Chapel Message for 2020

Senior School Chapel held recently, was tied into the wellbeing theme for this term of SELF, and it explored the theme further by looking at the Biblical statement that humans are made, “In the image of God”. Read on to learn the key thoughts presented.

We tend to define and understand our SELF on the basis of what we perceive our image to be. In this modern world, especially for teenagers, that image tends to be defined by the media to be what we look like. This often has a negative consequence as very, very few people can look as good as those who appear on our screens and glossy magazine pages – they’ve all been helped. If we define our SELF by that image it can be very destructive.

Fortunately, the message of being created in God’s Image has nothing to do with what we look like, but has everything to do with what (or Who) we are like. In this sense theologians for centuries have taught that being in God’s image has two parts.

Firstly, we are in His image, different to all living things, in the way we interact with each other. Being in God’s image means that we are moral, we are compassionate, we are just, we are forgiving, and we are loving.

Secondly, being in His image means that we are His representatives. In the middle ages, and certainly the Victorian era, statues were erected to remind people of who reigned or on whose territory people were. In the 1980s on the Gold Coast cardboard cutouts of police motorbikes and cars were placed on busy streets, and people slowed down as they passed them!

The implication for us, as being God’s image, is the question: what kind of God do we declare to the Somerset community, and our world, by the way we live our lives and the way we interact with others?