You don’t see yourself the way you see yourself when you get to see yourself

I'm not sure where I saw the quote: "You don’t see yourself the way you see yourself when you get to see yourself” – but it is fascinating to think about from a spiritual perspective. All of us have a view of ourselves that is shaped by more things than we can count or even know. Most of those things we learned and experienced, and some are cultural. It’s extremely hard to be objective about ourselves – sometimes we think we’re one thing when we’re not, or that we’re not one thing and we are! It’s hard to really see ourselves. And the same is true spiritually.

The Bible was revealed so that we can see ourselves the way we really are. We are challenged to: “Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves…” (2 Cor 13:5). We are to look, to see ourselves. But how, when we’re notoriously not objective: “All the ways of a man are pure in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the spirits” (Pro 16:2). God sees us as we are, but we don’t always.

We have two very powerful things from God to help us see ourselves:

Jesus. We don’t have to guess about God’s character and holiness. Jesus is “…brightness of His glory and the express image of His person…” (Heb 1:3). If we want to see ourselves then we have to see Jesus as the perfect standard and compare ourselves to Him. We want to think like He thinks (Phil 2:5) and “…walk just as He walked” (1 Jn 2:6). We aren’t going to see ourselves if we compare ourselves to the flawed standards of the world and even our own minds and hearts. Jesus didn’t come to simply point out our imperfections by His perfection, He came to perfect us. But we have to see ourselves needing perfection before we’ll go to Him to be perfected by Him.

Scripture. “For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it… this one will be blessed in what he does” (Jas 1:23-25). The Scriptures are intended to be a mirror that shows us what we look like spiritually. It’s one of the reasons that the Bible and preaching makes us feel uncomfortable sometimes. It’s why people closed their eyes and plugged their ears to Jesus’ teaching (Matt 13:15; Ac 7:57). It’s why we study the Bible and listen to preaching and teaching. It’s how we look in the mirror. You don’t see yourself the way you see yourself when you get to see yourself. See your real self (not just the way you see yourself) in God’s word! dd