How God Sees You

 She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.”~ Genesis 16:13

I love the Bible. I love it for a whole bunch of Churchy McChurch reasons, but I am not going to give you all of my favorite Sunday school explanations as to why I am a fan of God’s word. Instead I will be authentic with you.  I love the Bible because it’s real, and at times it’s really funny. It confronts and challenges humanity at the core of who we are and what we can become if we are left to our own devices. One of my favorite examples of biblical realness is found in Leviticus 19:14.

“Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind, but fear your God. I am the Lord”

Let me put this passage in contemporary lingo for you:

Don’t make fun of deaf people, and don’t trip blind people, seriously, it’s rude! I’m God and I see what you’re up to; watch yourselves!

 God is God. He knows our hearts and He gives real direction to real people who live in a really fallen world. God is not only real with us but He also has an ironic and amusing way of looking at the world. Take Judges 6:11-12

 The angel of the Lord came and sat down under the oak in Ophrah that belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, where his son Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress to keep it from the Midianites. When the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, he said, “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior!”

I find this passage humorous because at this point in the narrative Gideon is anything but mighty and the furthest thing from a warrior. In fact, he’s kind of wretched and sad. The angel finds him hiding in a cave frantically trying to thresh wheat with the wrong tool while entertaining some pretty serious doubts about God and too fearful of man to confront the idolatry in his own family.

It’s a good thing God clues angels into His plans because if He hadn’t I’m pretty sure that the angel would have wondered if he had found the right guy. I can just see an angel watching this nervous little guy hiding out in a cave, threshing wheat in a wine press and saying:

The Lord is with you…. mighty warrior??

This passage not only illustrates God’s sense of irony but also His mercy towards us. It gives us a critical glimpse into how God views the redeemed. After careful study of this passage I am fully convinced that God see us much differently than we see ourselves.

Most of us are inclined to see ourselves in the most negative light imaginable. When we assess ourselves we list the negatives first and if we ever get to our positive points we tend to downplay them. Thankfully, God views us differently, once we get to the place where we ask God for forgiveness and submit to His authority He sees what we are capable of becoming if we fully surrender ourselves to His plan and He treats us as if we have already become what He knows we are capable of.

Think about it like this, when you evaluate yourself you may see someone who is:

Hopeless  

Fearful

Inadequate

Incapable

Clueless

God sees you as someone who is:

Forgiven

Heroic

Complete in Him

Competent 

Clever

This truth is illustrated beautifully in 1^st Peter 1:8.

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.

I have not achieved the reality of what God says about me in this verse, and my guess is that you haven’t either. That doesn’t stop God from boldly declaring that right this minute, you are: holy, priestly, unique and incredibly special. The truth that God sees the redeemed not as they are, but as what they are capable of becoming, is profound and should affect our lives in profound ways. This truth should cause us to live our lives in a radically different way. As holy and dearly loved children of the Living God we should be inclined to:

Strive to become what we have been declared~

We can respond to this reality in one of two ways: the first would be to intellectually process the truth with an attitude of thankfulness and move on. That attitude is a good place to begin but a terrible place to end. If we respond with just gratitude we may very well miss out on the whole point of Christian living. The understanding of how God chooses to see us should create in our hearts a holy impatience to be exactly what and who God says we are.

Our spirits should be overcome with a longing that drives us to “live up to what we have already attained” (Philippians 3:16). We live up to what we have attained by recognizing that there is absolutely nothing in our actions or character that cannot be changed with the assistance of God and then acting on that truth. Freedom begins and bondages are broken when we initiate the process of letting go of bad behaviors and replacing them with new ones. This is how we obey the command given in Philippians 2:12 to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. The beauty of this process is that we aren’t left to figure it out alone.  God walks with us every step of the way.

Strive to see other people the way God sees them~

For most of us, the only thing in this world we view more negatively than ourselves is other people. We tend to see their motives as bad and their behavior questionable, whether we have proof of bad behavior or not.  Grasping the reality that God sees us as forgiven, special and dearly loved is one of the most freeing things in the world. It not only frees us from trying to earn God’s favor; it empowers us to see other people in a more positive light as we grasp the reality that He is working on them just as He’s working on us. As we learn to look at people through God’s lenses we are more inclined to become encouragers rather than critics and cheerleaders rather than naysayers.

Worship God with every aspect of our lives~

The Book of Romans is sometimes called Paul’s ultimate apologetic or defense of the gospel. He spends eleven long chapters explaining the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection. He goes into great detail for his readers explaining in no uncertain terms that we are all sinners who stand condemned before God. He goes on to explain that it was not God’s will to doom people to destruction but to offer salvation through faith in Jesus Christ as a gift available to anyone willing to take it. Paul gets to chapter twelve and he sums up in one verse the proper response to an eleven-chapter explanation of God’s offer of salvation:

And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him~ NLT

 Our response to God’s goodness should be worship—and not just a halfhearted singing on Sunday morning kind of worship. Instead our worship should be a complete submission of our whole selves to God and His purposes. This kind of worship changes the way we do and view everything. That kind of wholehearted worship is the only truly proper response to the God who really sees you.

 For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light~ Ephesians 5:8