Love & Beauty Sermon, Pt. 4- His Love, My Identity

By Abigail Barrett

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” -Genesis 1:27

Reason #2 for why God is a better father to us than our earthly fathers: God’s love defines our identity.

Earthly fathers can only choose to love the children God blesses them with. They have no say in who that child is. They can only hope that their children look like them, act like them, etc. They have no choice but to love who they get.

But God created us to fit His love. First, He created us with the capacity to receive the specific kind of love He wanted to express. We couldn’t be animals, plants, inanimate objects, or even angels, because those things don’t have the capacity to receive the kind of love and relationship God desired to express. So, He had to make us humans.

Secondly, each human God created was intentionally crafter by Him. Like in the garden of Eden, God molded each of us from the dust of the earth, made His finishing touches, and breathed the breathe of life into us. In modern day science, this looks like food choosing the right parents and the right combinations of their genes to produce the creature of His liking.

God not only chose our physical features to fit His love, but He also chose our personalities and gifting to fit His love. God made us in his image and chose the ways that we would look like Him. Needless to say, our bad ways do not reflect God, but our sinful nature. It is our good qualities that point to Him. Any good thing is a reflection of the Father. I know for myself that God gave me the gift of intellect, which means that He uniquely fashioned my mind after His. And He gave me a peaceful temperament to reflect His peace.

Some people were made emotionally sensitive to reflect the heart of God. Some were made with beautiful voices to reflect the beauty of God’s voice. Some of us were made simple to reflect God’s simplicity and some of us were made complex to reflect His complexity.

I could go on forever:

Your beauty reflects His beauty.

Your wisdom reflects His wisdom.

Your creativity reflects His creativity.

Your artistry reflects His artistry.

Your joy reflects His joy.

Your discernment reflects His omniscience.

All of us were made to look like our Heavenly Father in the way that He wanted us to and in the way that was fit for the unique expression of love that He wanted to extend to us.

God’s intentionality does not end with our personalities and our giftings. Rather, God was even intentional about our spatiotemporal context. Spatiotemporal is just a fancy word for space and time. So, what I am trying to say is the God intentionally chose when and where we existed. Even this would be critical to how we experience His love.

For me, I had to be born on a rainy Monday afternoon, the fourth day of January, the year 1999. I couldn’t be born anytime earlier or anytime later. Same with you—God chose the day you would enter into history so that you can experience His love in a specific way. He even chose who would and wouldn’t be a part of your life and the seasons for which they would be in your life. He did all of that so that you would have a unique experience of His love.

Before I move on to reason #3, the last thing I want to say is that though there is diversity is the expression of God’s love, His love is one and the same. It is the same in nature and in measure. He doesn’t show one of us a stronger love than the other, and He doesn’t show more love to one of us than the other. Like the hymn “The Love of God” suggests, God’s love is “measureless and strong.”

So, sometimes we may witness someone experiencing God’s love in a different way from us, and a little envy/jealousy may rise in our hearts. We say, “God, why don’t you love me like how you love that person?” But, we ask amiss because we don’t understand that the love God has for that person is the same love that He has for us, just expressed differently.

We can’t have someone else’s experience of God’s love because we weren’t created to fit that expression. We were created to experience God’s love in a unique way, in a way that no one else can experience it. Once we realize that, we will begin to intentionally look for God’s love in our lives.

✨Stay tuned for Part 5✨