worth is never earned and cannot be taken away. To be human is to have dignity and worth because you carry the image of God himself.

Psalm 139:13–16

For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.

John 17:20–23

I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.

Paul Tripp - Do You Believe?

God designed this little one to be able to know him, relate to him, love him, talk to him, and worship him. These capacities separated Adam and Eve from the rest of creation as they did this little one that I held in my hands. She was made for God, she was made to live with God, she was made to listen to God, she was made to obey God, and she was made to offer her heart to God in awe, wonder, and worship. Human spirituality is at the core of who human beings are, why they were made, and what should motivate how they live. Humans were designed with a catalog of spiritual capacities. The ability to think, the capacity to give and receive communication in language, the ability to feel a range of emotions—from love to hate and everything in between—and the motivation to worship were all designed by God because human beings were made to “live and move and have our being” in him (Acts 17:28).

Psalm 95:6

Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the LORD, our Maker!

N. T. Wright - Simply Christian

... Because you were made in God’s image, worship makes you more truly human. When you gaze in love and gratitude at the God in whose image you were made, you do indeed grow. You discover more of what it means to be fully alive. Conversely, when you give that same total worship to anything or anyone else, you shrink as a human being. It doesn’t, of course, feel like that at the time. When you worship part of the creation as though it were the creator himself—in other words, when you worship an idol—it may well give you a brief ‘high’. But like a hallucinatory drug, it achieves its effect at a cost. And when the effect is over, you are less of a human being than you were to begin with. That is the price of idolatry.

2 Corinthians 5:17–21

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

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