Imago Dei.

On the first warm Sunday, I just want to say, wow, thank you guys for still showing up to church on the warmest day that we've had when it could be so easy to just be outside. But hopefully you got outside today because it is beautiful. Good to be back with you all. I just realized this is my first time preaching since I was gone for a couple of weeks. So we'll try to keep it short.

We are still in our Deeply Formed Life series. And we were going to cut it short, and then I was like, you know, I think we still have a few more that we ought to talk about. And so today we are talking about Deeply Formed Imago Dei, deeply formed Imago Dei, which means image of God. We are all uniquely formed and together we represent the Imago Dei. We need each other, and this takes work. That is our so what today: that we need each other to represent the image of God, but this takes work.

I want you guys to take a minute and just look around this room. It's a little awkward, just look around the room at the people around you. We all are different, right? We have different hair. We have different eyes. We have different color skin. We have different ears. One side of my family, my cousins that are blood relatives to me, they're all Vietnamese. So we look nothing alike, but we always joke and it's real. The only thing we have in common physically is that our earlobes look the same. We have the same earlobes, but everything else about us looks completely different. And when we stand in family pictures, people are like, who are those people? We look nothing like them. But we call them the Sawczak earlobes. We've all got those strong genetics there.

But there is something unique about each and every one of us, the way that we were formed and we were made in the image of God. As unique and as different as sometimes you may even feel in the way that you were made, you represent the image of God. We need each other to be the Imago Dei, but this takes work for us to live together in unity and harmony and peace.

Understanding the Imago Dei

We are going to read today in Colossians chapter 3, and this is going to kind of be our anchoring text for the day. Paul is addressing a lot of different things here, but there are some references that he gives to the image of God and us bearing the image of God that I think are really important for us as a church as we continue to say, how do we become people that are deeply formed into who Jesus is?

Since then, you have been raised with Christ. Set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature. Sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. You used to walk in these ways in the life you once lived, but now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these. Anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. Do not lie to each other since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on your new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its creator.

Colossians 3:1-10

Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all and is in all. Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourself with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues, put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. Let the peace of Christ rule in your heart, since as members of one body you were called to peace, and be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and you sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Colossians 3:11-17

So I want to explain a little bit what's happening in this passage. After Paul becomes a Christian and starts believing in Jesus Christ, he has this call to take the gospel to the Gentiles. We read about this in Acts chapter 9 when he first says yes to this call. And so this was a pretty big deal, being as Paul was someone that was recently persecuting Christians, and now he's going to preach the gospel.

In the book of Acts, you're kind of reading about the churches that Paul is planting, and then we're reading some of the letters that he's now writing to these churches. At this time, a few Jewish people believed the message about Jesus, but in Colossians, the church that we're reading about was mostly Greeks and Romans who were listening and trusting in Jesus to pay the price for their sins, to be their Savior.

Paul is telling the Colossian Christians that as members of this new humanity, that no part of their human existence remains untouched by the loving and the liberating rule of Jesus. He's saying the suffering, the temptation, the moral character, all your family dynamics, that every part of who you are must be reexamined and transformed in the light of the work of the gospel of Jesus.

He's now saying, you are now one in Christ Jesus. You are now a part of the body of Christ, this new multi-ethnic family. But as you begin to think about that and say that, it's easier said than done. You see, we are a part of a new family, but we still come from our earthly families. So we are still in the human flesh that we were born into that represents something. And yes, we represent the image of God, but also a race, a nation, an ethnicity, a culture. We are not all the same, and God made us unique in this way.

So then what does this mean for us to be the Imago Dei? What does it look like for us to come together and to be one that represents who God is?

Now, I recognize whenever we talk about these things, we can all receive it a different way based on our culture, our race, our ethnicity. But when we get to it, we recognize that God so loved the world that he gave his son so that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. The gospel at the core of what it is is that God so loved that he gave. And there's an invitation for all of us to come and to say yes to that, but in recognizing that we need each other to then represent the image of God to the world.

Imago Dei means the image of God. It's defined as a metaphysical expression associated uniquely to humans, which signifies the symbolic connection between God and humanity. The phrase has its origins in Genesis 1:27, where it says, God created man in his own image. The biblical passage does not imply that God is in human form, but that humans are in the image of God in their moral, spiritual, and intellectual essence. Thus humans reflect God's divine nature in their ability to achieve the unique characteristics with which they have been endowed.

So Adam and Eve did not necessarily resemble God's physical body because in John 4:24 we read that God is spirit. But we do represent the image of God. We're created for relationship with God. We're created to reflect God's holiness and God's righteousness, to represent God's love to the world, to reconcile all people. We represent God. We bear his image.

Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ. God is making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

2 Corinthians 5:20

So we bear his image, yet all of us are going to bear it a little bit different in the bodies that we're born into, in the stories that we enter into. One of my favorite places in the world to go is the Church of Annunciation in Israel. At one point in history, they asked almost every country and nation that they could get a hold of and they said, will you send us a painting, an image of Jesus? When you walk around the church and you walk around the outer gates and you see these beautiful, gorgeous paintings of Jesus, none of them look the same. The Irish Jesus has bright red hair, right? Jesus looks different. What's interesting about that is people see God in themselves and the bodies that we are born into shape the way and impact the way that we see God.

The reality is we know that Jesus was Jewish and so Jesus would have had dark skin and dark hair. And so most of them are probably incorrect to what he would have looked like, but that's beyond the point. It's that it's representing the different cultures, the different ethnicities, the different nations, and how they view God and see God in themselves. Paul says in this text that there's no Jew nor Greek, but we're one. He's not saying that we ignore the bodies that we were born into or the impacts that they have or the things that come with that. God made us. He formed us. But rather, we submit all of who we are to the lordship of Jesus Christ. Our new identity, our first identity, our ultimate identity that we live out of is the identity that we have found in Christ Jesus.

And then we represent it in the unique ways that he's given us. But here's the thing. This Imago Dei does not just happen. It doesn't just happen that all of a sudden we together come together in unity and represent the image of God. This takes work, and this takes all of us coming together.

Ethnicity, Culture, Nationality and Race

So to help us as we work through some of the texts today, Rich Viotis in his book The Deeply Formed Life, where some of this is taken from, gives some really great definitions that I want to talk through when it comes to ethnicity, culture, nationality, and race.

Ethnicity is a biblical word. It's Hebrew, goi or am, Greek, it's ethnos, and this is something that is created by God. We see in scripture that the different people would move together through space and through time. Culture is patterns, customs, things that have been passed down, beliefs, rituals, your worldviews, things like that. When it comes to nationality, this indicates the sovereign nation or state where an individual is a legal citizen. It is a geopolitical category determined by the legal structures of the state.

And then finally, race. It is about power in political terms, dominion. As a political construct, race was created by humans to determine who can exercise power within a governing structure and to guide decisions regarding how to allocate resources.

So this is the interesting thing. We don't see a lot about this in the Bible, but we know that in our culture today and our patterns and our norms that race plays a huge role in how people have been treated and how maybe you have been treated. This plays a huge role.

So what does this all have to do with formation and the deeply formed life? Well, it's to show us that we have all been formed by our cultures. We have been formed by our race, our ethnicity. It impacts how we live and how we follow Jesus. We have been formed by the nation that we live in, no matter how long you've been here in the United States. It's formed you in some way. We have been formed by the people around us, the communities that we choose to be a part of. The place we were born in, the bodies that we live in, they form us. And it's not all good or bad, but as followers of Jesus, it's important for us to be aware of the roles that they do play.

A Story from Thailand

I'm going to be really real here for a minute. A couple weeks ago, when I was in Thailand and I was on my trip doing missions work and teaching overseas, I had one of the Sunday mornings where I wasn't speaking at the church, but I worshiped in a church in Thailand with about twenty people. This church was new and they just got started in November, but the passion that they had for Jesus was so evident. And here's what I started to recognize is that in many nations, cultural Christianity is not an option.

What do I mean by this? In the United States, in the nation that we all live in right now, the culture says that we can follow Christianity without actually following Christ. We can go to church. We can even give our tithes and offering, maybe above and beyond. Yet our daily lives, the way we live, the way we talk, the way we love can look nothing like Jesus. We can be totally not submitted to the lordship of Jesus Christ. Now, us going to church, it may cost us something like maybe a little bit of time, but it doesn't have to cost us everything. For many of us, we can just follow the cultural norms of Christianity without following Christ, and we can get away with things that many Christians around the world cannot.

You see, Paul in Colossians is saying that when you choose to follow Jesus, you die. You no longer live the way you were. Your life is now hidden with Christ and God. The old is gone. The new has come, and we put to death all other desires. This is Christianity. It's not half in, but it's all in. Yet how often do we try to play the games of Christianity, thinking that we can just follow the patterns without actually following Jesus?

But my friends, today that type of life just will not work, and we have to decide. Do we want to be perceived as people that are following Jesus and be perceived as a Christian? Or do we actually want to go all in and follow Jesus and lay it all down? And when I share that with you, I also share that it's worth it when we do it. It's worth it when we lay it all down for Jesus.

You see, that passion that I recognized in that Thai church was because Buddhism is the leading religion there. And now you cannot just choose to stop being Buddhist and following Jesus without completely changing the way that you live your life. Following Jesus isn't possible to do just culturally when everything there is centered around Buddha and Buddhism. So they recognize the evils and the powers of darkness that we in our American Western culture can just kind of ignore and set aside because we find ways to just fulfill every desire and to meet our every need going around Jesus rather than relying on Jesus.

But Paul is calling us to actively put one thing off and put another on. He's saying to completely transform, to reconcile, to change. One of the things that was so powerful is one of the nights that I was giving a message to the youth, and I talked about how as a young person, even though you might not feel like it, but you can change the trajectory of your family's legacy, their history for generations. And so I gave this encouragement to them to pray for their parents. And just the next week, one of the young men brought his dad to church who was Buddhist, and he gave his life to Christ and is now following Jesus.

This is a big deal because you can't just change one thing when you're completely changing who's Lord of your life. You have to change everything. Paul is calling us to change everything.

Three Ways to Reflect, Repent and Reconcile

And so three things that I want us to walk through: how do we do this? The first is this. We need to continue, and this is a continual process, to reflect. Who am I? Who do I represent? It says in Colossians 3:3, for you died and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.

We have to continue as we are people formed into the likeness of Jesus to discover our own cultural context. When I practice spiritual disciplines, when I read my Bible, when I pray, when I come to church, what do I bring into that? Through what lens am I doing this? Sometimes it's not just am I reading scripture, but how am I reading scripture? What are the cultural assumptions when I'm opening my Bible and I'm reading the text? What cultural assumptions do I bring to it that impact how I understand it? When I read the Bible, what lens am I reading it through?

Now, this is a great point to why it's so important for us to continue to read scripture and to pray with people that are different from us, that come from different backgrounds, races, ethnicities, so that we can continue to not just see God and read scripture through our own lens, but the Imago Dei, the body of Christ.

In the book The Color Courageous Disciple, the author lists a few different lenses, and one of them that I wanted to share that I think is kind of applicable for all of us that live in the United States is that when we're living in America, we may read the Bible through the lens of individualism. We tend to read "you" when we read scripture as singular rather than plural. Most of the time, that's how the author intended it. When Paul is writing this letter to the church in Colossians, he's not writing it to just one person but the entire church. It was plural. Some of this could come into play though in the culture and the ethnicity that you grew up in. If you grew up in a context where family was celebrated, then maybe you do read it as plural. And maybe you read it as a family unit. But if you were primarily raised in a westernized American culture where everything is about following your dreams and making a name for yourself and success and winning and succeeding, you may read it through the lens of individualism.

Where we come from impacts how we read scripture. But in the biblical context, it really was more communal. We read about things in Joshua 7 where it says Achan's entire family was punished because of his sin. Can you imagine if one person in this room did something terrible and we all had to go pay the price for it? But the Bible was written communally in that type of way where it wasn't just like one person and everything relied on them, but it was a family. It was communal. We have to understand the biblical cultural context of what was happening. There was a shared sense of repentance in the Bible and responsibility. There was this shared way of living. The Bible teaches us this communal way to live.

The second thing that we need to move towards, if we want to be the Imago Dei, is to walk towards repentance and continue to ask the question. As I reflect on who I am and on who I represent, on the culture I represent, what is my response? When we become aware of sin in our life, this is for all of us here in this room. When we become aware of sin, we have to acknowledge the things, the greed, the lust, the evil desires. Sometimes we have to acknowledge that those are the things that lead us to treating people so differently.

I love Jesus and his encounter with Zacchaeus, who is a tax collector. It started from a place of relationship. Relationship with Jesus changes everything. But then it ended in repentance from Zacchaeus and him going back and repaying everything that he had stolen. There was a response that took place here as a result of that encounter with Jesus and the relationship.

Evil desires is what leads to the sin of racism and power and control. So before we can reconcile, we need to repent and take off the things that once formed us in our old identity. To follow the way of Jesus is to continue to pursue repentance. And that starts with relationship with Jesus, but it should always lead us to repentance and to living differently and changing the way that we live.

To represent Jesus well, the Imago Dei, we need to work together, and this takes work. It's not just a one-and-done repentance type of thing. I want you to think for a second about the book of Acts, how we read of the early church starting. We read about them going and making disciples of every nation. So that means all people, right? But then we read the epistles, the letters to the churches that they all started, and it's all of them fighting, not getting along. There are issues of greed, of lust, of racism, of everything in between.

So when we talk about being the Imago Dei, that means we are a multi-ethnic, multicultural church. We're not the same race, we're not the same gender, we're not the same age, and that is messy. But when we come together in peace, we represent the image of God. It's not a matter of if, but when we're going to offend each other in this room. It's not a matter of if, but when we are going to be the ones that are offended by each other because we're different and we represent different things. So we have to choose to continue to forgive and to put to death the evil desires and to put on the image of God.

The final thing is this idea of what does it look like for us to reconcile? How can we actively pursue this? Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts. This word "reconcile" in Greek means to completely change. You're going from hostility all the way to the extreme. You're completely changing to a place of love. You're reconciling.

We need Jesus to do this. Bottom line, we need Jesus to do this. But this word "let" is an active thing. The Imago Dei of us coming together in all our uniqueness and all our differences, representing the body of Christ, doesn't just happen. It takes work. We are called to peace, shalom, which is wholeness, completeness. But here's the thing. We are called to peace for all people, not just you or people that look like you. Peace is a marker of Imago Dei. Peace is what God longs for for his people. And so as image bearers of God, we need to seek peace and let peace rule for all people.

This is a glimpse into what heaven is going to be like. A great number from every nation. A glimpse of what's going to happen when Jesus restores all things. I believe that for us to be Imago Dei, this is a cross-cultural, multi-ethnic church. And God knew what he was doing when he created every tribe and every tongue and every nation to bear his image. We are going to continue to bear his image in heaven. This is a picture of heaven, but this requires that we love like Jesus.

Paul says here in Colossians, bear with each other. Forgive each other. Put on love. Let peace rule. So if we know that this is what the church should look like, then why is it that when we think of the church in America they talk about it, and we definitely don't fall into this? They say ten o'clock on Sunday mornings is the most segregated hour in America because we don't know how to be together. We don't know how to overcome some of our differences. We get stuck in what we know and what's comfortable.

But what does it look like to lean into being the Imago Dei? It takes work and we need each other to do it. We don't do it because it's easier if we just stay sometimes with people that look like us. We don't want to get into our differences because it's messy and messy takes work. But Jesus demonstrates something so beautiful. He leads his disciples through a place to a people that most people would have avoided because of who they were and what they represented. He did not avoid people that were different from him or what people would think of him if they saw him interacting with these people. Jesus continued to show us what it looks like to love all people and to take people with us on that journey.

To be the Imago Dei, we may have to choose to go through places with people that are different from us and to love in ways that might make us a little uncomfortable and even sometimes risk our reputation for us to represent the fullness of God and who he created us to be.

When I first moved here to Wisconsin, I had this moment where I was playing a game with people. Someone's like, hey, do you want to play this game? And I'm like, yeah, I know that game. And it was a card game. And then they start explaining the rules. I'm like, oh, that's not the game that I know. Like, that's not it. It was like the same name, same concepts, but some of the rules were different, right? Because we all know you've got the house rules. All these families have kind of added rules through the years and all of this stuff. And the rule follower in me was so tempted to be like, you're wrong. I'm right. My rules are correct. Yours are wrong. But the reality is it wasn't a matter of like right or wrong rules to the game. It was just different. It was a made-up card game and that was supposed to be fun. It wasn't right or wrong. It was different.

But how many of us show up to church like this? Where we walk in, whether we know it or not, and we have an idea of what's right and what's wrong, of how to worship, how to give, of how to love our neighbors? And can I encourage you today that maybe it's not right or wrong, but different? And maybe those differences are the beautiful way that God intended us to live and to worship together as a reflection of Imago Dei?

My hope is that we don't ever get to a point where we all worship the exact same way. Because I don't think we're supposed to. I think that the way that God made you, the way that he speaks to you, the way that he wants to engage with you is different and needed in this space. Paul talks about later in his letters where he talks about one body, but many parts. We're not all supposed to be the same. We get to reflect the heart of God in unique individual ways as the Imago Dei.

So when we show up to worship and when we show up to gather, when we show up to love our neighbor, let us not be looking at each other to say what's right and what's wrong. Rather, how is that person reflecting the image of God? How is that person representing the unique DNA in Christ Jesus? And what can I learn about God through them? What binds us together is the love, death, and resurrection of Jesus. What puts this love on display to the world is us choosing to actively let peace rule. It is us as the church displaying the Imago Dei in the way that we love, we forgive one another, we bear with one another, we let go of offenses with one another, we continue to repent and respond and completely change and reconcile with one another.

Can I urge you, New Culture Church, can we be a church that creates the culture of Christ in the way that we reflect and we celebrate who God uniquely made us to be? We celebrate our differences, yet our oneness in Christ. Can I urge us to continue to live and walk and putting to death our greed, our evil desires, which have led to even in our nation, in our country, so much sin of racism and power and oppression because of greed and because of evil desires? But can we respond with a passionate, active pursuit of reconciliation within the church and reconciliation of all people, living as one body but many parts, letting Christ rule?

And this takes work, but it's worth it. The Imago Dei cannot take place if we all are the same. It requires us to be who God created us to be.