Change Your Profile Pic

Before someone decides whether to go on a date, they often look for clues or evidence about what the person could be like on social media. They might look at their profile picture online to help decide whether to make an offline connection. After all, how can we have a meaningful conversation with someone if we don’t know what they are actually like? 

When we start to consider making a new connection with God, we can’t exactly check out God’s profile picture, can we? But we can look for clues to help point us in the right direction. 

If you want to get to know a creator, you just need to look at what has been created. We can know what an artist is like by looking at the art they make. We can know the mind of a composer by listening to their music. This means if we want to know what God is like, we can look at ourselves as part of God’s creation. The Bible says you are made in the image of God.

There is this verse in the book of Psalms that says, "I am fearfully and wonderfully made." The writer is not just talking about himself. He is talking about all of us. You are fearfully and wonderfully made, even if you don’t always feel like it. Knowing that we are wonderfully made by God has far-reaching effects on our own identity. But it also helps teach us something about what God is like. 

Your spirit inside you reveals something about who God is. You can love because God is love. You have a sense of compassion because God is compassionate. You have an inbuilt moral compass because it reflects the kind of justice God wants to see in the world. You are made in the image of God.

Yet if we are honest there is a problem with this idea. If we really are a reflection of God then the mirror of our lives often feels dirty, clouded, and broken. Our own selfishness, struggles, stresses, and failures mean that the personality of God fails to shine through us. No matter how many times we update our profile pic, we are just not good enough on our own. 

This is where Jesus comes in. Because in Jesus we start to see, as the verse says, that God's works really are wonderful. God sent Jesus to show us what He was really like. If God took a selfie, it would look like Jesus. By looking to Jesus as the perfect reflection of who God is, we start to find the way to make our own image clear again. And if this really is true, then finding out who Jesus is, is definitely a conversation worth making time for.