As we will be talking about what it means to be created in the Lord's image and likeness, I found this article by Rev. Frank Rose in New Church Life from 1958 particularly inspiring to ponder this week.  What does it mean for us that the Lord is the source of our life?  How shall we respond?

Love and Peace,

Ethan

What do we have that we may call our own? Our soul, mind and body are given to us as vessels created by the Lord. The light, sound and fragrance which the body senses, and to which it reacts, are not our own. The love and wisdom to which our minds react are not our own. Even our freedom of choice is a gift.

But the point of creation is not that we should own or possess things, it is that we should enjoy them. God does not will that we should become love and wisdom, but that we should react to them and enjoy the delights which they produce.

When we do react to what is good, we do so, not from ourselves, but from, the power given us by God. Our minds are brought into correspondence, so that the vessels of life react harmoniously to the [inflowing Divine] and produce semblances of Divine qualities which we are permitted to enjoy as long as we do not steal them from the Lord.

So it is that love and wisdom are always the Lord's in us. He exists; we only appear to exist. “Our life consists in the things which we choose to accept, or with which we are pleased to identify ourselves” (Swedenborg, Divine Providence 79).

It is said in the Word that we were created into the image and likeness of God. This does not refer to the human body, or even to the human mind, but to the essential person, that is, to the angel. The likeness of God is inscribed on all things and is the appearance that they live from themselves. With us this likeness is destroyed when we attribute life to ourselves, think that we are a god, and so turn against the One who alone is living.

In order to be a true likeness, we must also be an image, reflecting the Lord's wisdom. The first of this wisdom is the acknowledgment that we are [but a vessel]. “A person is a likeness of God from the fact that they feel within themselves that the things which are of God are in them as their own; and yet from this likeness we are an image of God only so far as we acknowledge that the love and wisdom, or good and truth, in us are not our own, and hence are not of us, but are solely in God and therefore of God" (Swedenborg, Love in Marriage 132).