Image of God Sermon Ideas
Being created in the image of God is a great glory of humanity—a source of great dignity and of great human rights and responsibilities. The image of God consists of at least three things: responsible dominion within creation, communal love, and true righteousness. These truths give us much to explore in sermons and in worship.
What does the Bible say about the image of God?
All humans are created in the image of God, scripture tells us. Jesus is the perfect representation of the invisible God.
Sermon ideas about the image of God
What can a sermon on the image of God say about our role as caretakers of creation? Responsible dominion within creation is no license to damage it—just the opposite, in fact. In the kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed, dominion is never lording over; it's more like lording under by way of respect, care, and support. Good stewardship of a good creation means things like respectful animal husbandry, forest management, and water conservation.
Beyond the biophysical sphere
A number of theologians believe that God's creation extends beyond the biophysical sphere to include an array of cultural possibilities that God has folded into creation. When God charges human beings to fill the earth and subdue it (Genesis 1:28), the idea is that we would unfold the built-in cultural potentials within creation—to develop language, for instance, and get married, and compose art. In this connection, theologians sometimes point to the cultural initiatives on display in Genesis 4, including urban development, tentmaking, musicianship, and metalworking.
John 17 demonstrates that because God is triune, the image of God is social as well as personal. Jesus prays that the disciples and the people they bring into the community through evangelism will be "one" as he and the Father are one. Oneness in John's gospel is closely related to the "in-ness" Jesus describes, connecting him and the Father and the new community. It is usually spoken of as mutual love, mutual glory, and a shared will, word, knowledge, and work between Son and Father. John 17 presents the church as the image of God—a bleary image at present, but one Jesus took very seriously. When the church does in fact live in loving harmony and community, it is like the triune God.
Renewal of the image
What can a sermon on the image of God say about ways to achieve this kind of unity? Some examples appear in the "renewal of the image" passages that connect vast tracts of Pauline redemption teaching to the image theme. In these passages (Colossians 3:10; Ephesians 4:24), knowledge, righteousness, and holiness stand for the whole new life in Christ that Paul wants believers to "put on." Paul is talking especially about self-giving love, the ligament of the new community (Ephesians 4:15–16; Colossians 3:14). He is talking most generally about the Christlikeness that allows believers to present God's image to the world and to each other. For, as Paul says alternately in Romans 13:14, it is somehow Christ himself that believers put on like a garment.
Colossians 3 is explicit that the renewal of the image occurs when the old self gets killed off (mortification) and the new self arises (vivification) to clothe itself with the virtues of Christ (Colossians 3:12–14).
We can properly conclude from these passages that the New Testament image of God in believers includes not only loving, forgiving, and being perfect—all specifically linked to God or Christ by "just as" clauses (Ephesians 4:32; Colossians 3:13; Matthew 5:48). It also includes the whole range of ways in which believers obey God by imitating Christ. It includes all the virtues, all the fruit of the Spirit, every generous lifting of a cup to someone's thirst, every resourceful attempt to shore up a sagging spirit, all compassionate attempts to struggle and suffer with people in trouble.
Human rights and responsibilities
Many Christian theologians and ethicists believe that the image of God in humanity secures a range of human rights as well as responsibilities—the responsibility to keep the earth and to live in righteousness, but also the right to respect, the right to life, and the right to certain freedoms. These are unalienable rights. No human being has granted them, and no one may remove them. Personhood is not an achievement, but a gift. The same is true of human dignity—the natural weightiness and worthiness of creatures designed to look like God.
The doctrine of the image of God serves to position human beings in the universe. A sermon on the image of God can explore this. We are not God, but only images of God. On the other hand, we are images of God and not mere products of natural selection working off random genetic mutation. Christians therefore reject both humanist exaggerations of our status and materialist reductions of it.
