Image of God - christiansquoting.org.uk

Assuredly there is but one way in which to achieve what is not merely difficult but utterly against human nature: to love those who hate us, to repay their evil deeds with benefits, to return blessings for reproaches. It is that we remember not to consider men's evil intention but to look upon the image of God in them, which cancels and effaces their transgressions, and with its beauty and dignity allures us to love and embrace them.- John Calvin

Within each of us exists the image of God, however disfigured and corrupted by sin it may presently be. God is able to recover this image through grace as we are conformed to Christ. Just as the figure of David lay hidden within the marble, discernible only to the eye of its creator, so the image of God (however tarnished by sin) lies within us, see and known by God Himself. Yet God loves us while we are still sinners. He doesn't have to wait until we stop sinning. Acceptance of His love is a major step along the road that leads to our liberation from the tyranny of sin. ALISTER McGRATH

When God finished man He breathed into the human form the divine life, "and man became a living soul." Man is created to be a witness and likeness of God. God and man are so near to one another that it was possible for the Eternal Word to become Man without ceasing to be God, to re-ascend to the Highest without dehumanizing the Manhood which He had assumed; so near that the believer may say in the fullest meaning of the words, "I live, yet not I, but Christ".
John McIntyre (1916- ), Faith's Title Deeds

It was a particular condescension of the Son of God, to be born of any of Adam's sinful children. True honour in God's account consists in holiness, and sin is to Him the vilest disgrace. Original sin in Christ's mother had made her more contemptible and ignoble than anything else could; had she been an empress, it would yet have been to Christ an abasing of himself to derive his humanity from her. That a clean thing should come out of an unclean is strange; for though she was sanctified by grace, nevertheless she had not attained spotless perfection, but still had the stain and pollution of sin on her. As it is a disgrace to have a traitor as one's father, so it is no less to have a sinner for one's mother. Thus Christ, though without sin, would be intimately related to sinners, for whose sake he came into the world. - SAMUEL WILLARD