You are Wonderful

Good morning Mrs Quek, school leaders and teachers,

Text :

Sermon Title : You are Wonderful

Occasion : Staff Devotion

Location : PLMGS

MPP : Your wonder gets imprinted unto your students

Good morning Mrs Quek, school leaders and teachers,

I want to start off by saying that it is a real privilege to be here with you this morning just spending time with you…

I've not been to many PLMGS events, but I must say that every time I come here, I am just so overwhelmed by the love and care you all extent to the girls here in PL…

And I would like to say to you right now… to everyone of you that you are impacting lives and are fulfilling your vision, which is "an outstanding school of choice, producing women of fine character".

And how do I know that?

Because I married a wonderful woman who is a PL-Lite…

Looking at the PL website, I think that PLMGS was able to fulfil what the school set out to do, for she is a woman who is of fine character and someone who runs after God's own heart, someone who demonstrates the values that PLMGS tries to imbue in her students.

At this point, I may have to declare my conflict of interest because of close relationship with the subject of our discussion because she is my wife…

However, to give myself more credibility, and to assure you that I am not biased, I want to note the fact that many of her classmates at (at least more than 10) were serving together AMKMC, her home church. In fact, the very fact that I became a Methodist was partly because of her and her classmates, that was able to recreate that atmosphere of care and love in the church…

This is the PL spirit that Mrs Quek was talking about in her address on Founders' Day on the 12th of Oct.

This group of PL-lites continue to love God and continue to be people of fine character because of the imprint that the leadership, teachers and the staff of PLMGS had left in them when they were in the sheltering walls of PLMGS… Some of the teachers are in this room…

So thank you school leaders and teachers for the great work that you are doing in this school, in the lives of the many students within this sheltering walls…

This morning, I would like to turn our attention to just two verses, which reads

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So God created mankind in his own image,

in the image of God he created them;

In particular, I would like to focus on one word that is repeated three times in this short segment…

"Image"

I wonder what comes to mine when the word image is mentioned?

I suppose most people would have in mind, what you see in a reflection in the mirror, or perhaps a photograph, whether it is in the phone or physical copy...

That’s natural in our visual society...

Then the next question is... do you like what you see?

How many of you, when you are washing up to get to work this morning, saw your reflection in the mirror and thought to yourself... “I look wonderful”

Chances are, not many if any of you would actually do that... I mean who has time to think of how wonderful you look at 5am in the morning, with your hair all over the place, dried drool on your chin and if you’ve kids, trying to get your children to wake up and wash up…

And even if you’re not doing all that, chances are you do not actually think you’re wonderful…

Our sense of self has become very visual, for we are constantly being bombarded by pictures in the magazines, in billboards, on the various screens telling us what a perfect body looks like…

Well, I’m sure most of us know by now that most of the pictures we see have undergone Photoshop and how wonderful someone looks on the magazine is partly determined by how good the Photoshop artiste is… But it still gets to us doesn’t it?

What’s more interesting is that not only are there tons of unrealistic images out there telling you how you can look “wonderful,” there are also tons of businesses, drugs and gyms all eager to help you reach that goal…

Even my old mobile phone has a selfie function that can enlarge my eyes, suck in my cheeks and give me flawless skin…

In fact, as I was preparing this sharing, I received this in my email…

Amazing… even Lawry’s a steakhouse is jumping on the bandwagon, trying to allow us to boost our body image… This was amazing… and they start by offering you a smaller cut of their meat…

📷

My point is that many times, when we think of our image, it is often based on how we look… this is what the world teaches us, and often that is the interpretation of our passage today…

Our world is obsessed with the notion of how we look…

But if we were to look in the context of the passage, we can see that in this set of scriptures, in the accompanying text, there was very little description of how creation looked, but more what they did…

The waters gathered, the plants yielded seeds and bore fruits, the sun and the moon gave light, the living creatures swarm and flew, the living creatures multiplied while man was asked to have dominion over the earth and to rule over living creatures…

This suggests that when the word “image” was used in this verse, paired with the word “likeness”, it was used with the idea of external appearance in mind, but more in terms of attributes as well as status…

In other words, God, after creating man gave man a decree and declared that man is now his envoy or ambassador to the world, being charged with the responsibility of taking care of the world on His behalf, and this we can see in the way God said “I have given you…” and use of the words “you shall now rule over” as well as in where man’s function was to “take charge, to guard and to have the place as a property in trust”[1]which suggests a delegation of responsibility as well as a place of honour…

This passage also tells us that God blessed man and gave them providence to fulfil their responsibilities…

This therefore, tells us that in the passages here, “image” does not refer to how we look but our very status and function in this world…

And this status and function is an intrinsic attribute and property they have, that cannot be lost, because man was created that way…

In other words, the image of an intrinsic part of man… the image is an intrinsic part of you and me…

It is a part that had been imprinted in us, and God declared it to be ְהִנֵּה־ט֖וֹב (mineh-tov) very good, and the Psalmist declared in that you are “wonderfully made”…

So my friends, do not be waylaid by the lies of the world and the Photoshop…

Our worth and responsibility is not on how good we look on the outside…

Now I’m not saying that we should not be concerned with our dressing… I mean that are cultural norms, protocol and decorum we need to respect… that’s a different topic altogether…

But we are more than how we look…

Another point about our images, and how we express it is that it can also be modified and shaped by the environment and how much we choose to express ourselves…

It is just like a diamond that is raw and how you polish it and how you coax it, you would either release the beauty of the diamond by ensuring that different facets are able to refract and reflect lights in such a way that it can sparkle or by carelessly cutting it, introduce more scratches and making the surface dull…

Therefore, relevant to us in our text today is a two-fold look at this concept of the image… the first speaks of our image as our different areas of responsibilities and places that we are to be responsible for and to take charge of… that is our image… and the second, is to help our girls in school to realise their image and let them shine like diamonds…

With regard to the first, I think you are all doing a great job as school leaders and teachers, you have fulfilled your image and your area of responsibility is to build into the lives of the girls that come under your care…

And let me tell you friends, from the testimonies that I’ve heard, you are tremendous impact and because of that your wonderful and beautiful image is shining through…

The very fact that so many of the former students come back to school after they have graduated to say hello to you during Teachers’ Day, to come back to have their graduation photos taken in the campus, to organise events such as the Founders’ Day dinner, and even to have their wedding photos taken in the very place where they have spent their formative years of their lives is testament to how you have exercised that image that had been placed in you…

Being stewards of the many lives that had been put into your hands…

And why is it important for you to know this fact that you are doing a great job?

It is because of the second part of the discussion of your functional image to bring out the image in the girls…

Other than the fact that you are providing the girls with education in the academic sense, you are providing the girls with education in other forms as well…

The educationalist Elliot Eisner which I’m sure many of you have heard of said that there are three kinds of education… the explicit, the implicit and the null curriculum…

The explicit curriculum, we all know… that comes in through in our materials, and our lesson plans…

The null curriculum, we learn to be aware of… that comes through our careful study of what we have left out in our curriculum whether intentionally or unintentionally…

But the implicit curriculum is the thing that comes through things that are not formally taught…

It may come through the way our pedagogies or that way in which the school is designed, it may come through the physical environment the classroom is like, but more importantly, it comes through the way we interact with our students, inside the class and outside the class…

How much we believe in the materials we teach, how much we really believe in the students under our care and how much we really believe in the mission and vision of the school comes out in the implicit curriculum of our lives, through the way we behave, how we interact with colleagues, how we interact with the girls consciously or unconsciously…

Even how we think of our vocation as teachers as well as what we think of ourselves, whether we truly see ourselves as “wonderfully made” comes out in our implicit education…

And all these will be imprinted in our next generation of our nation… the girls who had gone through these walls…

You have, through your vocation, through your unique functional image as stewards of the girls here in PLMGS are given the awesome privilege and task to mould and imprint into their lives, allowing them to be willing to let their image shine through comes partly through whether you are willing to let your image shine through as well…

Through your confidence, your willingness to accept the fact that you are “wonderfully made” the girls will learn to be confident and willing to accept the fact that you are “wonderfully made” as well…

Through your zeal to exercise your responsibilities and letting your image shine, the girls will learn to have zeal to exercise their responsibilities and let their image shine…

Through your love for who you are, with your pimples and white hair, your girls will grow eventually to love themselves for who they are, with their pimples and white hair…

Through your continued willingness to overcome challenges, your girls will learn to overcome challenges as well…

As you continue to seek wisdom, truth and ways of kindliness, your girls will also learn to seek wisdom, truth and ways of kindliness…

As you learn to grow academically, learn to grow emotionally, you are doing your wonderful part in let the girls “go with fearlessness, enriched to face life's greatest call By Paya Lebar MGS.”

May the Lord bless the works of your hands, letting your image shine through, so that you are able to help our girls let their image shine through. Amen.

[1] שָׁמַר, Francis Brown, Samuel Rolles Driver, and Charles Augustus Briggs, Enhanced Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 1036.