Dress-up occasions. Did you ever attend an event where you need to look especially formal, with a nice suit or classy dress, and wonder when you arrive if everything looks right? As a preacher, this happens all the time. And then I’ll start thinking, “Is my tie straight? Did I cut myself shaving and not stop the bleeding?” I worry about that stuff because, over the decades, it has happened many times.
Earlier this week, I woke up in the night, and as I did in the total darkness, I could see eyes looking back at me. This has happened before and I don’t know if it is a reflection off the insides of my eyelids, or if my brain is just trying to accustom me to wakefulness. But, in any case, I think it would be helpful to have automatic mirrors so I could see myself, especially in those formal situations.
God also wants us to be constantly aware of ourselves; not so much our physical appearance, but what really matters: how do we look to God – our spiritual appearance. Remember, He can see to the very core of our souls (Psalm 139)!
God gives us plenty of warning about checking ourselves out.
“Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not know yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you? — unless indeed you are disqualified” (2 Corinthians 13:5 NKJV). You mean we can be disqualified! Now that’s attention getting.
“For if anyone thinks himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let each one examine his own work, and then he will have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another. For each one shall bear his own load” (Galatians 6:3-5). We can, indeed, be fooling ourselves.
“Therefore, since a promise remains of entering His rest, let us fear lest any of you seem to have come short of it” (Hebrews 4:1). Coming just short of God’s finish line is the worst of tragedies.
You might be wondering exactly how you can examine yourself, so the above horrible results don’t happen to you. Where is this spiritual mirror we can use?
God gives us one, His message to us: the Bible. “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. 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, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does” (James 1:22-25).
How do you look?
Jeff Greene, minister for the South Stokes Church of Christ