Made In God’s Image By Charles F. Stanley

Day 1: Made In God’s Image

God created you like Himself so
you could have fellowship with
Him.

When God created you, He made you like Himself. Why? So you would have the capacity for fellowship
with Him. Without that commonality, you would have
no way to comprehend Him on a personal level.
However, because you have this commonality, you
can recognize His perfections. You can appreciate His
limitless love, mercy, grace, wisdom, and power
because of the (extremely) limited versions of those
attributes you see in yourself. Worship, of course, is
the only sensible reaction to God when faced with
this realization.
The world tends to sum up a person’s impact
based on the fame and fortune that he or she
possesses. But God sums up a person’s impact in
terms of relationship, character, and obedience to
Him. God wants you to succeed first and foremost in
your relationship with Him, then in your relationships
with others, and finally in your vocations and
ministries. His highest priority and purpose for your
life is intimacy with Him. Therefore, the depth of
your relationship with Him will determine the impact
of your life in this world.

Each of us has a need to know
that we are loved.

Thanks to God’s design, this relationship
simultaneously fills your deepest personal needs—
especially the need to know that you are loved. Each
one of us has to feel certain, deep down in our
hearts, that someone cares for us and has our best
interests at heart. When your relationship with God is
strong, you experience His love with a passionate
intensity too deep for words.

So it is that God
created you with fellowship in mind—with Himself
and others. But you cannot fully love others until you
have yourself experienced the love of God.

God said, “Let Us make man in
Our image, according to Our
likeness; let them have dominion
over the fish of the sea, over the
birds of the air, and over the
cattle, over all the earth and over
every creeping thing that creeps
on the earth” (Genesis 1:26).