Sermons – GraceLife Church: Deltona, FL

Hear a powerful story of transformation as a student shares how he encountered God in a life-changing way during his camp experience.

God made us to bear His image—to reflect and represent Him in the world. That’s our design and it includes capacities like affirming human dignity, worshiping our Creator, acknowledging our God-given biological sex, exercising careful stewardship, pursuing relational enrichment, finding meaningful work, and even multiplying the human race. That’s how God designed us. And that’s how life works best. But because of sin, that design is under siege. Whether from the world, the devil, or the flesh, our image-bearing design suffers a multi-front attack. Knowing is half the battle.

In the beginning, God created Adam and Eve. He gave them His image. He gave them each other. He gave them a garden. And He gave them a task: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion.” What does it mean to “have dominion”? The word means to rule. To take charge. To control. To exercise power. That sounds scary. We know what “power” does in the wrong hands. But before sin marred the image of God in us, we were entrusted as God’s stewards. His caretakers over earth. We were given authority and responsibility. You know how that ended. The world has been under poor management since Genesis 3. But God never rescinded that charge to us. We are still to exercise dominion. How can we—and more importantly, how should we—go about that.

Every second Sunday, we hear a testimony from a member of GraceLife. It could be a testimony of how they came to faith, or any other instance in their life where they saw firsthand the goodness of God.

What does it mean to be a human? How do we know what a mature, healthy human looks like? The answer to those questions is found back at the beginning—in Genesis. God said something shocking and revolutionary before he created us. He said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” God was essentially saying: “Let’s make somebody that looks and functions like us; someone with our features.” He is using relational language. Let US. OUR image. Let THEM. Hear the theme? Human beings are relational creatures because they were made in the image of a relational being.

The Bible tells us how enslaving, corrupting, alienating, and defiling sin is. Over and over again, Scripture reminds us of the terrible consequences sin brings. But sometimes, God SHOWS us those truths in stories. The story of Naaman the leper from 2 Kings 5 is one of those graphic reminders of not just the destructive power of sin, but the redemptive power of God in the Gospel. Sin tears us apart, but God puts us back together again—better than before!

Civil Rights. Pregnancy Centers. Hospice Care. Social Services. Department of Justice. It’s easy to take those for granted but impossible to account for them without the creation story in Genesis. Our image bearing privilege is the basis for many of the common grace benefits we enjoy. When God created us, he put his divine stamp upon us. He made us “in his image.” It’s stunning to consider the implications (relational, vocational, cultural, political, and personal) and tragic to deny them.

Christians have a history of imbalance. We notice a distortion in a certain area of life and rush in to fix it. Then we discover that we over fixed it. We rode the pendulum. We overcorrected and therefore put ourselves out of balance again. One distortion with massive implications is our view of creation. How do we interact with the world in all its broken beauty? What perspective do we have on our bodies, the planet, food, drink, and marriage—just to name a few? Are they dangers to avoid? Gifts to indulge? Depending on which era of Christian history you land in, you could be impacted either way.