Love Discussion Week 3
“An Image Bearer”
January 11, 2009

LOVE. We are back to the discussion again. Before we begin let’s have a recap as to what we discussed last time we were together.

We did not get a chance to get too much into it for we had other things going on but what was something that we did?
(Recreated the Creation story)

That is right. I wanted us to take time, to think about how we would create the beginning poem and story of our bible. You guys did a wonderful job. The ways in which you represented each step and how you too notice of the difference between the good story. It is important to that we remind ourselves how we are created in the image of God. That our belief on God differs from others in the world and how we do not believe we will turn into God but that we have a divine spark within us, that we are not God and we aren’t going to become him but in some distinct, intentional way, something of God has been placed inside us.

We even began a discussion about how we blow out that divine spark by the ways in which we treat and talk about people. We also mentioned how when we allow our conversations to take us from seeing a person as a child of God and instead, we view them as a “that”.

This lead us into a reality about how the Hebrew’s viewed heaven and hell differently. How there was heaven that belonged to God but we are in control of the earth so we have a choice: a choice to bring God’s kingdom to the earth bringing heaven on earth or do the opposite of that, neglecting the cries of the world and bringing hell on earth. We have a choice. We will always have a choice.
 Hell is when we exploit women
 Hell is when we snicker at someone who is different than us
 Hell is when we knowingly ignore someone who needs help
 Hell is when we pick on someone

Yet there are debates over these things. How whether or not we should encourage our kids, you the students, to overwhelm yourself to the point where you cannot go on. But more controversial is that we even have began to debate whether or not we should carry out some military like actions: bombing, torturing and killing. My question to you is, why are we debating this? What is this saying about us as a Christian people? You see no longer is it about the person who is being tortured, just like it is not only about the person you pick on, but it is about the one DOING the torturing, and the one DOING the picking-on.

This then is where we are tonight. We are children and people of God. We are no longer separated by labels society gave to us. You see, we have a common bond with each other. There is something here that brings us all together. Our first Christian brothers and sisters had a name for this common denominator. They had a work for when they no longer viewed each other as Jew, Gentile, Greek or other. When Christ came, those labels no longer worked. Instead of seeing people in their ethnic races, the early Christians called the new commonality, this new bond the brought these people together, the “new humanity”.

The new humanity were followers of, “The Way”. This friends was what the early Christian movement was called. Before there was Christians, there was The Way. In order for The Way to happen, people had to begin in the beginning. The very same place where we did the last time we talked about God. They had to be reminded that they, like we, are created in the image of God. That God gave us an image to bear. Something that is so precious to God, that when we tarnish this image, sadness overwhelms God. It wasn’t until AFTER God gave us God’s image did we become male or female. Then after that we were giving tasks to do within the Garden, we have something to do, to take care of the world and move it forward, taking part in the ongoing creation of the word. However people messed this up and something else happened.

We began to view ourselves no longer image bearers. Instead we began to move to a different way of labeling people. As time went on and as we were given things to do, people began to spread across the world. It takes years and years of human history to get to the place where these people are from here and those people are from there. Different locations, skin colors, languages, and cultures come much later in the human story. You see, we have it backwards. We begin describing people by their cultural background and their skin colors and their nationalities, and it sonly when we look past these things that we are able get to what we have in common—that we are fellow image-bearers with the shared task of caring for God’s creation.

The new humanity is about seeing people as God sees them.

This is where we are tonight. I want us to begin thinking about how God views us, individually. So this evening, we are going to spend time in reflection as we think about, pray about and eventually demonstrate how, we think God views us. What we are going to do is sit ourselves in front of many artistic opportunities and allow ourselves to pray with paint-brushes, canvases, magazines, and other art related things.

I want you to stop and think about what God was thinking we he created _____________. Use this time to paint a picture of who you are. You can paint an actual portrait or you can paint images that represent how you see yourself through the eyes of God.

In order to love others, you must love yourself. In order to be a new humanity, you must not hate yourself, for it was John who reminds us, “We love because he first loved us”. So tonight, God loves us and we are going to artistically express how we feel God’s love in our lives!