He Made You to Look Like Him

When God made you, He said a thing He said about nothing else.

"Then God said, 'Let us make humankind in Our image, after Our likeness...'" — Genesis 1:26 (NET)

He did not say it about the sea. He did not say it about the mountains or the wheeling stars, lovely as they are. He said it about you. In Our image. After Our likeness.

People have wondered for a long time what that likeness is. Is it that we can think? That we can make things? That we know right from wrong? Those aren't wrong answers. But I think they circle the thing without landing on it. Look again at the One whose image you bear. He is love. So the part of you that is most truly His likeness is the part of you that loves. You were not built first to be clever. You were not built first to be strong. You were built to love — because the One you came from is love, and a likeness is meant to look like the One it came from.

You have felt this, even if you never had words for it. Think of the last time you loved someone and it cost you — when you gave and kept no account of it, when you stayed and leaving would have been easier, when you forgave the one who had no right to ask. Something in you was working as it was meant to. The mirror was catching the light. And think of the times you held love back, or spent it only on people who paid you back in kind — something in you was running below what it was built for. Not broken past saving. Just not yet all the way alive.

Paul said this as hard as it can be said, to a church that had every gift a church could want:

"If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but I do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so that I can remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing." — 1 Corinthians 13:1–2 (NET)

Read that last word again. Not less than I could be. Nothing. You can have all of it — the knowledge, the faith, the gift to move mountains — and without love be a clanging pot. That is how near the center of you this thing lives. That is how much of what you are made for is bound up in whether you love.

So when I tell you that without love we are not much, I am not scolding you. I am telling you something you already half-know in your own chest. You were made to look like a God who is love. Where the love is, the likeness shows. Where it is not, the mirror has turned to face the wall.