Who You Came From, Pt. 2

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The world has a lot of ways to measure your worth––by your achievements, your appearance, or even your social connections. But Genesis tells a completely different story. Pastor Nick Gatzke asks a question that goes deeper: Where does your worth come from? Discover biblical answers to life’s most important questions.

God’s image in you points to your worth and to your purpose in life. God’s image in you points to your worth and it points to your purpose in life. Now we could go to great lengths to try to flesh out all the different possibilities of what this means to be like God and to represent Him. But I want to focus on six major implications for us this morning. What does it mean, what’s the big deal that we’re made in God’s image? How does that inform how we live daily? Implication number one. Because you are made in God’s image, this informs your idea of self-worth.

Implication number two. If we’re made in God’s image, then this puts into perspective the giving of life and the taking away of life. Implication number three. Of course, this means that abortion is wrong. Because even in the most complicated cases, we still have to reckon with the reality of killing an image bearer of God. Implication number four. If all people have inherent value, then the idea of how we relate to people in life and death extends to how we relate to people in just our everyday types of interactions, doesn’t it?

The most basic form of human decency is founded in the fact that we are relating as Christians with other image bearers of God. And this has all kinds of trickle -down effects into how we treat people. Here are a couple of the big ones. This means that people of the opposite sex are no longer to be considered as mere sexual pursuits, like our society might tell us. This means that other people around us shouldn’t be looked at as a means to simply gain more for myself because they, too, are of great value. This means that the way I talk to people and the way I talk about people should be intentional in its nature. James warns us about this in James chapter 3 in the power of the tongue and all the habit and the pattern that we all form in our speech. He says in James chapter 3, but he grounds in the image of God.

“No human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil full of deadly poison. With it, we bless the Lord and Father, and with it, we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth comes blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.” So God’s image in you points to your worth, and it points to the worth of the other people around you. You are of incredible value to him, no matter what you’ve done, no matter where you’ve come from, no matter what earthly family you’ve been a part of.

The greater source of your identity in this life is found, it’s rooted, it’s grounded in the person of God himself. You represent a holy God of the universe. And if that’s true, then not only does this point to your value, but it also points to your purpose in this life. And that leads us to our fifth implication. And that is part of our purpose in this life is that we are created to serve God. When you look at Genesis chapter one and chapter two, God creates man and woman and he immediately ties them to their work.

Part of you serving God is very simply to work. Four times we see early on in this book of Genesis that he sets them to work. Look with me, Genesis chapter 1, verse 26. Right after God said, let us make man in our own image and after our own likeness, let them have dominion over the fish of the sea. To exercise dominion includes a level of work. Looking at verse 28, God blessed them and said to them, be fruitful and multiply, that’s the fun part of work, and fill the earth and subdue it. He puts them to work.

Move over to chapter 2. He talks about the waiting for them to work in verse five, so the Lord had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground. Moving down further to verse 15, the Lord took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and to keep it. And looking ahead a little bit into next week’s text, chapter two, verse 20, the man gave names to all the livestock and the birds of heaven and the beast of the field. But for Adam, there was no helper found suitable for him. God set him to a specific task of work. Here’s the point, we are made to work.

In a society that has benefited greatly from hard workers and hard work, we know this to be true. And yet at other times, our society has sought to reconstitute the importance of work and to promote the idea, particularly in America, that the greatest point of your life is retirement. When you don’t have to work anymore, doesn’t life get great then? And yet study after study after study shows that those who still, after their main career has come to its completion, those who still engage in some kind of work or some kind of service outside of their own recreation are healthier, struggle with less depression, live longer and generally are more happy and fulfilled. Why? Because we weren’t made to recreate. We were made to work. And this is a good part of serving God.

Now beyond that healthy pattern of work that God has placed for us, there’s a specific call to work for God himself as to please him. We see throughout the Bible that God has gifted you with spiritual gifts if you’re a Christian for the sake of serving God and building up the believers around you. This is good work. We see again and again that God calls people toward good works, generally speaking, to reflect his good nature. And Ephesians chapter two tells us that we are his workmanship in line with Genesis one, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. So part of your purpose in life is to work. And part of your purpose in life is to work for God, specifically in serving Him. And I challenge you, if you are not actively serving Him, then you’re missing out. You’re missing out on part of your very purpose, because God’s image in you points to your worth, but it also points to your purpose for this life.

We see implication number six, that beyond serving God, His image in us means that we are created to be in a unique relationship with Him. When you take a step back and you look at the whole picture of creation, day one through day seven, and all of the different animals and land and plants that God has created, humans are unique in many, many ways. But the primary uniqueness is this imprint of God upon them. And we see this dynamic in which God, in fact, desires to have a special relationship with them, unique to all the rest of creation, between him and humans. He makes himself known to them, and he does so generously in an ongoing fashion. God creates only one species after his likeness, and the fact that he does this is a unique bond between them.

There’s no further explanation that’s needed. God walks among the people in the garden. He displays his desire for relationship with them and expects them to desire relationship with him. We see in chapter 2 verses 16 and 17, the end of our text for today, that God gives explicit command to them, and this command is grounded in relationship. This is what it says, the Lord God commanded the man, and you shall surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die. What does this tell us about relationship? Tells us number one, that God expects his relationship with us to have a healthy level of authority and submission. He’s the one that commands to the created beings, and they are the one who follow his commands. That’s a relational dynamic. Number two, it shows that he is concerned for their well-being,

He says, these are the things that are good for you. And these are the things that are bad for you. Do the things that are good for you. That’s a relational command in its nature. And it points to a larger unique relationship that we have with God. God’s image in you points to your value. And it also points to your purpose in this life. But here’s the problem. And we all know the problem, don’t we? The problem is that sin distorts the image and it distorts the purpose as we perceive it.

Mike Glenn wrote of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who told a story of thieves who broke into a jewelry store, but they didn’t steal anything. They simply rearranged the price tags on everything. And so the next morning the store opened and expensive jewelry was being sold as junk. And junk was being sold as expensive. And his point was obvious. We live in a world where someone has rearranged the price tags. Nowhere is the switching of the price tags more evident than in this area of self -esteem or self -worth. What makes you valuable? In our culture people are valued for how they look, for what they can do or what they have, but rarely for who they are.

In our world, you have to have beauty that is defined by a mathematical equation. If you know anything about our media today, there are proportions and equations to define what good and what beautiful looks like. In our world, entertaining is important, not talent, but entertainment. And if you aren’t entertaining, then there’s not a place for you. In a celebrity -driven culture like ours, if you can’t make the top 100 list somewhere, then you’re not worth talking to or talking about. The pressure for self -esteem has tremendous effects on our young generation. It means that young men do certain things to try to define themselves as manly. Young women get themselves into destructive relationships because if they don’t play by the cultural rules then they’re not considered to be a person worth investing in. But in the middle of all that, every single day, I am reminded that the importance of the gospel, that you are loved, that you didn’t do anything to earn it, that God gifts you with his grace, that you are created in his image. And even if you’ve tarnished that image by your sin, that you’re still valuable to him, and he still wants a relationship with you. In fact, he goes to such a greater length as to purchase you back to himself through the death of his son, Jesus, so that you would have a new way to live with him in his resurrection life.

For as many verses in the Bible talk about you being created in God’s image. There’s also as many verses that talk about you being recreated into a new image Ephesians chapter 4 is one such verse says Put off your old self which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires. That is to say tarnished image Once was good was not is now very bad because of sin and be renewed in the spirit of your minds Put on a new self a new self created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness And so God’s work in Jesus Christ when you fast -forward this from creation to the its complete fulfillment Is to say I am going to restore image in you an image that was once beautiful and perfect, and then was lost by sin, and we’ll talk more about that, but will be reclaimed through your faith in my Son. You are valuable, incredibly so. You know, paintings are valuable, an increase in value depending upon who painted them, or whose signature is on the bottom of the painting. Pause for a moment, just for a moment, and consider what a museum would value you at with the signature of God himself upon your life.

That’s what imago Dei or being made in the image of God is really all about is That God has signed you and me and our self -worth is not based on what we have Or what we’ve done Your value is found in who you came from God himself and when you know what you’re worth That changes everything What will you change about your life as You understand your true value and worth that God has given you God’s image in you informs your worth and it creates purpose for your very own life and perhaps there’s no greater distortion or one of the greatest distortions of our time

The importance of human life is certainly seen in World War two. During World War II, German paratroopers invaded the island of Crete, and when they landed at Malmene, the islanders met them there to fight, but they had nothing more than kitchen knives and pitchforks. And the consequences of their resistance was devastating. As the German troops came in, they lined up people from all the villages and towns, and they shot them all. Overlooking that very same airstrip today is an institute for peace and understanding founded by a Greek man named Alexander Papadaris. Papadaris was just six years old during World War II. His home village was destroyed, and he was subsequently imprisoned in a concentration camp for a number of months.

And when the war ended, and as time went on, he saw growing in his people a cultural hatred against the Germans for the wrongs that had been done to them. And so he established this institute at this place that embodied the horrors and hatreds that were unleashed by the war. And one day at the end of a lecture, Papadaris was asked, what is the meaning of life? And the room filled with sort of a nervous laugh. Because they were talking to a man who had experienced some of the worst horrors of human existence and had now come to another side. And they waited to see how he would respond or if he would respond at all. But he answered them. He opened his wallet and he took out a small round mirror and he held it up for everyone to see.

During the war, he was just a small boy when he came across a motorcycle wreck. It was a motorcycle that had belonged to some of the German soldiers, and he saw pieces of the broken side mirrors on the ground. He tried to put them back together, but he was unable to do so. So he took the largest piece and he began to grind it against a stone to smooth out the edges until it eventually became a small round mirror of its own. And he used it as a toy. He was fascinated by the ability to shine light into holes and into crevices that he would come across. He kept that mirror, and as he grew up and over time it came to symbolize something very important. The mirror became a metaphor with what he might do with his life.

He said, I am a fragment of a mirror whose whole design and shape I do not know. Nevertheless, with what I have, I can reflect light into dark places of this world, into black places, into the hearts of men and change some of the things in some people. Perhaps others may see and do likewise. This is what I’m about. This is the meaning of my life. God’s image in you informs your worth and it informs the purpose of your life.

And so I encourage you, and encouragement from this text today is that we reorient our thinking about ourselves and those around us, and we reorient our purpose in according to this very image. Let’s pray together. Lord God, that you would see fit to imprint your very image on us is something that we cannot completely understand. It is something that we so quickly seem to toss aside and I pray God that first you would forgive us. You would forgive us for minimizing this incredible, miraculous act and that you would forgive us for regularly tarnishing your image.

God, we ask that you would allow the truth of this relational dynamic that you have with us, this likeness and representation to more fully motivate us in the way that we live for. We thank you for Christ who redeems an image in us that is so tarnished but never lost. And I pray that the encouragement of being part of your family would rest wonderfully with us all. In Jesus name, amen.

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** This transcript was generated using AI transcription technology and reviewed for accuracy, but may contain errors. Please refer to the original audio for precise wording.