Today's Devotional

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Before humanity does a single thing — before a word is spoken or a task finished — God stamps his own image on us. Slow down on those words. Your worth is not printed on the far side of your achievements. It is written into you at the source, in the likeness of the God who made you. James was direct about it on Sunday: our deepest struggle is that we try to build an identity out of what we do, what we own, or what other people say about us. But a newborn has done nothing, and its parents are undone with love — because of whose image it bears. So it is with you. God set you apart before you had produced anything at all. This is not a license to drift, or to imagine you are your own maker. Genesis is clear that we are the creation, not the Creator. Only the one who made you gets to say who and what you are. That is not a cage; it is relief. When your identity is received from God rather than achieved by you, no failure and no critic can revoke it. So carry today what James called liberating. You do not have to earn your place at the plate. Like an athlete freed from the fear of striking out, you are set free to live and work and love — not to secure your worth, but because it is already secure. Before you do anything today, hear it: you bear his image, and you are loved.