Mensa Otabil - Created In God's Image (10/28/2025)
We’re still looking at the concept of fruitfulness, and we’ve examined it from the perspective that the Earth is made to be fruitful. God has given us the seed to be fruitful, and He has given us the power to exercise dominion. All of these are important factors to remember. If you want to be fruitful, you can’t feel that you are under; you have to be in charge of your life. So today, we are taking it to the grand statement that God created in Genesis chapter 1, verse 27: «So God created man in His own image; in the image of God, He created him; male and female, He created them.» I like that important statement: male and female, He created them. Both male and female are made in the image of God, and that is a very important observation.
God originated the idea to create us; we didn’t ask to be created, nor did we create ourselves. God created us to resemble Him, to look like Him. The passage says that God made us in His image, and a simple way to understand that is to use the word «image» as we understand it when we look into a mirror. When you look into a mirror, you see an image of yourself; if you lift your hands, your image lifts its hands in the mirror. If you smile, the image smiles, and the image does what you do. However, the image is not you; the image is a reflection of you.
Thus, God made us and gave us the capacity to do what He does, but we are not God; we only reflect Him. We are His image; we have His resemblance, and we can do some of the things that God is able to do. God does things in many ways, and right from the book of Genesis, God is introduced to us as a Creator. The word " Creator» means a maker, somebody who makes things. That’s the first introduction we have of God: He is a maker; He’s a Creator. In modern language, you would say He’s a producer or a manufacturer. God doesn’t just exist; He makes things.
In Genesis chapter one, He makes the heavens and the Earth and then goes on to make us. This nature of God to make things is part of the image we also have; we also are meant to make things. God has built within the human being the capacity to make things, and how does God make things? He makes things in two main ways: He makes things out of nothing. When there is nothing, He makes things, and then secondly, He makes things by using what He has made to do something new. For example, when it comes to making man, He took what He had made-the Earth, the ground-and made man. So, He uses already existing material to create something new.
Which part of God’s ability to make things has He imparted to us? Human beings do not have the ability to create things out of nothing; we can’t do that. Only God has the power to create things out of nothing, but we can make things out of already existing materials. God has already created the world; we didn’t create it, and from the world He has created, we have the ability to make things.
To be fruitful, we use the internal power that God has given us within us and His external world, which He has created outside of us. That means there is something inside you that God wants you to use in the world He has created. It is when we take what is inside of us and apply it to the world that God has created that we become fruitful. A fruitful person, as we have said earlier, has a seed from God within, but he also has a world that God has created. In that world, he takes things and applies new ideas and new concepts to them, and sometimes he comes up with something new-not new in the sense that it didn’t exist before, but new in the sense that he takes already existing materials and does something good with them.
That is how we become fruitful. From the inside, God gives us a gift, and from the outside, He gives us the material to make our lives fruitful. I trust that God will help you to deploy what He has put inside you into this vast world to live a fruitful life.
Let’s pray. Say with me: «Heavenly Father, You made me to be like You. Thank You for breathing Your creative spirit into me. In Jesus' name, amen and amen.» You are God’s image; go act like Him. Pastor Mena, Shalom-peace and life to you.