Sunday Study Session — Weekly meeting time 10:15 in Room 301 at Owensboro Christian Church
June 21, 2026 — Session 5: The Image Restored: Jesus as the True and Perfect Image
Colossians 1:15, Hebrews 1:3, John 14:9
Focus: What we could not fix on our own, God fixed by sending His Son — the exact image of who God is.
WHAT TO LOOK FOR
Listen for the shock in these passages — the claim that Jesus is not just a good example but "the image of God" in a way no one else is. Notice that Paul and the author of Hebrews do not describe Jesus as becoming the image over time; He is the image. Watch how the image of God in Jesus is described in active terms: He holds all things together, He sustains the universe, He is the radiance of God's glory.
SCRIPTURE
Colossians 1:15 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.
Hebrews 1:3 The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.
John 14:9 Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?
NOTE TO SELF
I have spent decades trying to be like Jesus. I have memorized verses about following Him. I have made promises to myself and to God. I have worked hard at being a better version of myself. And sometimes I have felt progress. But mostly, I have felt the gap between who Jesus is and who I am. The gap is not a motivational tool. It is exhausting. It makes me feel like a failure. But what if that exhaustion is actually an invitation? What if Jesus is not calling me to close the gap through effort, but to close it through relationship? What if instead of trying harder to become like someone I see from a distance, I am invited to know someone who is present with me right now? That would change everything. It would mean I could stop working and start receiving. It would mean that transformation is not about my willpower but about His presence. And that is something I can actually do. That is something that is already happening.
1. Have I been trying to become like Jesus through effort and willpower, and if so, where has that left me — tired, discouraged, or feeling like a failure?
2. What would shift in me if I stopped trying to be like Jesus and instead spent time actually encountering Him, letting His presence reshape me from the inside out?
3. In what area of my life am I most exhausted from trying to be better, and how might I release that burden and instead ask Jesus to work in me?
OVERVIEW
When you understand what it means to be made in God's image, and when you see how sin has cracked that image in all of us, the question becomes urgent: Can the image be restored? The answer is yes — but not by trying harder. Not by deciding to be better. The restoration comes through a person: Jesus Christ.
Jesus is not merely a human who bore the image well. He is the image. He is not an example we might eventually live up to. He is the complete, perfect, undistorted reflection of who God is. When you look at Jesus, you are looking at God — not God in all His fullness, because God is infinite and Jesus took on human limitations. But you are looking at who God is in a way that can be received, understood, and followed.
This is the revolutionary claim of the gospel. We cannot fix the image ourselves. We cannot meditate our way back to wholeness or try our way back to God. The image can only be restored from the outside — by God Himself coming into our situation and showing us what a fully imaged human being looks like.
The rest of Scripture flows from this. Every law, every prophet, every ceremony in the Old Testament was pointing toward this moment: when God would come in person and show us how to be human the way it was meant to be.
THIS MAY SURPRISE YOU
Most of us think of Jesus primarily as our savior — the one who died for our sins. That is true and essential. But before Jesus was a sacrifice, He was a mirror. He was showing us, for thirty-three years, what a fully imaged human being looks like.
The gospel writers seem almost obsessed with this. They show Jesus doing what Adam was supposed to do: naming creation, bringing order, exercising dominion over the chaos (the sea, demons, disease). They show Jesus doing what the Old Testament priests were supposed to do: serving, interceding, offering Himself. They show Jesus creating (feeding five thousand, turning water to wine), teaching truth, forgiving, loving enemies, and extending dignity to the broken.
Every single thing Jesus did was an answer to the question: "What does it look like when someone fully bears the image of God?" And the answer was not dramatic or forced. It was quiet, consistent, and so human that people in His own time could not believe He was also God.
Here is what might surprise you: You have probably spent years trying to be like Jesus, and rightly so. But before you can actually look like Him, you have to know what you are looking at. You have to understand that the point is not to imitate a distant ideal. The point is to let yourself be remade by a relationship with the one who is the actual, perfect image.
SEEDS FOR THOUGHT
Colossians 1:15 — "The Son is the image of the invisible God" Comment: Paul does not say Jesus is "an image" or "a good image." He is "the image" — the one who perfectly shows forth the invisible God. This is not metaphorical language. This is the central claim of the gospel.
Colossians 1:16-17 — "For in him all things were created...all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together" Comment: The one who is the image is also the one through whom and for whom all creation exists. The image-bearer is not a passive reflection. He is the active sustainer of everything that is.
Hebrews 1:3 — "The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being" Comment: "Radiance" means light shining forth. "Exact representation" means a perfect copy — not a diminished version or an approximation. When you look at Jesus, you are looking at God expressed in a form human beings can perceive.
Hebrews 1:3 (continued) — "sustaining all things by his powerful word" Comment: Jesus does not just represent God's character. He actively holds the universe together. His identity as the image is not passive. It is the most powerful thing in existence.
John 14:8-9 — "Show us the Father...Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father" Comment: This might be the most stunning claim in the Bible. Jesus is not pointing toward God. He is not representing God from a distance. He is saying: To know what God is like, look at Me. What you see is what God is.
John 1:1-3 — "In the beginning was the Word...the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Through him all things were made" Comment: John establishes that Jesus did not become God or start existing when He was born. He was with God at the beginning and is the one through whom all existence came into being.
HOW DOES THIS HELP ME TRUST GOD TODAY?
There is a particular comfort in this session for people who have lived a long time and carried a heavy burden of trying to be good. So much of what we have been taught about faith is about effort: try harder, be more faithful, pray more, serve more, become holier.
All of those things have their place. But this session offers something different: release. The image of God is not restored by your effort. It is restored by encountering Jesus Christ and allowing yourself to be changed by that encounter.
That changes what trust means. Trust is not "I will try to be worthy of this relationship with God." Trust is "I will stop trying to fix myself and instead receive the one who can fix me."
For older believers, there is profound rest in this. You have tried long enough. You have been faithful, and there are still edges in you that are rough, places you have not healed, patterns you have not broken. This is not failure. This is the human condition. And Jesus knows it. He came for exactly that — not to reward the people who got it right, but to enter into relationship with people who finally got tired of trying and asked for help.
The image of God in you will never be perfectly restored until you see Him face to face. But it is being restored. Every time you encounter Jesus in Scripture, in prayer, in His presence through the Holy Spirit — your mirror is being cleaned. The crack is being mended. You are becoming more and more the person you were made to be.
And the remarkable thing is that this happens not through grim determination but through love. Through encounter. Through the presence of the one who is the image, changing you by His presence into His likeness.
QUOTES
"The doctrine that Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God is not just a curious theological point. It is the hinge of redemption. In the Incarnation, God shows us what He is like and what we are meant to become." — Sinclair Ferguson, The Whole Christ
"When we look at Jesus, we see God. When we see God in Jesus, we see who we are really meant to be. The image of God is not restored by a program or a decision. It is restored by beholding the one who is the perfect image, and allowing that sight to transform us." — Timothy Keller, The Reason for God
TAKE-HOME THOUGHT
For most of your life, you have been trying to be like someone you have never fully seen. We read about Jesus in the Gospels. We hear sermons about Him. We sing about Him. We pray to Him. But we do not see Him with our eyes.
That can create a gap. We try to imitate Jesus from a distance, comparing ourselves to an ideal that feels distant and impossible. We do the best we can, and it never seems like enough. We look at Jesus and see holiness so far beyond us that we sometimes feel it is almost cruel to expect us to try.
But what this session reveals is that Jesus is not a distant ideal. He is the personal presence of God. And the restoration of the image does not happen by straining to be better. It happens through relationship with Him.
Here is how that works practically: When you spend time with someone, you start to become like them. Their way of speaking influences you. Their priorities shape yours. Their way of seeing the world becomes more your way too. This is not imitation. It is osmosis — the slow exchange that happens in a relationship.
That is what Jesus offers. Not a list of standards to live up to, but His presence. His company. His friendship. His willingness to spend time with you — teaching you, showing you, remaking you from the inside out.
For those of us who are older, this is particularly precious. We have spent decades trying to be good, trying to be faithful, trying to live up to an image that always felt just beyond our reach. This session says: Stop trying. Start relationship. The image is restored not by effort but by encounter. And Jesus is present to that encounter, right now, in whatever season of life you are in.
BIBLICAL CONNECTIONS
2 Corinthians 4:4 & 4:6 (The Image That Shines)
"The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God... For God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God's glory displayed in the face of Christ." Comment: Paul calls Christ "the image of God" in the context of the gospel's power to transform sight itself. The gospel displays Christ's glory in a way that blindness—spiritual blindness—cannot prevent. The passage then echoes Genesis 1 ("Let light shine out of darkness") but applies it to Christ: God's light shines not from a distant cosmos but from the face of Jesus. The image of God is not passive or theoretical; it is a light that can be seen and that transforms those who see it. This is the restoration: what was cracked and distorted in humanity is now made visible in perfect form in Christ.
John 1:1–3 (The Word Who Is God)
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made." Comment: John establishes that Jesus did not become God or start existing at the incarnation. He was with God at the beginning and through Him all things were made. This is foundational: the one who will become the image of God is not a creature who achieved perfection, but the eternal Word through whom all creation exists. There is no gap between His identity as creator and His identity as the image. He is perfectly expressive of God because He is God. This answers the deepest question of the image: it is not something humans achieve, but something we receive when we encounter the one through whom we were made.
Philippians 2:6–7 (The Emptying)
"Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness." Comment: Here is the paradox that restores the image: the one who is truly God in His very nature set aside the privileges of deity and became human. He did not cling to equality with God but emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave. This is the opposite of Adam's choice. Adam grasped for something he didn't have. Jesus released something He did have. In this humbling, Jesus became what humanity could not achieve on its own: a person who perfectly images God through complete obedience, complete self-giving, and complete trust in God the Father. The image is restored not through human effort but through divine humiliation.
John 1:14 (The Word Made Visible)
"The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth." Comment: The incarnation is the moment when the invisible God becomes visible. The Word—the one through whom all things exist—becomes flesh and dwells among us. John emphasizes that this is not an illusion or an appearance: Christ was "a one hundred percent authentic human being." His glory is seen because the Word came not from afar but made His home among people. The image of God is not an abstract concept or a spiritual principle; it is a person you can see, touch, and follow. Those who beheld Him beheld His glory—the very glory of the one and only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.
2 Corinthians 4:4 (Christ as the Image)
"...Christ, who is the image of God…" Comment: Paul identifies Christ directly as "the image of God" in the context of gospel light overcoming blindness. Unlike humans who bear the image imperfectly and distortedly, Jesus is "the image"—definite article, singular, complete. This is not one image among many or a partial reflection. This is the full expression of God in human form. When Session 1 warned about homemade gods and Session 3 mourned the cracking of the image through sin, this is the answer: there is one perfect, undistorted image of God, and His name is Jesus. The restoration does not come through our efforts to improve ourselves or our understanding; it comes through relationship with Him.
1 Corinthians 15:45 (The Last Adam)
"So it is written: 'The first man Adam became a living being'; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit." Comment: Paul frames Jesus as "the last Adam"—the one who makes right what the first Adam made wrong. The first Adam received life; the last Adam became life-giving. Whereas Adam's choice brought death and a cracked image, Christ's obedience brings life to all who follow Him. The passage continues: "As was the earthly man, so also are those who are of the earth; and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are of heaven." This is the hope of restoration: as we have borne the image of the earthly man (fallen, broken), we shall also bear the image of the heavenly man (Christ, perfect, life-giving). The image is restored not by trying harder but by being transformed into His likeness through relationship with Him.
Made in His Image — 7 Sessions - What it Means to Reflect God's Will
May 31, 2026—Session 1 — Don't Get It Wrong: The Danger of a Homemade God
God warns us not to replace His glory with images of our own making — even well-meaning ones.
June 7, 2026—Session 2 — The Original Blueprint: What "Image of God" Actually Means
Being made in God's image is not about what we look like — it's about who we are meant to be.
June 14, 2026—Session 3 — A Cracked Mirror: How Sin Distorted the Image
The Fall did not erase the image of God in us, but it bent it — and we have been living with the distortion ever since.
June 21, 2026—Session 4 — When God's Gift Is Misused: The Heartbreak of a Cracked Image
When the image He placed in us is used to harm, deceive, or rebel, God grieves.
June 28, 2026—Session 5 — The Image Restored: Jesus as the True and Perfect Image
What we could not fix on our own, God fixed by sending His Son — the exact image of who God is.
July 5, 2026—Session 6 — Being Renewed: The Slow Work of Becoming What We Were Made to Be
Salvation is not just rescue — it is restoration. God is actively reshaping us back into His image.
June 12, 2026—Session 7 — Bearing the Image in Everyday Life: What This Looks Like at any Stage in Life
Every season of life is an opportunity to show the world who God is.