Today’s Devotional: “It’s Not About Image”

Today, it’s all about image! Magazines sell it. Advertisers promote it. People crave it. But what they sell, promote, and crave is overrated, unfair, and causes more harm to people’s sense of who God made them to be.

This whole idea of image has created a multibillion-dollar cosmetic, transportation, construction, and more industries. While they generate jobs for millions, they also cause financial and emotional harm to billions.

It’s causing within us a discontent with who God made us to be, along with an overall feeling of inferiority from comparing ourselves to others, and even to ourselves. We make others the standard for who and what we should be, instead of who God created us to be.

The Apostle Paul recognized this danger and said, “For we dare not class ourselves or compare ourselves with those who commend themselves. But they, measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise. We, however, will not boast beyond proper limits, but will confine our boasting to the field God has assigned to us.” (2 Corinthians 10:12-13)

The image is all about how we want others to see us. But God isn’t interested in the outward man, but in the inward (1 Samuel 16:7). The only image we should care about isn’t the one the world promotes, but the one God wants to shape within us: the image of His Son, Jesus Christ.

“For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son.” (Romans 8:29a)

So instead of comparing ourselves to the world’s misguided standards, focus on cultivating what God has uniquely created us to be and begin growing into the likeness of Jesus.

“But we … are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.” (2 Corinthians 3:18)

So let’s reject the image of this world and begin embracing the design of our Creator, our loving and gracious Heavenly Father.