We are in the middle of a series that highlights the four essential components of a biblical gospel: God, Man, Christ, Response. I hope you are growing in your understanding of how these four pieces go together so that you can more fully understand the gospel and more carefully explain it/testify about it to others. I welcome your feedback.
On Sunday, we looked at the “man” component. I knew it would not be easy listening. I mentioned the Bible identifies (only) two kinds of people: unrepentant, unbelieving sinners who are under judgment by God; and Christ-following sinners, who have repented of their sin and placed their faith in the person and work of Jesus, thereby gaining pardon from “the wages of their sin” (Rom 6.23a). Either way, man has a problem: he is a sinner. Beginning in Genesis and using select passages from the Scripture, I preached that man had an image problem and a pride problem; that the problem was universal, and, if left unaddressed, the problem threatened the soul. The sermon can be heard at our website: http://www.harrisonhills.org/index.php
In the first point, “made in God’s image”, I listed several sub-points including this one: “To be made in the image of God is to experience the greatest love that God can bestow on a creature.” I took that from God’s declaration about the crowning act of his creation of man in Gen 1.31: “God saw everything He had made, and behold, it was very good.” I want to add some reflections to that observation:
We should marvel at what it means to be made in God’s image; but we dare not thump our chests about it:
1) Being created in the image of God should cause us to be immensely grateful for this expression of God’s love
2) Being created in the image of God should cause us to be amazed at the greatness & goodness of God; to be astonished at the Godness of God (Is 46.8-11)
3) Being created in the image of God should cause us to fall before God & say: “you alone are God; who am I that you would love me & send your Son to die for me”
4) Being created in the image of God should cause us to have great sorrow over our sin; what the Bible calls “godly grief that produces repentance that leads to salvation without regret” (2 Cor 7.10). John Piper helps us here when he reminds us: “The seriousness of our sin is determined not mainly by the nature of our deed, but the nature of the One we dishonor.”
Every sin creates distance between the sinner and God. When acts of sin or a lifestyle of sin continues without repentance, there becomes a strong indication of unbelief; a lack of genuine conversion. So, at best, our sins create a dangerous separation; at worst, our sins bring us under the just judgment & condemnation of God. Sin is a capital offense, which calls for capital punishment; “for the wages of sin is death” (Rom 6.23a). How do we escape that death sentence? How can we be pardoned from what we justly deserved? That takes us to our fifth reason why we should not thump our chests about being made in God’s image:
5) Being created in the image of God should cause us to run to God & bow before Him & cry out for His mercy and forgiveness
Being made in the image of God should be so immeasurably treasurable to believers that we spend every hour of every day, for the remainder of our lives, in praise and thanksgiving that this Sovereign God cares to create us and cares to love us and cares to come and live among us and cares to die for us and – after His resurrection from the dead – cares to remember us as He sits at the right hand of God’s throne and cares to pray on our behalf, so that when we fail to praise and thank God, God does not remove His hand of grace, but – by His grace – keeps us to the end . . . so that we may live in His presence with eternal praise and thanksgiving to Him. After all, as His image bearers, that’s what God created us to do.
Let this addition to yesterday’s message be one more thing to encourage you and equip you in your faith.
Resisting chest-thumping with you,
Pastor Gary