Living It—Designed to Depend (Part 2)
A Daily Practice for Living as God's Image
Consider This:
Every day something tells you who you are.
The only question is
whether you’re listening to God
—or everything else.
This is the second installment of a 2-part look into what it means to be made in God’s image. I opened the previous article by saying that most Jesus followers agree that we are the imago Dei (Latin for “image of God”), but few know what it really means—much less know what difference it makes in how we live.
So the goal of these two articles is to provide two insights in genuinely living as God’s image bearer—in a New Testament, “in Christ” context:
A simple but foundational mindset that reframes your reality.
A way to practice that mindset on a day-to-day basis.
Since Part 1 covered the foundational mindset, Part 2 will provide an operating template that we can apply on a daily and even moment-by-moment basis to walk out our renewed identity in Christ in tangible ways.
The Mindset Revisited
The mindset from Part 1 includes some elements that are relevant to the daily practice I’ll be laying out in this article. Here’s a refresher (and a link to the full article):
1. As the imago Dei, we are a physical extension of God.
We’re made to reflect and represent him, rule over creation (pre-Fall), serve as his reconciling ambassadors (post-resurrection) as “the fullness of him who fills everything in every way” (Eph. 1.23).
2. Being an extension of God requires a dependent identity.
“Dependent” here isn’t (just) a faith practice, it’s our design—we are dependent beings by nature.
The moon is the brightest thing in the night sky, but it isn’t a light source—it’s a light reflector. Just as the moon is dependent on the sun, so we are dependent on God to reflect his image.
3. Not embracing our dependent nature is rejecting what God made us to be.
This was Adam and Eve’s choice in the Garden.
4. Rejecting our created nature doesn’t eliminate our dependence, it just redirects it—to the world.
We don’t have the capacity to function independently (though it feels like we do).
Our dependent nature means that we’ll always depend on something, whether that’s God or the world (and everything in it).
Note: This 2-part series is a paid-subscriber follow-up to a previous article that was free to everyone: You Were Designed to Depend.
Subscribe if you want to have access to this 2-part series (and future articles like it).
