The Image of God Isn't What You Think

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

Well, God bless you and love you everybody. Welcome to Founded in Truth Fellowship. Today we're going to start this morning in a desert in Egypt in the early 1800s. In 1816, there are a couple of guys with a rope and they have a problem that weighs about 7 and 1/2 tons. The men there worked for a strongman out of a circus. This strongman was named Giovanni Belzoni. One day, as you do in the circus, you decide to become a treasure hunter.

Oh, can someone bring me the clicker? It should be back there—the one that doesn't have a battery cover on the back. I think it's in the cage. Sorry for the distraction, guys. It was my fault.

So there was a circus strongman by the name of Giovanni Belzoni, and one day, as you do in the circus, you decide to become a treasure hunter. Here's our guy.

The strongman decided to go and start collecting things. This was a carved head of Pharaoh that had been broken off from a much larger statue that had once been one of the largest human depictions ever created. Some say the statue measured somewhere around 50 to 55 feet. And it had just been lying around in the sand, half buried for several thousand years—about 3,000 years when he found it. And the statue was of Pharaoh Ramses II.

This is the statue that Giovanni found. A poet named Percy Shelley couldn't help but to feel the irony of the statue, and so he wrote just a short poem based on this colossus that was lying broken in the desert. On the base of the statue, the poet imagined what the inscription should say. It says: 'My name is Ozymandias, which is the Greek name for Ramses, king of kings. Look at my works, ye—meaning look at everything that I as Pharaoh built at one time. All of you lesser kings and everything that you give up, you'll never match me, but also look at where I'm at now.'

I know I'm kicking a dead horse here, but you understand the kind of the ironic joke of it. The statue that was meant to represent the most powerful thing in all of existence is something you get a selfie with now.

The Fall of Empires

See, in the ancient world, a king would make images of himself and plant them all over his kingdom, specifically if he conquered a place. He would plant them so that his presence would be there even though he was not. It's kind of the idea, right? But every single time a king builds big statues of himself everywhere he goes to establish his reign and sovereignty over a kingdom, in history it ends up the same way. Statues fall.

So we're going to put a pin in that because we're going to open the Bible and talk about this exact same concept throughout Scripture and how it relates. Specifically the images and what their function was in the ancient world. We're starting a new short series—I promise. This week it'll be four or five messages long. And it's about the Bible, but it's also about you. It's about what you actually are and the story in the Bible. Underneath your name, underneath your job, your skill set, underneath the best moments of your life and the worst that you've experienced.

This series is going to be about the oldest thing the Bible actually says about being a human being. And we're going to jump into Genesis 1, the first chapter of the Bible. The whole chapter of Genesis 1 is something you come to appreciate more the more you study it, the literary designs, the rhythm that it has.

Creation: The Image-Bearer

God speaks and things come into being. God says it is good, light comes into play, the sky is created, the sea appears, then the land comes forth. Then he has this big aquarium all set up for all the pets to put them in, right? Then he brings the birds and puts those in the sky he created. He brings the fish and puts those in the water. Then he brings the animals and puts those in the land. Right up until the last day, the sixth day.

And for the first time God kind of stops narrating the world and he starts being very deliberate and intentional about everything up to this point. He says this in Genesis -27. It says, "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. They will rule the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky, the livestock, the whole earth, and the creatures in our image, as some translations will say, in our likeness, if you will. My favorite is as our image. Let us create man as our image.'"

Most of us have heard these types of phrases our whole life: being the image of God. We have lots of different ideas that we try to employ to reconcile what that means. Almost sounds like a compliment. Sounds like the Bible's being kind of sweet to us, telling us we're kind of special. We have this spark of divinity in us in some way that qualifies us to be labeled this image bearer. We nod and we smile: "You're a good boy. Yeah, I'm an image of God. That's right. Special." But it means a lot more than that.

What Is an Image?

It means more than just trying to make you feel more polished than all the other creatures. You are, but there's a reason behind it and there's also a weight that goes along with that title. We're going to discuss what an image is in the Bible. The word "image" in Hebrew is "tzelem"—T-S-E-L-E-M if you transliterate it—tzelem.

In the world long ago, a tzelem was not like a special phrase you would tell someone. It's not like a poem. It's not a feeling you get. It's not a vague spiritual concept at all that we have to wrestle with. It's an object. A physical object in the ancient world. A statue. Something physical, carved out of stone or wood and decorated. And specifically it was the statue of a god that would stand inside a temple, or the statue of a king that would stand and acknowledge the king's power and authority and presence in a place where the king may not be.

Numbers has a reference to tzelim. Here it's used in many different contexts. But just to drive it home, here's when God is speaking to Israel. He says, "You must drive out all the inhabitants in the land before you. Destroy all of their stone tzelim images and their cast images. And you must demolish all of their high places."

So when the Israelites first heard Genesis 1 state that you are created as God's image, they knew what that was. It had nothing to do with the idea that we just look alike. We all look kind of different. It's not about being spiritually complex. No, it was an idol.

Because the statue of a king or a god did a job. When an emperor conquered a piece of territory too far away for him to be in person, he would put up the statue. Because he can't be in two places at once. That's the idea, right? It was not just for decoration. The statue was a claim. It announced to everyone who walked past it: "This land has a king and the king rules here, and I am his presence among you—the proxy, if you will."

We have actual inscriptions. The Assyrian king Shalmaneser conquered new ground and recorded that he fashioned "a mighty image of my majesty and planted it in the conquered place to stand for his glory." That's all a tzelem is. It's the king's authority given a body standing in a place the king is not there himself.

If we go back to Genesis 1 with this idea, we now understand that being the image of God is not simply a compliment or a status—it's a job. It's a job. God, the king over everything, makes the world. In that world, he's going to place his image—a tzelem, a statue—that stands in the king's place and announces the king's rule and represents all the things the king does around there. Except this image, this tzelem is not carved out of stone. This one breathes. This image has a pulse and a face and a name, and the image is you.

Our identity as God's tzelem, God's image, means we have a representational role. It's a big deal. The Creator God appointed humans to exercise his rule over creation on his behalf. You were not made to be impressive. You were made to be a representative. You are the statue of the king planted on the earth to say: "This world has a king, he rules, and look—you can see what he looks like. He made one of these that walks around and looks like him." That's the goal.

That's the first thing the Bible ever says about you. Before sin, before the Torah was given, before Israel, before any of it, you are the image. You are the planted flag of the reign of God.

That's the evolution, by the way. When we go and conquer some place now, we don't necessarily set up a big image. We personify the sovereignty in the form of a flag and then we plant the flag, right? The moon's ours—that's what it's saying. That was funny. So that's the context. When ancient Israelites first read Genesis 1, it was a very scandalous thing. Because you can imagine in a world where everybody else has salem, we're supposed to destroy those. Why? Because they're false. Because they have no breath. Because they're just—what's it called when you have fake money? It's a counterfeit. Yeah, it's a counterfeit.

It's a fraud. So I told you salem could be the statue of a king. Of course, it can also be the statue of a god for the same reasons. Every temple in the ancient world had one. When you go visit historic temples today, right? You walk into the temple and depending on how it's laid out, it most likely has a super sacred room—the private bedroom of the god, right? The holiest of holies. And that is where the image, the statue, the idol, if you will, would be standing depending on what type of god it was and where it was. That's where this deity, the image of the god would sit.

The God Inside the Statue

Again, it wasn't meant to be decoration for the people who worshipped it. It wasn't a symbol. The people who worshipped these stone images believed that their god was inside of it. That his spirit was inside of the image. The statue was god's body on earth, his presence and proxy. They'd even bring it food. They would clothe their statues with honor. Now, people believed that the gods actually ate and drank and stuff, which is funny. I think it's funny because I would have loved to have been behind the scenes of the reality show of the priesthoods of these pagans, because they got to bring out the god and they got to show people and be like, "Oh, well, god's hungry, so we got to go eat now." And they got to kind of take him inside and they'd give him some food and they'd kind of tell everybody, "Yeah, he ate the cheeseburger. He's doing great." You know, how did that work? How do you pull that off? How are you even in on that? You know what I mean? But that was the concept.

And just how audacious for this people group to walk into the land and everyone has their gods on display. When they go into battle, they bring their gods with them because it's really the gods that are fighting in the ancient world, right? So whoever the gods are upstairs arm wrestling in the clouds—whoever's winning will be reflected on the battlefield in who's living and who's not. So you have pagans bringing their gods forward. Yeah, we got ours. And then you have Israel with a box. Which is supposed to be god's throne, but it's empty. Like, what? What do you——there's nothing there. Where is your god's image? Israelites pull their swords. I'm the image, you know. I don't know. It's very scandalous. Very scandalous.

The Mouth Opening Ceremony

But the statue in the ancient world, when you would make one, it never started out alive. There was actually a ritual that took place called the mouth opening and the mouth washing ceremony. Specifically in Babylon but other places—Assyria and so on and so forth. Where they would describe the awakening of the image. And you probably know where I'm going, but stay with me for just a little bit longer. They would have a master craftsman and he would carve it into the image, into the shape of whatever their god personified looked like. They'd chisel it and they'd have a big workshop, and everyone knew that they were building the statues. That wasn't the problem. The problem was how is the thing the craftsman just built in a shop the living presence of God? So they built a ceremony to fix that and help transition people into believing that this is where God is now, right?

The priests would carry this newly carved statue down to the river at night. This is Babylonian workflow. And they would perform a ritual over it and they would wash its mouth out. And they would pretend that his mouth and nostrils are opening up, and the reason they did this is because they would declare that the statue could now breathe and eat and smell the incense that they're offering to it. And the spirit of the god was believed to have come down and entered through the nostrils and the mouth of the statue. Kind of like a genie in a bottle, I guess, and it would take its root in the statue. And now the statue is the living proxy of the pagan god that they worshipped. Everybody still with me? All right. I know this is way too dense. I apologize.

Before the ceremony, it was just deadwood, stone, or gold. After the ceremony, they would celebrate that they now have a living image of their god with the god inside of it. They even had a recorded moment where the craftsman would come out, and it's almost a joke because the craftsman—everyone knew he built it—but he would lay his hands out and they would have a special wooden sword that they would fake chopping his hands off with as he swore that he never built the idol. It is crazy. It's just crazy. But we do crazy things all the time. I mean, if in 3,000 years people are going to look back at us and just see our traditions—I mean, who knows? Their god was born.

God's Image Breathes

And so if we take that ceremony, the carved statue, the mouth opening ceremony, the spirit coming in through the nostrils and the mouth of this statue, and then we turn to Genesis 2, we find some neat connections of context, right? And so Genesis 2, verse 7 states, "Then the Lord formed man out of the dust from the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living soul, a living being." Look at what God does. He forms a man out of dust. And the word for form there is a—it's the word for shaping clay. So mud, right? God kneels down in the dirt. He molds the statue as selem out of mud, and then he does the one thing for real that the pagan priests needed the whole ceremony and the river and this whole lie to fake.

He opens his mouth. He bends down to the clay, and he just breathes his own breath, the ruach, straight into the nostrils, and the chest rises, and the eyes open, and the image of God is now alive. No river, no midnight ritual, no "I didn't cut my hands off if I lie. I didn't shape them. I didn't do anything." No, the living God built his image with his own hands and animated it with his own breath. You are the statue. God opened the mouth of himself.

And centuries later, the prophets figured out how funny it was to see pagan cultures imitating this. And so they poked them a little bit and mocked them a little bit in the Bible. It's there, right? The whole pagan ceremony. The first one is in Habakkuk , right? What's it say? "Woe to him who says to wood, 'Wake up!' Or to mute stone, 'Come alive!' Can it teach? Look, it may be plated with gold and silver, yet there is no breath in it at all." The reason why they're emphasizing breath isn't just to state, "Oh, it's not alive." It's the fact that they're familiar with the whole ceremony, right?

The Foolishness of Idols

Another big one—and then we'll read a couple of them because this is one of our favorites. Jeremiah 10 is all about this exact thing, right? Jeremiah 10: "For the customs of the peoples are worthless. They cut a tree out of the forest. A craftsman shapes it with a chisel. They adorn it with silver and gold. Hammered silver is brought from Tarshish and gold from Uphaz. What the craftsman and goldsmith have made is then dressed in blue and purple, all made by skilled workers." Then we continue in what, verse 14 of Jeremiah? "Everyone is senseless and without knowledge." He's saying, "These people are stupid." "Every goldsmith is shamed by his idols. The images he makes are a fraud because they have no breath in them. They are worthless objects worthy of mockery. When their judgment comes, they'll perish. He who is the portion of Jacob is not like these, for he is the maker of all things, including Israel, the people of his inheritance. The Lord Almighty is his name."

Oh, thank you. Was that for me? Oh. Thanks, babe.

"There's no breath in it." This is not talking about trees. This is—a long time ago, I used to think this was talking about trees, and I wanted it to be about trees for some reason. This is about exactly what we just spoke about. He's critiquing the making of an image and then them faking that God put his breath in it. And look, that's the whole joke. You carve a statue, you do all this chanting, and the entire time the real God has already filled the world with images that breathe on their own, billions of them, walking around. It's neat. And I love how it ends because you can almost see that he's mocking the craftsman because he can't do what God has done in making images appropriately.

One more piece that the ancient world would have found almost offensive out there: when a god did get a living image, it was just one man. So there were many cultures who believed that God did infuse himself into a human body, and in those cultures, that human body would have been called the king. How convenient, right? So you think about Pharaoh. Pharaoh is considered to be a god. He was considered to be God's image reigning and ruling on earth.

What a cushy spot to find yourself in, right? The one on top. Everyone under him was just the labor. Genesis takes that and turns it inside out and hands everyone the title of image of God.

In other words, when God made his image a living being, he didn't just make one that ruled over everyone else. This is a big deal for how Israel is compared to other nations surrounding them, especially in Babylon and such. There's no one on top. Because how can someone be on top if everyone is on top, right?

That was the fruit of the garden. When you want to determine good and evil for yourself, and then you start choosing good and evil for yourself, and the byproduct of that is, well, you're on top now because you're the most good and everyone else is evil. That wasn't God's plan. God's plan is that everybody's at the top. And that's why it goes so far even to say male and female. It points out the minorities and raises them to the top at the very beginning of the book. Everyone is the living, breathing image of God.

The Breath That Holds Creation

Breathing. So the word for breathe is the Hebrew word ruach. Right? The ruach hakodesh—the Holy Spirit, right? It's also the word for breath. When you breathe, it's also the same word for wind. And the reason why one word covers three, four, even five different definitions is, to an ancient people, that's what fit.

If you walk outside for just a second, you just walk around. You can watch a man breathe out, and you can watch him keep his breath out. So every single time that you exhale, you're starting to die, right? It's like in a video game where you're underwater and you only have so much left. You begin to die. And what is it that allows you to keep living? It's breath. And you see the animation of your lungs in your chest.

On a cold morning, you can breathe out and see it leave your mouth. It's something there. And then the wind comes through and the whole tree line breathes. It's animated. Whatever this is, it's animated. The people who wrote our Bibles looked at every single bit of that and said there's one thing that is holding all of creation together.

All of the life in creation is connected. That one thing is what we will call the ruach. This animating, life-giving presence—not only the breath, but also the wind, but also the spirit. All of it is the vitality of God moving through creation. I think it's beautiful. Beautiful.

Job says it without blinking. He says, "Take that breath back and every living thing perishes together and returns to the dust."

So when God kneels in the dirt and breathes into this statue, he's plugging you into the thing that's going to hold the world together. Which is his vitality. The breath.

Bound by One Breath

Which means the people that you cannot stand in this world, the ones on the wrong side of wherever you are, no matter how zealous you are of whatever side you're on, no matter if you have receipts and evidence for you to be on that side—they are running on your king's breath, too. The ones that you claim have taken your peace, which, by the way, nobody takes your peace. You only ever surrender it. They are running on your king's breath. The ones that you've written off, they're breathing the same air because they're plugged into the same circuit, whatever metaphor you want. They're just as present with God as you are.

And so, that is what you are—a breathing statue of the living God.

The Garden and the Temple

So we go to chapter two again. And chapter two is a little bit different version of the creation story. It's kind of cool. It has a few more details. But when we go to chapter two, verse 15, it says this. What did God do with this living statue?

The Lord took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden to work and watch over it. To work it and watch over it. Sounds like gardening, okay? That's nice and relaxing, right? Sounds like God gave Adam a nice yard and a chore list to do before he can go play Fortnite and watch TV, right?

But those two words in Hebrew—to work it and watch over it, as some translate it—it means to serve and to guard. That's what they mean. To serve and to guard. And the two words show up together again later in the Torah here in Numbers. And when they show up together later, they're not talking about a garden. They're actually talking about what the priesthood does in the temple.

Because they were placed in the temple so that they could work it and guard it. The Levites, the men who served and guarded the tabernacle as well as the priesthood within it. So I think we have one more slide. Oh, there we go. Yeah, Numbers.

Perform duties. So here in most of your translations you'll see they are to perform duties and be responsible for all the furnishings. It's the same words. They're to serve and to guard. Serve and to guard.

The gardener and the priest are doing the same job. Because the garden that God placed Adam in was never just a garden. Think about it. Eden is full of gold and precious stones. My vegetable garden is not full of gold and precious stones. Do you know what is? The temple. In the garden, cherubim, angels are guarding its entrance. Just like on the tapestry at the front of the temple. Eden is the place where God himself walks around in the cool of the day. He's present. He's at home there.

As the Garden of Eden was a temple. That was the construct. It was the first holiest of holies, if you will. It was the one spot on the early Earth where heaven and Earth were not separated, where the king is at home and present right here.

You, the Living Statue

And so put the picture together. God builds a temple. And in the temple, where a temple would normally have a statue of a god, God puts his image. He puts you—living, breathing, serving, and guarding his sacred space the way that a priest does.

You were not set down in this world to be a tourist. Unfortunately, as cushy as that would be, no, you were set down to be a priest in a sanctuary, the statue of a king. And those are the same job. And that job is the deepest true thing about what being human is.

Because the sole purpose of that job is that when people look at the statue, they see who? They see the king that's in charge. And the downer of that is, it means the statue has to represent the king that's in charge. And if the statue fails to represent the king that's in charge, maybe they can represent themselves, maybe they can represent some other king that they want to be in charge, maybe they can represent their own opinions and beliefs or their own theology. Whatever it is, when they start doing that, they stop doing that.

When someone meets you and all they leave feeling is some type of guilt or shame or anger, that means we're not doing something right. We're not doing our job correctly.

Work Was Part of God's Plan

We have this instinct, a lot of us, that we probably picked up at church because of how the story is typically read. And that is that before this fall, before sin, Adam lay in a hammock and ate grapes. And then when he sinned, the punishment was now he has to get a job. Go out and work.

As much as I empathize with that reading, that's not what the text says in the Bible. The work came before the fall. He was already working. God gives the man the garden to serve and to guard before there is any such thing as sin. Work was not the curse. Work was part of the original dignity of being human. It's part of being the image. The king gave his representative something to do.

The Priesthood of Daily Work

Which means your work that you do now, your actual work—your daily, weekly—is not beneath your spiritual life. It's what you're called to do. It's another venue for how you bear the image.

When you bring order to a corner of the world that was chaos before, or when you fix the thing, or teach the child, or you plant the thing, or when you make a patch of the world a little bit more like a garden and a little bit less like the wilderness, you're doing the priest's job. You're doing the job of the image.

Most of it is not flashy. Nobody's filming your day-to-day work, the little divine appointments when you bump into people and you just have a word for someone of encouragement. Doesn't even have to be anything spiritual. It's connecting with another human being about what connects us all. It's not something to be taken for granted. Whether you're mowing the lawn or folding laundry, that's the work of the image. Is to do that with the dignity of the king.

Finding Your Purpose

So in every small effort of maintenance or large project undertaking, good job. A lot of us carry around a low background static, if you will, of aimlessness sometimes, especially in the world that we live in. A sense that life is not really about a whole whole lot other than our beliefs, maybe, or just our opinions about stuff.

And I think part of the reason is that we're not doing the thing we've been built for. And hear me. We were made to bring God's kind of order and care into the world around us. And when we spend our days only consuming, which is what we're trained to do, only scrolling, only being entertained, maybe something inside of us starves a little bit. Because that's not what images are made for. You were built to make a difference in your corner of the king's land.

And so recognize where you're planted. Recognize where God says, "I want my sovereignty and my kingdom to be known in this place of the world right here, and I'm putting my image right here." You should be very proud of where you've been planted.

A Very Humbling Thing

Because it was intentional. You tell a room full of people today that they are an image of God, the crown of creation, the representative of the King, and I guess the temptation might be to walk out feeling a little bit nicer than you walked in, right? Which is what we think it does to begin with. And that's not really what it's meant to do. And I think you caught that. We live in an age where we're very obsessed with ourselves individually. We don't have a concept for a collective effort in the world, for doing things for the collection of people around us, community. Realizing what you are should be a very humbling thing when you walk out into the world. It's a very big responsibility, especially if you have the knowledge of it.

Because look at what this kind of king, the king that you are an image of, does with his power. On the seventh day, with the whole world finished, he doesn't seize, he doesn't hoard, he doesn't demand to be served. He blesses and he shares, and he gives the plants to the humans and the very same plants to the animals, the same food. Everybody eats; nobody gets left out. The rule he hands you is not a license to grab everything in the garden; it's to keep it abundant. And our world is full of leaders who abuse their power and take what they want. It's the hierarchy; it's dog eat dog. Too self-absorbed to think of anyone else, because again, that's the world that pushes us to become that.

What Genesis paints is the opposite of that. You are appointed to make everything around you flourish. So if being the image of God tends to make you more grasping or more self-important or more entitled, then it's backwards. You've gone the opposite direction. The real image of God is someone using whatever power they have to help the things around them thrive in a meaningful way.

The image is not handed out by rank. Again, God created them male and female together. It goes out of its way to make sure you understand that being the image of God is not about your gender or sex. It is not about your status. It is not about how useful you can be, for all of the Marthas out there, both men and women. It's not about your ability, despite how badly we prefer it. For every human being, the image is that of God.

The Family Resemblance

But verse 3 says Adam fathered a son in his likeness, according to his image, and named him Seth. And it uses the same word for both, "in his image," on purpose. What does it mean for Seth to be Adam's image? Seth is not a statue. He's not something that Adam carved. Seth is not a symbol of Adam's authority. Seth does have his father's face, though. He walks into a room and people say, "That's Adam's son." You can see it, the resemblance. And I think that is what the narrator here is trying to do by connecting those two concepts. He's telling you that the same relationship that existed between Adam and Seth exists between you and God. Not a king and his monument; a father and his child. You have his face. You carry the family resemblance. You walk into a room, and if people can see clearly, they would say that one belongs to God. Because you can just see it sometimes. This isn't only about having a job; it's also to understand that you belong to someone.

So there's everything stacked up. You are the image of God, the selem, which means that you are God's representative, his authority given a body. You are a priest set in the sanctuary to serve and to guard. And you are a son, you are a daughter, carrying the family resemblance of God himself into the world every time you step out in it. That's the job that you were born into. That is the oldest and truest thing about being human that we have in our word, older than every single other label that you would want to give yourself or someone else. This is the one that's static. That's the one.

Go Into the World

And so, with that, I hope that you're going into the world with an understanding of what you were meant to be and what you were meant to do. And I hope that you will go into the world and maybe consider thinking a little bit less about you and a little bit more about everybody. And I hope you'll go back out into the world and you will understand that in God's eyes, you're not elevated above anyone; there's no hierarchy. You've been planted somewhere, and someone else has been planted somewhere.

See, Ramses spent his whole life trying to build up his empire and his authority. And he marked himself with statues, like that one on the screen, all over the place. And the thing about what we see with the pagan statues is they tend to crack, and they tend to break down. And so next time we meet, we'll talk about what that looks like when the image of God begins to get cracks in it and begins to break down, and what the scriptures say about that.

But with that, please stand with me and we'll go ahead and conclude services. And I hope you'll join us in worship. We conclude with a song of worship because of that, but we also have prayer on either side of the stage. And I invite you today, if you need prayer, please come up and we will meet you and present you before the Father.

Avinu Malkeinu, our Father King. Father, we thank you for this opportunity to come before you once again, to study your word and to have a deeper understanding of what our vocation is as your creation, as the images of God. Father, I ask that your spirit within us would continue to give us the wisdom to go out into the world, and wherever we're planted, to be able to bring order to chaos, to bring your spirit to a place, and to bring your grace and love to those who need it. In Yeshua's name we pray. Amen.

Nothing Satisfies Like You Do

*The congregation joins in worship:*

> I will never forget the moment I met you, the moment you called my name. You pulled me out of the darkness, gave me a promise to never thirst again. And all that I ever wanted, my heart has found in you. > > Oh, I have tasted life, and nothing satisfies like you do. The fount that won't run dry, nothing satisfies like you do. > > I want all that you offer, your living water. Drink from the endless well. And I will sit at your table, forever grateful, forever where you dwell. And all that I ever wanted, my heart has found in you. > > Oh, I have tasted life. The fount that won't run dry. Nothing satisfies, I've tasted, oh, I have tasted, and nothing satisfies like you do.

The fountain that won't run dry, nothing satisfies like you do. > > All my fountains are in you. All my hope is built on your love. All my fountains are in you. With every breath I live for you. All my fountains are in you. All my hope is built on you. All my fountains, every breath I live for you. And all my hope, all my hope is built on your love. All my... are empty. With every breath I live for you, Lord. > > Oh, I have tasted life, and nothing satisfies like you do. The fountain, like you do. > > I called, you answered, and you came to my rescue, and I want to be where you are. I called, you answered, and you came to my rescue, and I want to be where you are.

Oh, I called, you answered, and you came to my rescue, and I want to be where you are. I called, oh, you answered, you came to my rescue, and I want to be where you are. > > In my life be lifted high, and be lifted high, and all. In my life be lifted high, and be lifted high, and all be lifted high. > > I called, and you came to my rescue, and I want to be where you are. I called, you came to my rescue, and here I am. I called, you answered. The King of all is called; the King of all is called. You answered me. I called, you answered, and you came to my rescue, and I want to be where you are. You are.

May We Image You Well

We are the visible answer to someone's call today. Right? We are the visible answer. We are the visible image of a living God. We are the visible answer to someone's call today. Oh Father, may we image you well. God, may we image you well. God, thank you. Thank you that you hear us. Thank you that you answer us. Thank you that you choose to put breath in our lungs so that we could image you well, so that we could speak life, that we can love loudly with our words and our actions.

Oh God, help us. Help us, Father, to be so mindful of the power of our words, the power of our responses, of our interactions. Every encounter is an opportunity to connect. We are the connection points. Thank you for that, Father.

Oh, we bless you, Father. We thank you. Your love is so great for the world. Your love is so great for humanity. Your love is so great for that which you have established as your image in the earth. You desire that none should perish, that none should operate in a false identity. Thank you, Father. Help us to image you well. We bless you, Father. We thank you. You're so worthy.

A Shema Moment

You're so worthy to be imaged well. So worthy. It truly is a Shema moment. Amen? Truly is a Shema moment this morning. So, let's declare it. Let's sing. Let's come into agreement with the pronouncement of the Father over our mission.

Here, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one, and blessed is the name of his glorious kingdom for all eternity. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up his countenance toward you and give you his peace. In the name of our Sar Shalom, our prince of peace, Yeshua Hamashiach, we pray. Amen and amen. Shabbat Shalom, family.