By C.J. Mahaney

I appreciated and benefitted from all the messages at the Next 2011 conference in Orlando. I would encourage you to set aside some time to listen to all of the messages (you’ll find the main sessions here and the breakout sessions here). But if listening to all these messages is not possible, I would particularly commend Kevin DeYoung’s message, “Who Am I? Humanity in the Eyes of the World and the Christian.”

Kevin structured his message to answer five important questions about ourselves:

Are we here by chance or by design?
Are we free to create ourselves or to reflect God's image?
Are we basically good or fundamentally flawed?
Are we ethically excusable or morally culpable?
Are we destined for a happy heaven or a blessed extinction, or are we on the way to heaven or hell?

Kevin summarized his conclusions to these questions like this:

Here are two views of the human person:

According to the world we are here by chance, free to create our own self, basically good, ethically excusable, and destined for a happy heaven or a blessed extinction.

According to God we are here by design, created to reflect God’s image, fundamentally flawed, morally culpable, and destined to worship God in heaven or face his wrath in hell.

You can listen to the whole message here.

Over the next couple of days on the blog I plan to post a few choice excerpts from Kevin’s message.