A Quote by Philip Yancey

God reproduces and lives out His image in millions of ordinary people like us. It is a supreme mystery. We are called to bear that image as a Body because any one of us taken individually would present an incomplete image, one partly false and always distorted, like a single glass chip hacked from a mirror. But collectively, in all our diversity, we can come together as a community of believers to restore the image of God in the world.

Philip Yancey

Quote Topics

Always Any Bear Because Believers Body Chip Collectively Come Community Distorted Diversity False Glass God Hacked His Image Incomplete Individually Like Lives Millions Mirror Mystery Ordinary Ordinary People Our Out Partly People Present Restore Single Supreme Taken Together Us World Would

Quote Author

Philip Yancey
American - Author
Born: 1949

To Whom does our God say, 'in our image' (Gen. 1:26), to whom if it is not to Him who is 'the brightness of His glory and the express image of His Person' (Heb. 1:3), 'the image of the invisible God' (Col. 1:15)? It is then to His living image, to Him Who has said 'I and My Father are one' (Jn. 10:30), 'He who has seen Me has seen the Father' (Jn. 14:9), that God says, 'Let us make man in our image'.

Saint Basil

Woman does not possess the image of God in herself but only when taken together with the male who is her head, so that the whole substance is one image. But when she is assigned the role as helpmate, a function that pertains to her alone, then she is not the image of God. But as far as the man is concerned, he is by himself alone the image of God just as fully and completely as when he and the woman are joined together into one.

Saint Augustine

There's an old saying that God made us in His image, and we've been trying to return the favor ever since. People often view God in a human image. This God changes His mind, gets upset, answers some prayers but not others, loves some people but not others. But even with that limited image, if we pray sincerely, we'll eventually realize that God is changeless. He's the same all the time because He's not in time-time is in Him.

Michael Beckwith

God cannot be represented by an image. We ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device. We wrong God, and put an affront upon him, if we think so. God honoured man in making his soul after his own likeness; but man dishonours God if he makes him after the likeness of his body. The Godhead is spiritual, infinite, immaterial, incomprehensible, and therefore it is a very false and unjust conception which an image gives us of God.

Matthew Henry

There is no God separate from you, no God higher than you, the real "you." All the gods are little beings to you, all the ideas of God and Father in heaven are but your own reflection. God Himself is your image. “God created man after His own image." That is wrong. Man creates God after his own image. That is right. Throughout the universe we are creating gods after our own image. We create the god and fall down at his feet and worship him; and when this dream comes, we love it !

Swami Vivekananda

Within each of us exists the image of God, however disfigured and corrupted by sin it may presently be. God is able to recover this image through grace as we are conformed to Christ. Just as the figure of David lay hidden within the marble, discernible only to the eye of its creator, so the image of God (however tarnished by sin) lies within us, see and known by God Himself. Yet God loves us while we are still sinners. He doesn't have to wait until we stop sinning. Acceptance of His love is a major step along the road that leads to our liberation from the tyranny of sin.

Alister E. McGrath

God made us in His own image so that His image would be shown.

John Piper

In recent years my understanding of God had evolved into increasingly remote abstractions. I'd come to think of God in terms like Divine Reality, the Absolute, or the One who holds us in being. I do believe that God is beyond any form and image, but it has grown clear to me that I need an image in order to relate. I need an image in order to carry on an intimate conversation with what is so vast, amorphous, mysterious, and holy that it becomes ungraspable. I mean, really, how to you become intimate with Divine Reality? Or the Absolute?

Sue Monk Kidd

The supreme religious challenge is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image.

Jonathan Sacks

Take man's most fantastic invention- God. Man invents God in the image of his longings, in the image of what he wants to be, then proceeds to imitate that image, vie with it, and strive to overcome it.

Eric Hoffer

God build’s God’s kingdom. But God ordered this world in such a way that His own work within that world takes place through the human beings that reflect His image. That is central to the notion of being made in God’s image. He has enlisted us to act as His stewards in the project of creation. So the objection about us trying to build God’s kingdom by our own efforts, though it seems humble and pious, can actually be a way of hiding from responsibility, of keeping one’s head well down when the boss is looking for volunteers.

N. T. Wright

It's the fact that your body and your personality are not God. God is you. But you can't say you are God just as the ocean is all the waves, but you can't say one wave is the ocean. And so you manifest God in a way that you don't understand. Man himself is the image of God, but he doesn't see that image in himself. And you need to meditate, and there will come your answer, not looking in the mirror.

Goswami Kriyananda

The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God's image in someone who is not in my image, who language, faith, ideal, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.

Jonathan Sacks

I make one image—though 'make' is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be 'made' emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess—let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict.

Dylan Thomas

We are not to reflect on the wickedness of men but to look to the image of God in them, an image which, covering and obliterating their faults, an image which, by its beauty and dignity, should allure us to love and embrace them.