A Whole New Life

By Jason, M.Ed., M.A.R., Headmaster

So, you’re back from camp. What a week! You had tons of fun, did things you probably never thought you’d get to do this summer, made some new friends, and got to know God better than ever before.

Now what? You’re back from camp and it’s time for your regular, old life to start again, right? Wrong! Not after everything you’ve learned this summer. Not after what God has been doing in your life. Your same old, stale, crusty life is gone, and you have a whole brand-spankin’, shiny new life with Jesus waiting for you.

What does this mean for you? Well, sit back and get ready, because we’re going to spend some time taking a look at exactly what your new life holds for you. Ready? Let’s get started . . .

God’s Plan for Your Life

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule . . . over all the earth." So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.  God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.” (Genesis 1:27-28, NIV)

Imagine you’ve found a light bulb for the very first time in the middle of the woods. You’ve never seen a light bulb. You don’t know what a light bulb is. To you, this funny-looking glass thing you just found is a whatsit?. You’re standing there with your whatsit? in hand, scratching your noggin and wondering what you’ve just found. How are you going to find out what you’re holding in your hand and what it can do? Well, you’d better go to somebody who knows, before you think your whatsit? is a new snack and you bite into that bad boy and get a real surprise. Ouch!

Your new life with God is like that whatsit? light bulb. You’ve never lived this way before, and you’re going to need some help figuring out what God has planned for your new life. If you really want to know what God has in store for you, if you want to know what God wants you to be, you need to go all the way back to the beginning, to the time when God fist made people and put them on earth.

When God made the very first people, He created them “in his own image, in the image of God.” What does that mean? Does it mean God has red hair like me or brown hair or blond hair, like you might have? No, being in God’s image doesn’t mean that we look like God, but it does mean that we are made to be like God in the way we think and act.

To figure out how this was supposed to work, let’s look at some other things God said when He made the first people. I see four things about human beings, as God first made them:   

1. Human beings were made in the image of God. That means we were created to be like God in some way.

2. Human beings were blessed by God. That means God was happy with the first humans and spoke good things about them and not bad things.

3. Human beings were told to spread out over the whole earth. This means God wanted the whole earth filled with His images, with people who were like Him.

4. God also told the humans to rule over the earth. God wanted people to take control over the world the way God would, spreading God’s goodness over all things.

So, God’s original plan for you is that you should be like Him, that God should be happy with what you do and who you are, and that you should grow and spread God’s image or likeness in the world. Another way to say all of that is that God created humans to be happy and holy. God wanted us to belong to Him and to be like Him, and so to be happy and successful in all that we do.

This was God’s original plan, and it is still what He wants for you: to be happy and holy. These two things are connected, happiness and holiness. God’s desire is for you to have both, and you really can’t have one without the other. You’ll never be really happy until you are like God in all the ways that God wants you to be like Him. And, if you become like God in the way you think and act, if you belong to God completely, you will be happy—happy forever.