The Image in Ruins

Automated transcript, lightly edited for readability. Scripture appears as spoken; the video is the authoritative teaching.

The Painting Nobody Looked At Twice

Well, Shabbat shalom everybody. So, in 1958, there was an auction house in London, that had a painting up for bid and it went up for sale. And the painting was kind of a wreck to say the least. It was a picture of Jesus facing forward. He had one hand raised Renaissance style blessing with the two fingers which represents typically when you see the two fingers up it's the it's the u the nature of God and the nature of man that both find themselves and residing in Jesus right usually if you see three fingers it's the trinity so they have all the symbolism in specifically Renaissance style paintings that are just pretty cool it's like a code right and he's holding a glass orb which is believed to represent the whole world the cosmos if you will.

And it had been through it, been found. The wooden panel it was painted on had already cracked straight down the middle at some point in its history and somebody repaired it and didn't do a great job at it. But you know, I can fix it, right? And someone tried to fix it and other people tried to fix it and then there were other things that happened to it. More people tried to fix it. And then you have this painting that everybody has contributed with upkeeping, who were probably not the best artists all the same. Centuries and centuries of people wanting to help painting over whatever this original painting was.

And somebody, you know, looked at it and the eyes were a little off, need some help. You just do a little touch-up, you know, and then continue and continue and so on and so forth. And everybody in the art world knew of a famous painter. They named a ninja turtle after him, Leonardo da Vinci. Everybody knew that he had painted a painting like this one. We had etches of it. The salvator mundi, the savior of the world in Latin. Let's see here. There's never a question, right? That's that's the that's the painting when it went to the auction house. You see his eyes a little messed up and his beard's kind of weird and you can kind of see the crack over on the I guess the left side of the painting there.

But yeah, we have two of Leonardo's own sketches for the robe that Jesus is wearing in this. U, but the painting itself went missing sometime in the 1700s and for 200 years nobody could find it. In the meantime, about 30 copies of it were floating around the world painted by his students. So, I'm giving you the history and maybe I'm giving too much, but thank you for enduring. So, we have lots of copies floating around of his students who are mimicking this painting, his followers, the guys who trained at his shop. And so, the experts walked up to this one and this painted over thing, and they shrug and they say, "Hey, it's copy number 31.

Pretty cool." They gave it the nickname after Leonardo because obviously it was painted by his students after Leonardo. They write a student's name on it, a man by the name of Brafio. So who thinks they did it and they try to sell it. And it sold for 48 in London. Couple tanks of gas maybe. Not much. And the reason no one looked twice is that it had a similar resemblance to Leonardo, but there were so many knockoffs now that obviously it's probably just a fake or whatever. After this, it disappears into private hands for about 50 years. And then in 2005, it turns up in a little estate sale down in New Orleans, and two art dealers end up buying it on the hunch that it could be something more.

And they spend around $1,100 for it, and they sent it to a restoration specialist in New York, a woman by the name of Diane Mestini, and she starts to clean it. Very slow surgical work, as you can imagine. Just very slowly with a microscope just taking off layers to find out what's underneath all of this paint. And as the overp paint comes off she starts to get excited and notice more and more here. Here is after the cleansing process. So this is when they finally got back down to the original kind of looks like this before they start to restore it. She starts to get excited about it because the way the skin is done is familiar.

The way the lips are handled, very unique. And on the day that she cleaned around the mouth area, she said that her hands started shaking because she had not seen a mouth painted like this before. Except for only one other man in history. And that was in fact Leonardo da Vinci and everybody of course loses their minds. And they argued as you would do and some people are still arguing about this very painting today because the claim is enormous. There are only what fewer than 20 Leonardo paintings in the whole planet. There's not a lot. It's very rare. And this crap cracked scrubbed up painted over wreck I guess.

It sold for 45 pounds, you know, just 50 years earlier. Like, there's no way. When they x-rayed underneath the surface, they found that the thumb on the blessing had been painted twice in two different positions. And the argument is not whether or not this is Leonardo's painting, but if someone just kind of messed with the lips a little bit. This is what changed everyone's mind when they when they x-rayed it. They realized that the thumb was originally painted slightly oriented one way, but then the artist didn't like it. Noticed I said the artist, the person who originally painted this, not the person that was copying one of Leonardo da Vinci's paintings didn't like it, so he moved the thumb.

And they can tell this pretty big deal because again, someone who's copying a painting doesn't revise a painting. They copy the painting. Whoever did this was revising it. They were making origin imprints with the brush. Long story short, mid-length story short, it's believed to be an original painting by Leonardo DiCaprio. By Leonardo da Vinci. Yeah, you caught me there. And in 2017, let's see when they did the restoration. Do we have it? There's the restoration. So that's it fully restored. U someone changed the beard. Someone didn't like the way the eye looked. Like someone went in and changed his beard, which is I guess what you do with Jesus, right?

Whose Hand Made It

You just want him to have a little bit. I don't know. In 2017, this painting sold at auction for $450 million. And it is the it is the most expensive painting ever sold. Period. This one. It's that big of a deal. Same ugly history. It has the same cracked panel in the back. Every scar it had in 1958 still there somewhere. It still has all of that in 2017 when it was sold for this large amount of money. The only thing that changed was the answer to the question, whose hand made it? Whose hand made it? The value of this painting was never in the condition of the painting. The value was in its attribution.

No one knows where it is right now, but the last they heard it is on some very wealthy person's yacht out in the ocean somewhere. Can you imagine? But yeah, as we've been in a series about what it means to be an image bearer in the context of the Bible and in the biblical story and what the Bible says about you and your purpose and God's plan, right? I know week one, we found out what we are. We are the image bearer made as God's image or in Hebrew the Salem, the Salem. It's the statue of the living God shaped out of the dirt, breathed to come back into life or come to life. And it was set in the garden in Genesis to rule the world on God's behalf.

It's it's a proxy of God's power and authority. Week two, we found what happens when the image listens to a beast that it was supposed to rule over. It saw and it took and I guess you could say the statue started to crack a little bit. Crack ran through Adam and Eve. It ran through Cain. It ran through the flood. All the way down. Last week we learned about the crusher, the skull crusher, and we kind of followed one promise that was made in Genesis 3, and we followed it through the entire Bible. The son who would crush the serpent's head, and we found the son on a hill named the skull taking the strike so that he could land the blow to the serpent.

And of course, the serpent lost and the head was crushed. So the snake is handled. So that's great. But that still leaves the question, what about the statue? What about the image? This image that was supposed to represent everything God is kind of it's cracked. It's went through some stuff. It has some blemishes because of all of the things that it has done. It has fallen, if you will. Is it still the image of God? If an image is so far removed from its original place, if it has been cracked, if it's damaged, if it's missing pieces, if it's irreparable in some areas, is it still the image of God?

Or is it just a rock? What is the sum of its value? And that's what we're going to explore today. Because that's the same type of question that I would dare say many of us ask ourselves. What is the sum of my value? The things I've done in my past, my resume, my mistakes, my seasons of ignorance. What about my success? Where does all this play a part in my worth and value? And that's that's part of the whole message I think the Bible has been trying to tell us. So come on, Marty. We are going to go back to the garden, not DiCaprio. So, we'll we'll start back in the garden in Genesis chapter 2.

Hopefully I did a good job catching you up. And this is this is the command. But you must not eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. For on that day you eat of it, you will certainly die. You'll be grounded. You'll lose your privileges. Oh, it's it's very detailed. It says you're going to die. We know the story, right? And on that day you eat of it, you'll die. It's not vague. Not at all. That it's a same day sentence, if you will. And then we know in chapter 3, chapter 3 happens. They eat of it. And Adam and Eve don't die. They're still walking around. They're still breathing. Their eyes are open.

They hide. They get confronted. They get cursed. They get clothed. But they get exiled, but they don't they don't exactly die. And how does that work in the biblical worldview? Did God not follow through? Is he one of those kind of parents? You know, I don't follow through sometimes when I make threats to my kids, so I understand if that's the case, you know. But we know this verse. You know, skeptics of the Bible have waved this verse around for a long time as if they caught God in a lie. Which I get it. Like God was bling, you know, gotcha. I got him. Obviously, he was lying and the Bible's not real or what the rhetoric is.

Exile Is Death

And I would say we're just not reading it in the context of how an ancient Israelite would read it. See, look at what actually happens on that day. They get driven out of the garden, right? Out of the sanctuary away from the tree of life and God stations the cherubam there and a flaming whirling sword so they can't get back in. They were driven away from the place where the presence of God walks in the cool of the day. And in the story that God is telling, to put it bluntly, exile is death. Exile is death. That was the punishment of the sin of Judah. You will be driven out of your land. You will be driven out of the place that I meet with you.

You will be driven out of the hand of milk and honey. It's the It's supposed to project the images of the garden. It's the same thing. And you will be exiled into Babylon. You will have no place anymore. And you will be driven from my presence. It is synonymous with death. Exile is death in the Bible. That is the greatest that's the pinnacle of the curses in Deuteronomy 28. That's where they peak. Exile. To be cut off from the presence of God, from the source of all life, is to be dead while your heart is still beating. Adam and Eve died that afternoon. And I guess the next 900 years, their bodies were just kind of catching up.

But watch how the narrator of Genesis makes sure that you kind of understand this new pattern that's going on. In Genesis 5, it lists the family tree for Adam. And it has a type of pulse, I guess you could say, a drum beat, I guess. And it goes something like this. It's so Adam's life lasted 960 years and then he died. I love movies. There's a movie by DreamWorks. It was called The Cruds. I think it's about this prehistoric family, right? And every night he would tuck his kids in and he would tell them the story of what happens if they get curious and go outside. You will die. You will die. You will die.

This just came to mind, you know, if you go out too far, then he died. And this pattern continues. Seth lived 912 years and then he died. Enos lived 95 years, then he died. Cananan lived 910 years, then he died. Then he died, then he died, then he died, then he died. It's a repeating pattern. Of all these generations. But it breaks one time. You notice where it breaks? I highlighted it in yellow just in case you missed it. Enoch walked with God. Then he was not there because God took him. There's a hack. Okay, figure this out. Do you see what the biblical author here is trying to whisper to us?

If exile from the presence is death, then presence is life. That's that's the that's the link here. We see the evidence here with the one man who chose to stay close. He walked with God and something different happened based off proximity. Every single one of us born east of the garden, right outside the garden. With all of our cracks and all of our fixes, some of us ruined or repainted. Every single us one of us understands then he died. But we're going to go back and we're going to take another look and we're going to go back to the exile scene one more time where Adam and Eve were told that you will be exiled from the garden.

The Judge Who Made Them Clothes

Because there's something neat that happens that tells us a lot about the character of God and it's in Genesis 3:21. And of course, it's when all the curses are being laid out. And then right before they're they're they're booted out, God says, "And the Lord made clothing from skins for the man and his wife, and he clothed them." Now, it's strange where this verse appears because this God has just told them all of the curses, everything that's going to take place, you're going to go out to the land, you're going to live like wild beasts out there. You're not going to find any food no matter how hard you scratch the ground.

You're going away from my presence. But before I do that, hey, here's some clothes. Huh? The judge, the last thing that happens before they go out of the garden for the last time is the judge there stops and he makes clothes for the convicted here and he dresses them himself with his own hands. The God they betrayed that morning kneels down the same day and covers their shame. And look at the clothing. It says skins. Where do skins come from? The text doesn't say it, but it's kind of inferred something died on the day that humans were supposed to die. Something else died in the garden and its skin covered them.

Again, the text doesn't say that an animal died in blood and all this. It's just that where did they come from? Skins don't come off a living animal, right? At least I hope they don't. Something in the garden died so that they could be covered. And can I show you the verse right before this? Because it's an odd verse in Genesis as well. See, right between the death sentence, right, you're all going to die now, and the clothing sentence, Adam turns and figures that now, now is the right time for me to name my wife. Right after this, and the man named wife Eve. Why? Hala. Why that? Because she was the mother of all living.

She hasn't become that yet. This is what he's saying, right? Death just walked into the world through their own hands. You're going to return to dust because you are dust. And the man looks at the woman and names her life. Why? Because God just made a promise in the middle of all those curses that we looked at last week. What was the promise? He made the promise that one day her seed would come forth to crush the serpent's head. And Adam heard that promise. And so I like to think that naming Eve here is the first act of faith in the Bible. I heard a commentary mention that and I thought it was kind of that's kind of cheesy.

That's a stretch. The more I think about it, you know, that's a really cool little nugget. The promise was made that your wife will bear a seed and this seed will come and fix everything. It will destroy the enemy that has brought death into the world. And what does Adam do on his way out? He says, "No, this is Eve. This is the lifebringer. She's going to bring forth all life. And from this life, the sun will appear. The skull crusher will appear. And this is how the restoration of all things will come. All of that all within this trial that's happening. But why cover them at all? Why make clothes?

Because a king does not dress a traitor. A king doesn't do that unless the king is a father. Unless there's something about the image that has a blemish on it that is still worth guarding. And so he makes them clothes and he covers them. And you can say, I know, but that was just an act of mercy because God has to do that every once in a while and he has to, you know, do some merciful stuff. But then the chapter later, he does the same thing to someone else. Cain murders his brother. It's the first murder in human history, right? And God turns around and he puts a protective mark on him so that no one can touch him.

He's protecting the man. He guards the life of a man who just proved exactly how broken these imagebearers are. That's twice now that God has answered the level of his mercy and grace and what the value of his image bearers are despite their actions against him. He covers them. He marks them. And do the image bearers, do they get better after this? No, they don't. We're we're heading straight to the flood. And the whole thing about the flood is what? Well, image bearsers come forth and we get to rule and subdue, which is what we're supposed to do with the wisdom and knowledge of God. But instead, it's always convenient for us and very beastly to determine what good and evil is for ourselves.

And so now we have people who are equipped with this authority to rule and subdue, but now for selfish reasons. And what happens when you get two people in the same room? You have two people that think they're brighter than the other person or they're better than the other person or they're stronger than the other person. And what typically happens? We fight. We fight because I'm better than you. No, you're not. Yes, I am. It's three-year-olds, right? And it says the earth was filled with violence. This is what mankind does with its ability to rule and reign and subdue. We kill. We spill blood.

And we love it. Lock sings poetry about it to his wives. How much he loves killing people on a daily basis. This hasn't changed, by the way. Hasn't changed. This is reality right now within each one of us. And so God looks at the violence of the world and he's going to I'm just going to undo creation. I'm going to hit reverse. The waters that I separated. Nah. The land that came up. Nope. It's going back under. We're going to reset the whole thing. And we know that he chooses a family, Noah. And here we have Noah, man chosen. He goes into a sanctuary on the boat and now he has dominion over all the animals once again.

God Signs His Name Again

And so it's a restart of the creation story. And he gets off the boat and then of course the end of his story is he finds himself naked in a garden, right? Because he got drunk with the vines. It's the same pattern. So the flood just happened and the earth is filled up with violence, the beastly behavior, so on and so forth. And so Noah steps off the boat into this reset world that's been kind of scrubbed out. And here's what God says. This first thing that God says, he says, "Whoever sheds human blood by humans, his blood will be shed. For God made humans in his image." The reason why should you not kill other people, everybody?

Because humans are made in God's image. Why is murder the ultimate crime? Notice he says this is present tense. For God made humans in his image. Stated after the fall. This is stated after Cain. This is stated after the flood. After he just reset an entire civilization of beastarted people. God looks at the still cracked and blemished humanity exiled from the garden and he says the title of image bearer still stands on every one of them. Every single one of them. And if you deface the statue of God, you have committed high treason against the one it represents. Everybody still with me? The image of God gets reaffirmed after all of these things have taken place.

And it just goes to show that sin wrecked a lot of things, but it never once got the authority to unmake who you are as God's image. It's a big deal. It's a big deal because this isn't fresh humanity. God is walking back up and signing his name to the art piece. And when we look at ourselves, sometimes we assume the fallen, blemished, cracked image itself. We watch the painting again. We wonder what our own value is. Which is why I wanted to use Leonardo da Vinci's painting as an example because what was wrong with the painting that we started speaking about? What was wrong with it? Was it not a Leonardo?

No, it was a Leonardo the whole time it hung on that wall getting called a $45 piece copy. It was Leonardo's while the amateur artist painted over its face and gave him a new beard and messed with his fingers. The panel on the back, the canvas cracked down the middle. Everything that made the painting glorious was buried under other people's paint. But the hand that made it never stopped making it. Never came off. And I guess that's kind of the metaphor that I want to place in here to say that's exactly what the fall did to every one of us. When we fall to sin, when mankind fell to sin, when we struggle with it daily, it does not crack the signature of who the author is and who the sculptor is.

It may have cracked the glory, but sin does not erase your identity. It does not erase the vocation that God has given you as his image bearer. It just keeps us from fully reflecting the glory. And why did the glory fade, if you will? Well, for going on the logic here, it's based off proximity. Based off proximity. Didn't lose its maker. It lost its little bit of its light and it got walked out of the room where the light was. That's what exile is. That's what exile did in the story. But it never turned the masterpiece into a copy. It just moved it into a slightly darker room. You are not a copy that God decided whether or not to keep.

You are an original that may have been hung up in a bad room where it experienced circumstances over time where decisions were made or mistakes were made or ignorance flourished. And sometimes we look at our past and we can't just stop focusing on the crack in the canvas that happened because of that one thing we did a long time ago or yesterday. We can't help but notice some of the smudge, the paint a little bit because it wasn't handled well maybe in some circumstances. We can't h can't handle the flaws. And sometimes we make the mistake of thinking that we're not worth what we were intended to be worth.

And that's simply not the case. Glory comes back the second the painting gets carried back into the presence of the one who made it. And I guess that's the whole premise of my message today is that reflection of how many times we'll get in the routine of identity. We'll wear the mask so long that we think that's who we are. But underneath we still have the anxiety. We still have the worry. We still have the It's fear. It's fear. What if they knew? What if they saw? How many times do I have to keep dealing with this? How many times do I have to struggle? When will I be free? When will God love me again?

Is something I've heard people say. It's a common phrase that we sometimes say to ourselves because we feel like we've lost our worth, because we had a human experience and we walk down a road that is very rocky called life. And sometimes we trip. Sometimes we break an ankle. Sometimes we get mad at someone else walking and we throw stones at them. It's not good. Sometimes we make mistakes and we continue to grow in that. But sometimes a voice sticks with us that tells us that you're just not enough to be loved. And the whole story of the Bible is rhetoric against that type of thinking. It's really what it boils down to in a lot of pages.

The Beast King Who Looked Up

And some of us are probably thinking, "Matt, I haven't just become a blemished statue. I've went full beast mode." As we sometimes do. That was a popular thing. Do we still say that? Like go in beast mode or is that like an early 2000s thing? That was right. There's a man in scripture who ran that road farther than probably anyone else as far as his boldness and audacity to lift himself up in spite of God and the glory of God. And he went all the way to the bottom. And the whole purpose of this story, is to show that nobody can fall too far. His name is Nebuchadnezzar, King Nebuchadnezzar. The big bad guy, the king of Babylon, the king of the archetypal enemy of Israel, the most powerful human alive at one point.

And in Daniel chapter 4, it opens and it closes in his voice. And the whole thing is written up like this royal decree. It's pretty cool. It watch it says that essentially we'll read some of the verses here, but God hands this pagan king everything. Daniel even describes him with garden language. A great tree feeding and sheltering every living thing. The whole Eden, Garden of Eden job description is about this king and God sends him a warning dream and gives him a full year to change. And 12 months later, the king is up walking around his roof of his palace. Kings on rooftops, guys. Like it never ends well, right?

Never ends well. Just David gets up on a roof, you know, looks over at everything he gots and it cost him his whole family. Nebuchadnezzar gets up on a roof. And yeah, and so here's here's what he says. King Nebuchadnezzar. And the king exclaimed, "Is this not Babylon the great that I have built to be a royal residence for my vast power and for my majestic glory?" I mean, just the level of confidence to be able to say something like that. Do I have my little No. My power, my glory. I built this. And where have we heard that before? Oh, yeah. That's what Pharaoh said in Ezekiel. All right. The Nile is my own.

I made it for myself. It's it's the serpent speech, right? And so while the word words are still here and he's speaking these things, a voice falls out of heaven and here's what happens next in verse 33. He says, "Then he was driven away from his people. He ate grass like cattle and his body was drenched with dew from the sky until his hair grew like eagle's feathers and his nails like bird's claws. The king of the world becomes a literal beast. And if you remember from last week, we see this pattern of people becoming beastly when they are overcome with sin. They're choosing the wrong path, the wrong vocation.

Instead of being an image of God, they're choosing to be the beast, which is thing they're supposed to rule over. The king of the world becomes a literal beast. He was driven out, exiled, garden language. His head was down, eating grass where the animals eat. His hair was like feathers, nails, claws, everything we've been looking at for the past few weeks. The king has become an animal. Happens to one man's actual body here. Seven periods of time go by. Daniel says, it's how Daniel puts it. And then one verse, and I think this is one of the most more hopeful verses. It gets me excited. In the Bible, this is what it says.

But at the end of those days, I Nebuchadnezzar did what? Looked up to heaven and my sanity returned to me. Then I praised the most high and honored and glorified him who lives forever. What did he do? He went to church. He waited for the pastor to have that peak tone at the end of the message. And you know the keyboard just comes up there and just has that real medicrational flow and it's like, "Oh, I'm going to do it. I'm going to go up." and he runs up to the altar and he does the thing. And no, that's not what he did. The man that turned into a beast, he looked up. He look He did the thing that animals don't do.

My dog doesn't look up. The cows don't look up. They look at what they can devour. He looks up like a man. He looks up to the heavens. He lifts his eyes. A beast eats with his heads down head down. And this man lifted his eyes up from the grass toward heaven. And his mind came back. And his humanity, his vocation, his purpose, the thing he was created to be came back. He stopped grasping and he looked up and God gave himself back. And again, bad guy, not a good guy. That's the that's the irony of the whole story. This is the king whose armies burned Jerusalem. They leveled the temple of God. They dragged the people of God out of their land in chains.

He's the exiler. He did to Israel what the cherubam and the sword did to Adam. And when God decides to put one story in the Bible about a full beast mode type of man getting restored back into a human being, he doesn't pick a believer that lost their faith. He doesn't pick the prodal son here. He doesn't pick a prophet who just got crabby for a couple years, you know. No, it the man holding the keys to his own people's cage is who he uses to show us the level of love that he has for us and expectations and worth he has for every human being. Everybody, if God sees Nebuchadnezzar this way, I know how much safe self-hate talk you probably like to tell yourself when it's quiet or when you're in the mirror, but this disqualifies all of that.

It the evilst king of the evilst empire. No, even him, even he can be restored. Just look up. Look up and be my image bearer. Look up and be the person I was made. I made you to be the beautiful, beautiful receptacle for God's glory, presence, identity, love, mercy, grace, representative underneath everything, the feathers, the claws, the seven periods of time, the image was still in there. And the road of restoration was not full of checkpoints of doing good deeds and being pious and working really hard to try to level back up to clean yourself up. It was one honest look up. One honest look up.

And that's the whole thing. Sometimes when we go through life, we have influences that give us price tags. Sometimes they're parents. Sometimes they're siblings. Sometimes they're friends. Sometimes they're not friends. They're bullies. Sometimes it's in a marriage. Many times it comes from a church. People judge you and people tell you about it and people tell you how much you're worth. People love labels. We love labels. And sometimes we stick price tags on oursel for whatever reason because you know your own history. You know the crack in the panel. You know the blemishes. Living with this imposed identity.

I'm just a copy. I'm just a bad knockoff. I'm only worth the 45 pound price tag. Again, the condition of the painting was never the question. The question was always whose hand made it. And the same hands that shaped you out of the dust resigned the work in Genesis chapter nine after the worst thing humanity ever did. And so, I think the Bible is just trying to tell us that your worth is not your track record. Your worth is in your maker. And he has never once disowned his own work. And what's amazing is that he's still revising every single one of us, if we let him. He's still moving the thumb around a little bit.

I don't like it right there. I'm going to move it. Yeah. I like it here now. And that's awesome that we have a father and a God that would continue to do that. And again, how distracting is that when he's trying to do that and we're over here like, "No, I'm not deserving. I'm not worth your attention. I'm Shut up. Get the thumb. I want to bend it this way. Stop. I want a new beard on you." You know it. That's the point, right? And I think that's amazing. Copies don't get revised. Copies get copied. Only original masterpieces can be revised by the original author. And the fact that God is not done working on you is the proof of who you belong to and who you've always belonged to.

Glory Depends on Proximity

Whether you like it or not. Whether you like it or not, you are the image of God. Not something you carry around. Not something that Yeah, the invitation was never that you have to go earn it. The invitation is just become what you already are and look up. And so, how do you do that? Well, the same way the painting got its glory back, I guess you could say. You get carried back into the presence. Glory depends on proximity. Remember, Enoch was closer to God, walked with God. You become what you were made to be by getting close to the one who you were made to look like. And that's that's a concept that the Apostle Paul speaks about in 2 Corinthians 3.

He says he says, "We all with unveiled faces are looking as a mirror at the glory of the Lord and are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory. This is from the Lord who is the spirit." So if we have went through times of transitions in our life, shifting, blemishes, cracks, we can always go back to the glory. And how do we do that? Well, we look at him. We get close. We behold him until you start to resemble him. Because that's how an image works. It's a resemblance, right? It reflects whatever is turned toward. The beast looks down, the image looks up, and every time you lift your eyes off the grass and back onto your king, a little more of the overpaint comes off.

Taking the Price Tag Off

And the second half of that, I guess, is that it might come at a cost because if Genesis chapter 9 is true about you, it's just as true about every other human being you're going to lays lay eyes on between now and when you die. In other words, the value that I just told you that you have, the masterpiece, the signature original piece has this the same artist is working on every masterpiece. U and this is when it gets hard. Because we always love a God that always defends us and attacks the people that we don't think deserve his love and glory, right? That person who wrecked your life has the same value in the eyes of God.

It's the same masterpiece. He created them. The one you've decided is beyond the hope. Like there's no way they're getting in, right? They're too far messed up through my eyes. I don't like the things that they do or the opinions they have or the way they whatever the Yeah, that's that's the one that has just as much hope as you do. Gosh, we've gotten so good at deciding which people are really the image of God and which ones are allowed to just not be. We love being the image of God. What we love even more, I guess, is again getting to decide who isn't. Because the second that I mark you as a $45 price tag, I can treat you like a $45 piece of work, right?

That's how we do it. That's how we do it. That's why we make up narratives about people as soon as we meet them sometimes. So we can size them up in our own minds so that then we can pour value into the assumed identity that we think we want that is apart from God. That's why people judge. By the way, if you need a litmus test, so we can size them up in our minds and come out on top for some type of identity security. What a beastly way to live. What a beastly way to live to look at someone and the first thing that comes into your mind is something critical about them, something you don't like.

What would it feel like to look at every single human being? Anyone, no matter how they dress, where they're from, what religion, what lifestyle, I don't care. What would it be like to look at every single human being and the first thing you naturally without even having to think about it, the first thing that comes across your mind is something about them you think is really cool, neat, or positive. Little things Oh, M. That sounds pretty easy. Oh, okay. Let's do an audit this week. Yeah. Capture your thoughts. Let's do an audit. When you're at the restaurant, when you're at the restaurant and the waitress or waiter walks past and they're wearing a they're wearing a shirt that doesn't have a cool design on it or it doesn't look cool, it looks nerdy.

I don't know. Catch your thought. What's their first impression that you thought of this image of God? And if you're constantly always going to a negative, you need to come back and go over this because it probably means that you're the one giving yourself a price tag that is so low that you have to devalue everyone around you so that you can feel some type of worth because you've been running from the one that says you are priceless your whole life. And it's time for that to change. And I know you're tired if that's you. But it's time for that to change. For you to experience the worth and the value and the love and the mercy from a father that gave it to you, from a master artist.

It's time for that to change. If you're willing to face your fear, As Christians, believers in Yeshua, we're committed to fulfilling the mandate of what it means to be the imagebearer of God. We're committed. The image in the Bible survived the fall. It survived Cain. It survived the flood. It survived a beast king on all fours eating grass out in the field. It survived you. You have not been the one to take the image and strip it from its status. Sorry. So, lift your eyes up from the dirt this morning. Lift your eyes up from looking at everything that is just there for you to consume and take to the one who you should be resembling.

Lift your eyes up from being an animal, a beast that is meant to be ruled over to the image, the expression of God in his own world that rules and subdues the earth with the wisdom of God, with the love of God. And that takes boldness to grab onto that vocation. But that's who Yeshua has always called you to be. You follow the one you want to imitate. We follow Yeshua. If we need to get the glory back, if we need to go back in the room, if we need to come back from exile, we follow the one that's leading the way. And he's carrying a cross. And he says, "Pick up yours and follow me. Resemble me.

Do as I do." And of course we know that comes at a cross becau a cost because we know where he's walking to with this cross and we're meant to follow. And so please stand as we as we conclude in worship today. I guess the only thing I want everyone to know based off the lesson for the image bearer is just that you can't go so far from God that you're no longer considered a masterpiece. But more so, you don't have the authority to wear or adjust the price tag that God put on you. And so during this time of worship, we have a prayer partner on either side of the stage. I invite you if you need prayer today for anything going on in your life.

You'd like someone to come alongside you and just lift you up before the father, please come forward. We have an altar here and it's a symbolic altar and it's made for one reason and that's if maybe you've carried something in today that you're tired of carrying around. Maybe it's a status, maybe it's an identity, maybe it's a sin that you've held on to too closely for too long. It's appropriate to come forward, kneel down, and just place it on the stage. Symbolic act that you're drawing a line in the sand and that you're going to step over it today. Alvina Mino, our father, our king. Father, we thank you for this opportunity to once again dive into your word and see the reality of what a masterpiece is and that a masterpiece is never declared based off of its condition, but by who the artist is.

Father, I ask in the name of Yeshua that your Holy Spirit would work today. That it would be a reminder of who we are, what our worth is. That it would be a reminder that no amount of time, no amount of things, wrongdoings, mistakes, no amount of exile can keep the value that you've given us away. That we would once again realize who we are. That we would realize what we were made for. That we would realize our responsibility and vocation. That when people meet us, it should be as if they are meeting you, your love, your connection, your forgiveness, your mercy as your images. And that we would be reminded to take the price tag off.