The Imago Dei | Genesis 1:26, Romans 12:6 | Rainey Segars

So today I want to tell you a story about a problem that I encountered in college.

And I imagine that you might encounter this same problem.

Maybe you have already.

Maybe that has never happened to you, but one day it might.

People like somebody else better.

People include or invite or prefer somebody else.

So my story, when I was in college, I had a boyfriend break up with me because his words, I was not smart enough for him.

Colton said it was okay that I tell this.

So uh in college, I really liked a guy named Noah.

And he was a grad student, which was very exciting, and he was just very well liked on campus, and he really was very smart.

He was very high achieving.

Um, and it sounds so absurd now, but Noah was in this very cool, very smart, like chic group of grad student friends.

And they were interesting and they were older and they'd read all these obscure authors that you had not heard of.

It was just all this icky college baloney.

And so I, the new girlfriend, I have to go to a dinner to meet this very well-read, very exclusive, very snobby group.

And it was very clear I needed this to go well.

I needed to impress these people and show them that I can keep up and hang with them, and I needed to not make Noah look bad.

Now, I wish I had said to Noah, oh no, no, no.

I have a very involved, supportive father.

I will not be made to audition.

I would love to meet your friends, but I do not need them to green light me.

And if you do, I'm not interested.

I wish that that's what I had said.

But I was 19 and I had a huge crush on him, and so I did not say that.

So I go to the dinner and I give it my little like 19-year-old best shot, and the dinner did not go well.

Kind of on purpose, they said, So, Rainey, what do you think of Kant's critique of judgment?

Do you think we can still use his categories to talk about art today?

And I said, Yeah.

I think Kant is really good.

Art also very good.

So to sum up, I am pro.

It did not go well.

They were not impressed.

Noah was embarrassed.

So after the audition dinner is over, all of a sudden I sort of stop hearing from Noah quite so much.

All of a sudden, Noah's classes got really hard.

And then one night I go out to dinner with my roommates, and there's Noah, not studying, but out to dinner with Lauren.

So I see him, and like he sees me, and later that night he came by my apartment and he goes, Listen, this isn't gonna work out.

Yeah, thank you.

I might not know who Kant is, but I was able to put that together.

And I asked why, and he told me, the friend group and I don't think this is a good fit.

He told me he thought I would be more comfortable with someone more my speed.

And the speed that he meant was slow.

I had been evaluated and I didn't pass.

Now it might not happen to you in a way that's as overt as that, but this happens to us a lot.

What do you do when you want to be in a friend group that clearly says no thank you?

What do you do when you want romance with someone who does not want it back?

Or when you apply to a million jobs and every job turns you down?

As a teacher, what do I do when the students clearly prefer someone else's class?

Sherry's class, to be specific.

Listen to this.

I get my like college magazine, and in the back is this section of like life updates from the alumni, and Joyce, the alum, wrote this.

My daughter Katie served on the international board of the largest teen youth group in North America.

Katie planned the convention for 2,400 international teens, plus many educators, staff, and speakers.

Elected president, Katie will spend six weeks abroad helping to train leaders, encouraging social action programming, and much more.

My other two daughters are also doing well.

The poor other two daughters, she doesn't even name them.

What do I do when my parents are prouder of my sibling?

How do I handle it when someone's opinion of me is bad?

Well, I'm sorry to say, but for all of us, these moments will happen a lot.

There's no use pretending that they won't.

There's no use saying, oh, don't worry, everybody's gonna love you.

Well, that's not true.

Everyone is not going to love you.

Sometimes people will not think highly of us.

They'll like some other person or some other church better.

We have to be able to move forward well in the hope and the rootedness of Jesus when people are not impressed with us.

We can't just pretend that everyone always will be.

The gospel is good news for everyone, everywhere, always.

So it has to be good news for us, when our parents or our kids or our colleagues or our clients prefer somebody else.

We need good news when we're insecure.

Because if we let those messages of rejection and disapproval from others, if we let that sink into our hearts, if our worth gets linked to impressing other people, this is a real problem for a lot of reasons, but one of those reasons is that it makes us incredibly weak.

Let me read you this story.

This is from Matthew 14 about King Herod.

The background of this story is that Jesus has been getting more and more famous.

The local community has started to rumble that maybe Jesus is actually some kind of new king.

And Herod, the current king, is feeling very insecure.

Side note, this Herod, Herod Antipas, is the son of Herod the Great, who's the one who killed all the babies when he heard that baby Jesus might be a new king.

So it's a different sermon for a different day, but there might be a meditation here on toxic insecurity passed down generationally in families.

But anyway, this Herod is saying, Hi, what is happening?

I'm the king.

All right?

I am very strong, and nobody's taken my spot.

And so into this simmering insecurity comes Herod's birthday party.

So here's the story from Matthew 14.

Herod knew John the Baptist to be a holy man, and he liked to listen to him.

But on Herod's birthday, the daughter of Herodias his wife danced for the guests.

And she pleased Herod so much that he promised with an oath to give her whatever she asked.

Prompted by her mother, who had a grudge against John, the girl said, Great, give me on a platter the head of John the Baptist.

The king was greatly distressed.

But because of his oath and his dinner guests, he ordered that her request be granted, and he had John beheaded, and his head was brought in on a platter and given to the girl.

So why does Herod kill John?

He's greatly distressed.

He likes John, he doesn't want to.

But he kills John anyway because of the dinner guests.

He makes this show-off promise, and all the guests are looking, and he's feeling insecure because of this other king gossip, and he cannot look like a weak, wimpy king now.

So he has John's head brought into the party to show everybody he is tough.

Underneath this evil is not hatred, it's insecurity.

If Herod had not been so desperate for them to think he's strong, he would have been free to ask, regardless of what they think, what is right, but no.

He's feeling insecure, he requires their approval, and so he's only able to ask what they want to see.

If I need you to make me feel better because my old high school friend group ditched me, or my father left, or my sister's prettier, or whatever, if I need to impress you, then I have to do what's best in your opinion.

It's a position of incredible weakness.

If I link my worth to your approval, I cannot be a person who does what's right.

I have to be a person who does what you want to see.

One last story, and I'll move on from this.

Once, this was a while ago, someone came up to me and the person knew my parents, and the person knew Colton, and this person comes up to me and he puts his arm around my shoulder.

And with the best of intentions, the man said, Your father is sent from heaven.

Your mother is an angel on earth.

Your husband is gonna change the world.

And you are so lucky.

That's great, thank you.

And you're right, I am so lucky.

But what do we do with all of this?

Please hear me, please listen to me.

I am not fishing for compliments.

Do not, please do not come up to me after the service and go, don't worry, you're great.

We really like you.

I do not want that.

That's not my point.

My point is that sometimes, often, other people's evaluation of us won't be great.

They'll invite somebody else.

They'll give the promotion to somebody else.

They like somebody else better.

And yet, despite the world's evaluation of us, we, Christ's bride, are called to purpose and joy and health and confidence.

So if we're not supposed to get it from other people's opinions, where are we supposed to get it?

Someone will always have more money.

Someone will always have better Botox, better clothes, better vacations, and better behaved kids going to better colleges.

Always.

And we don't want to be insecure hypocrites begging you to like us and secretly glad when you fail, because the worse you look, the better I look.

That is not the joyful, hopeful, rooted church that Jesus died to build.

So, what might give us some freedom?

So, with the rest of our time this morning, I want to give you three ideas that I have found useful and empowering when I'm up against comparison and insecurity.

Okay, so number one, the imago day.

When insecurity starts whispering, part of what has given me freedom is the biblical teaching that you are made in the imago image of Dei God.

We talked about this a little before, but all of the universe's good things, all of the cosmos's light and warmth and life and color and humor, God is the source of all those things.

Those things bubble out of him.

So the world in Eden was happy, not just because it was great, but because happiness himself was fully here with us, splashing joy onto everything.

Happiness itself was really near.

He is the source of all beauty.

So if the beauty in a piece of music is appealing to me, what's attracting me is that that music is borrowing and revealing his beauty.

Psalm 19 says, the heavens declare the glory of God.

Every day they are pouring forth speech.

So we are supposed to look at a really blue sky and receive a message about God's own glory.

A really blue sky is just showing us a little bit of blue, but the universe's truest, most wonderful, most glorious blue is in him.

The blue is part of his glory.

So we should look at the sky and understand the glory of God a little better.

Why will we gaze at a mountain but not a taxi?

Why are restaurants built to give you a view of an ocean, but we don't build restaurants overlooking car dealerships?

Because nature is singing.

It's a choir.

He is donating his own beauty to the red birds and the pink hydrangeas, and nature is declaring the creator's glory, and we like it when we see it.

The Bible says all of nature is doing this, but nature is only doing a dim job.

Nature is only hints.

Only humans have the imago day, the image of God.

It's a language of children resembling their parents.

Back when Colton had hair, he would twirl it while he watched TV.

And now Teddy twirls his hair while he watches TV because Teddy bears the image of Colton.

He resembles his father.

More than the animals, more than the trees, we resemble him.

His own fingernails carved the lines of August's smile.

And he held her face and said, Yes, that's just right.

You look just like me.

You were made exactly as you are, with the personality and the giftings and the talents that you have, and you were sent here to show us what God is like in a new way that we need that no one ever has quite just like that before.

What incredible dignity.

In the book of Ezekiel alone, God says over 60 times that he's gonna do something because then they will know that I am Yahweh.

I'm gonna bless them, punish them, gather them, heal them, smite their enemies, because then they will know that I am Yahweh.

He badly wants us to know him.

We've rebelled against him.

We don't know him the way we should.

And so he has filled the world with eight billion little pictures of himself.

If someone took eight billion pictures of herself, she would really want to be seen.

And that's what he's done.

Eight billion little images.

A little glimmer of his own tenderness when Jennifer Hahn is calm and steady with a freaked-out pregnant lady.

A little glimmer of his own creativity when Kelsey takes cheese and salami and makes my boring dining room table gorgeous.

A little glimmer of his own passion when Colton starts crying again.

A little bit of his own face there and there and there and there.

Eight billion little images, and one of them is you.

When insecurity starts to whisper, something I believe we're supposed to hold on to when we think everyone would like me better if I were more like my sister, is to whisper back the truth.

No, not everyone.

He does not wish we were similar.

If someone says, we like Sherry the best and that makes me feel bad.

And then someone else says, Oh no, we like Rainey the best and that makes me feel good.

And then someone else says, no, it's actually Larry or Tiff or Amy we like the best and that makes me feel bad again.

I'm building my worth on the sand of your opinion.

And so my worth shifts all day.

No wonder we're anxious.

We need a rock to build our worth on.

And for me, part of that rock is this.

The one who used his fingers to carve the bones of your face is not wishing you were more like Larry.

Sometimes at a stoplight, I'll turn around and look at Teddy sitting in the backseat doing nothing.

And I'll look at the pudge of his hands and the shape of his cheeks.

And truly, I'll just laugh out loud, just because I'm delighted with the way his breathing moves his chest.

And God looks like that at you.

Except my love is small because I'm small, and his adoration of you is as infinite as he is.

It is beneath your dignity as an image-bearer for your worth to be yanked back and forth by everybody's opinion.

You have worth because the only thing of real worth made you to reveal him in a slightly particular way that no one else does.

And he really cares how we reveal him to each other.

In the Ten Commandments, the third commandment is you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.

Now in America, we use this phrase, and what we mean is it's a sin to say, oh my God.

That's what we mean.

But the verb here for to take is the Hebrew verb nisah, which means to pick up and carry something.

So the verse actually says, you shall not carry the name of God in vain.

You carry my name.

Represent me well.

Don't go out there and exclude and act superior, because when you do, you're showing that person I'm disinterested in them and I'm not.

Do not carry my name badly.

Don't treat Colin or Stephanie or Matthew like they don't matter.

When you do things, it carries the weight that you are speaking for me because you bear my image.

So when you treat people like they don't matter, that hurts so bad because there's a silent message that God thinks you don't matter.

And of course, we would say, Well, I didn't say that, but too bad.

We do that damage unavoidably because we bear his image.

So he says, do not carry my name badly.

So it is possible to carry it badly.

So, okay, if we're supposed to image him, if we're supposed to show people things about him, what are we supposed to show them?

Well, there's a lot of things that you could show, but there's one specific way that I want to charge us today to show him to the world.

In Genesis, we get the story of Hagar, who's an Egyptian woman and a slave.

In her culture, that is pretty much as low as you could possibly get.

She's been sold to Abraham and Sarah, and now she's pregnant involuntarily.

Then they called that surrogacy, now we would call that sexual abuse.

And she's being treated so badly that she finally runs away into the desert and she's out there pregnant alone.

And God comes to her out there and speaks to her and gives her a promise that he is indeed planning a future for her and her baby.

And in response, she names him.

She gives him a name.

She says, You are El Roy, the God who sees me.

I see you is his name.

That's who he is.

To people no one sees.

To people no one wants, he is El Roy, the God who does see you.

And you bear his image.

So one of my charges to us today is this.

Your task is not to impress anyone.

Where in Scripture are we ever asked to impress anyone?

What we are asked to do is show the people around you that God sees them.

To me, this is freedom because if you're a doctor, the nobility of your work is completely unchanged.

Whether you work at a big fancy New York City hospital that we know the name of, or some tiny local place we've never heard of, the value of your work is no different because at either place, you can still fulfill the good ultimate work of showing whoever walks in your door that God is not apathetic to them.

And he sent you and your stethoscope and your prescription pad to show them.

Your face and mind and hands were specifically built by the builder himself to show the person who comes into your living room or your office or your row at church that he has not forgotten them.

And if I'm doing that, it doesn't matter where I work.

It doesn't matter what grad school I got into or how much money I make.

The dignity and the nobility of my work is completely unchanged.

Jesus himself was always shocking and embarrassing everyone with the type of people that he would stop and help and speak with.

He looked at women, Gentiles, prostitutes, lepers, people that everyone around him, including his disciples, considered beneath him.

And he looked at them and he said, I see you, and I would love to have dinner with you.

I don't think there's a more overt way to bear God's image than to recognize someone's worth when no one else sees value.

The trees can't do it, the birds can't do it.

But when you look out with eyes of love at people, you aren't just showing them that you see them, you're showing them that he sees them.

It is the highest possible calling.

So when we are stressing because it feels like everyone around us is thinner, prettier, funnier, smarter, richer, it can help to remember that God has never asked you to be thinner, prettier, funnier, smarter, richer.

He asked you not to carry his name in vain.

He is asking you to faithfully bear his image.

He is asking you to go to the lonely and the left out and the ones who don't get invited and show them that God does see and love and like them.

And that is something we can faithfully do, no matter how thin, pretty, funny, smart, rich we are.

For me, that is a much stabler foundation.

Okay.

Number two, hope in insecurity.

We need the gospel according to you.

If you can't tell already, my thesis today is that God is not wishing that you were more similar to someone else.

God has designed you with the giftings and the personality and the story that you have because you are supposed to tell a unique perspective on his goodness.

And I think we see this in the personality of the gospel writers.

Why do we have four biographies of Jesus?

Half of their content is repeated.

Why do we need to hear this four times?

Well, we're not actually hearing the same thing four times.

We're hearing four different voices give four different perspectives for four different reasons.

And I'm gonna do all four.

I hope this is interesting to you, as interesting to you as it was to me.

I had so much fun researching this.

All right.

In the good news, according to Matthew, Jesus' life is precise.

To be the Messiah, Jesus has to come from the family line of Abraham, Judah, and David, and he has to fulfill all messianic prophecy without a single miss.

It doesn't matter if we like him, if he's not an heir of David, and if he doesn't fulfill the prophecies.

And someone needs to prove that he does.

And a tax collector is just the guy.

Matthew's a money guy.

He's good at perfectly counted change and perfectly balanced ledgers.

Matthew is constantly telling the stories of Jesus.

He was born of a virgin in Bethlehem, they gambled for his clothes.

He keeps repeating this was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet, and then quoting prophecy.

For Matthew, Jesus has to be the rightful heir.

He has to fulfill every prophecy of what the Messiah would do.

Jesus does, and God needed to show us that.

And so he picked a nickel and dime guy.

God needed a fault-finding perfectionist to highlight the glory that in Jesus' story there is no fault to find.

The good news, according to Matthew, is that Jesus is the flawless fulfillment of what the Messiah has to be.

As opposed to Mark.

The Gospel of Mark is, if you don't know, the Gospel of Mark is Peter's memories.

Mark is scribing Peter's voice.

Mark's audience is Roman soldiers, people who value power and results.

They march into your country, conquer you immediately, impose suffocating taxes, and crucify anybody who doesn't get happy.

And so God uses Peter.

Peter who loses his temper and chops off the servant's ears.

Peter who sees the transfiguration and is unable to shut up and offers to build the glorified Christ a cabin.

Peter, the only one who hops out of the boat to walk towards Jesus on the water.

Peter likes action.

You know who else likes action?

Romans.

They enjoy rolling in and stomping you into tomorrow.

And so Mark's gospel is fast-paced.

It's written for soldiers.

His favorite word, he uses it over 40 times, is immediately.

Soldiers don't want a lot of long sermons, they want a decision maker on the battlefield.

And so Mark's Jesus is doing.

He's exorcisms, calming storms, raising the dead, teaching on the move.

The Greek is choppy.

It's short sentences like a soldier's report.

In Mark, Jesus speaks the least of the four.

God uses Peter, the impatient, impulsive man of action, to write to men of action.

As opposed to Luke, who's writing to Greeks.

The Greeks aren't Jews.

They don't care about Jesus having a genealogy that traces through Abraham.

They don't give two rips about Abraham.

These are not covenant people, these are academic people.

And so God picks a doctor who knows to open like a Greek historian, that he has carefully investigated everything, and he promises that he has written an orderly account.

Luke opens with a formal preface because Thucydides and Herodotus and all Greek historians open like this by establishing that their history is credible.

For Greeks to care, Luke knows he has to frame his gospel as reliable research.

In parables like the Good Samaritan, Jesus' style is Socratic, like Socrates.

He asks the audience, which of these three was a good neighbor?

And he forces the listener to reason out the answer.

Greeks don't care about the promised king from the line of David.

Greeks care about ethics and human rights.

And so Luke highlights Jesus' compassion for women and the poor and the Gentiles, and his genealogy traces Jesus not back to Abraham, but back to Adam to show that he's a human for everyone.

For the Greeks to care, Christianity has to be reasonable and relevant, and Jesus has to be a wise philosopher.

And so God gets a doctor, a man of academia, to tell the same story, but in a way that Greeks would care about, in the most polished and sophisticated Greek of the four.

Unlike John, who's all emotion, Jesus calls him and his brother James the sons of thunder.

These are big, funny, thunderous boys with huge feelings.

One of my favorite Bible verses in the whole scripture is John 12.

It says, Jesus came to Bethany and they gave a dinner for him.

Mary took a pound of ointment and anointed Jesus' feet.

But Judas Iscariot, one of the disciples who was about to betray him, said, Why was this not sold and given to the poor?

But he didn't say this because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief and he used to help himself to what was put into the money bag.

What's so great about this is that John clearly gets worked up.

That line is not needed for the story.

He's just still mad.

This is the same guy who wrote this.

Both were running, and the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first.

Again, that is in no way information that we need for the gospel or for this story in particular.

You can hear him laughing writing this.

People in AD 3000 will know I beat you.

This is just a funny, emotional guy.

And God uses this funny, emotional guy to write a love letter.

John's opening is not Matthew's genealogy for Jews or Luke's promise to the Greeks that the history's reliable.

John's opening is an explosion of poetry.

John's Jesus has long personal, intimate talks with Nicodemus at night and Peter on the beach.

John's Jesus is a bestie, losing sleep as he sits with people in their doubt and their grief.

John doesn't ever even call himself John.

He refers to himself as the disciple Jesus loved.

Jesus loving me is a truer thing about me than my name being John.

When John thinks about his own identity, what he thinks most is Jesus loved me.

John's gospel is a love letter back.

John presents Jesus with seven I am statements, and biblically, seven always means wholeness and infinity.

So John is saying not only is he the bread and the shepherd and the door, but he's seven things.

That means infinite things.

He's whatever you need him to be.

The son of thunder comes in hot and he tells us that Jesus is not just a perfect fulfillment of prophecy or a perfect philosopher.

He's everything you always needed a good man to be.

Everything you hoped your father would be, everything you hoped your husband would be, everything you hoped your president would be, but no one ever was.

So now, let's look at the four.

Let's consider.

Which of these four voices do we need?

To Matthew, it doesn't matter how Jesus makes you feel if he doesn't fulfill the prophecies.

And to John, it doesn't matter if he fulfills the prophecies if you don't love him.

But together, both of those are truer than either is by itself.

So again, which of these four do we need?

And the obvious answer, of course, is that for the truest truth, we have to have all four.

The beauty of Jesus is more clear and complex when we have all four voices.

So now let's consider these voices.

Which of these voices do we need?

And the obvious answer, again, of course, is that the beauty of God will be more clear and complex if we have all of them.

So you are not supposed to be more similar to Colton or me.

You have different sufferings, different personality, different giftings, different story.

And that's not just okay, that's essential because that means that God will be present and good and faithful to you in a slightly different way.

Therefore, you will tell the story of his goodness in a slightly different way.

The gospel, according to Colton, is God can save anybody, no matter how unexpected.

The gospel according to Colton is a story of God saving the wild drunk people that absolutely nobody thinks will ever be saved, and healing their families and bringing them not just into the kingdom, but into the ministry.

In the gospel, according to Colton, God is a miracle worker and a seeker of lost sheep.

In the gospel according according to Rainey, it is much less exciting.

And a sermon for another day, but for me, God is the reason why nature's so complex.

And he's the basis for our beliefs about ethics and human rights.

So which is he?

Of course he's both.

To celebrate him fully, we need both Gospels.

Actually, to celebrate him fully, we need eight billion gospels.

I have no idea.

But maybe unpopular, nitpicking, money-focused Matthew sometimes looked across that table at John and his jokes and his passion, leaning against Jesus at dinner and thought, dang, I wish I were more like John.

Everyone would like me better if I were more like John.

But actually, no, not everyone.

God did not look at Matthew going, I mean, this is okay.

I can use this fine, but I really wish I had a second John.

No, he doesn't wish either of them were more like the other.

Part of what you are for is to tell the gospel according to you.

How for you has Jesus been good news?

Psalm 107 says, Let the redeemed of the Lord say so.

In what way has he ever been good news to you?

Has he given you any hope, any welcome, any friendships, hospitality, jobs, pregnancies, healings, forgiveness, anything?

If he has, let the redeemed of the Lord friggin' say so.

That's my translation.

Emphasis added.

God could have made all the Coltons He wanted.

He could have had 50 Coltons if He'd wanted.

He didn't want 50 Coltons.

He has the exact number of Coltons that he needs.

If he had thousands of Coltons, people would never know the thousand different ways that he's beautiful.

He needs Colton to say one thing and you to say a different thing.

And we only sing the song of his beauty fully as a whole church.

All right, number three, and by far the shortest, don't worry.

Please do not hear me saying this morning, just believe in yourself because you are enough.

We hear, next, we hear an enormous amount of this.

At St.

Mary's, so many girls used this as the thesis or the message of their senior speeches in chapel, we finally had to ban it.

We have fire hosed this phrase at our epidemic of mental illness, but it hasn't done very much because it really isn't true.

You are actually not enough on your own to relieve anyone's anxiety, to pull anyone out of a depression, to heal anybody's trauma.

You are not enough to give your kids wisdom or discernment or friends.

You cannot make your spouse successful at work.

You cannot make your friends be wise with their money.

You can't heal the poverty in the world.

You can't even heal the poverty in Memphis.

We feel inadequate because we are inadequate.

But my buddy says this, and I love it.

You are enough the way that loaves and fishes were enough.

The good news for all of us is that no one is asking you to be enough.

You're not enough.

But when we give stuff to him, he does miracles that makes one fish poboy feed 5,000 guys and all their families.

That little boy's loaves and fishes were only enough when he handed them to Jesus.

If we hand ourselves to him, if we say to him, Here I am, send me.

If we say to him, I know that there are lonely, disconnected people in our church.

I want to help.

Show me how.

I can't fix everybody's loneliness, but I can host a dinner.

I can't heal your trauma, but I can remember your name.

So use my face, my cooking, my house, my time, my car, my talent.

You can have me to do whatever it is you wanted to do.

Use me to bear your image.

Use my gifts to bless this church.

Show me what to do.

In my experience, he will.

Plenty of y'all have had dinner in my home from Costco, but what you might not know is that often before you get there, I have prayed and I've offered my time and my house to God.

Because my porch and my Costco lasagna and my scintillating conversation are not actually enough to really help you with anything.

But I'm just trusting that if I give them to him, if I say, I give this silly lasagna to you, may you somehow receive glory from this stupid lasagna.

I trust that he will.

Okay, if any of this is appealing to you this morning, I have a little prayer activity for us.

Um when I don't, Colton's in his prayer closet for hours, and I don't, I don't know.

But when I don't know how to pray or what to pray, I can't speak to that, but when I don't know what to pray, I like to practice breath prayers where you take short verses of scripture and you pray them on an inhale-exhale.

Um so I've got a few of them this morning.

These are all verses.

Here's what we're gonna do.

Um if you want to offer yourself and your life to the Lord for his glory and for his kingdom, perhaps this could be a good place to begin.

So I invite you, if you'd like to, to close your eyes and join me in praying these on your inhale, exhale.

Search me, God, and know my heart.

Know my anxious thoughts.

Lead me to the rock.

It is higher than I show me the way I should go.

For to you I entrust my life.

I am the Lord serving.

May it be to me as you say.

Amen.

Romans twelve says, We each have different gifts according to the grace given to us.

Your giftings are a tiny bit of God extending his grace to the world.

So, in an ocean of opinions, my blessing for us, my brothers and my sisters, is that you do not have to audition for your worth.

I forgot that the night of Noah's big friend dinner.

And my challenge to you is not to make anyone audition for theirs either.

In a world that will evaluate you, walk in the dignity of an image bearer.

Use your story to tell how he has been good news.

And when you are painfully aware that you are not enough, hand yourself to him like loaves and ask him to display his own beauty through you.

We already know that he's good at that, but he doesn't snatch things.

He waits for the loaves to be handed to him and then he makes them be enough.

So go forth in joy with this from me.

If you were more like your sister, we would all be the poorer for it.

And for the little bit of him that we can all see better only because of you.

Thanks be to God.

Let me pray for us.

Lord Jesus, we confess how quickly our hearts run to the approval of others.

Forgive us.

Thank you that you were unmoved by the crowd's opinion.

But you set your face towards the Father and the cross and the kingdom without fear.

So, Holy Spirit, come and help us.

Free us from the tyranny of competition and image and comparison.

As we go from this place, make us people who see others as you see them.

Send us out to the lonely, the overlooked, and the left out, not to compete, but to bless.

We ask these things in the strong and beautiful name of Jesus.

The true image of God, the bread of life who feeds the hungry, the good shepherd who knows us each by name.

Amen.