God is wonderful. He is the Lord, the Creator of heaven and earth, but He doesn’t see things the way we see things. He sees them very differently, and I believe the Lord wants to teach the church to see. In some places a sixteen-year-old has to log hours in driving school before getting behind the wheel. I think we need a seeing school. God wants people who see what He sees and, more importantly, who see how He sees.
I don’t think we see half of what God wants us to see. You do see with your eyes, but you perceive and understand with your heart. Two people with perfectly good eyesight can look at the same thing and not see the same thing at all, because we look through our history, our culture, the experiences we have had, the books we have read and our understanding of how things should be. We need our thinking rewired by the kingdom of God.
You Have Heard It Said
In the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5 to 7, one phrase comes again and again. As it is written in Matthew 5:38–39, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you not to resist an evil person.” My goal is not to unpack each of those matters of life (giving, purity, honouring God) but to notice what Jesus is doing. In effect He is saying, “This is how you have heard it. This is how you were brought up. This is your perspective. But I have come, and I have brought My kingdom with Me. I see things completely differently.”
I believe God is declaring war on the neat idea that you pray a little prayer, get saved, and then simply wait to go to heaven one day. God wants to change your life now. The kingdom of heaven is not something that begins when you die or when Jesus returns. Jesus came with His kingdom, and everywhere He went, He brought it with Him. The Lord is radically interested in changing our mindset, so that we no longer live as Brits or French or Americans first. I love all of those cultures, but we are citizens of heaven.
The danger is that there are things we no longer see because we are so used to them. Like a dog with an invisible fence, we learn, “I can’t go there. I can’t cross that line.” One of the reasons I love to take people to another culture, like Ireland, is that it sets them free. Suddenly they will preach in a public square in Belfast. God loves to take us into places where our old boundaries disappear, not simply to give us an experience, but to rewire us and show us how He sees. So my challenge is to go on a journey with the Lord and say, “Lord, I know how I see this. I know how I was raised. How do You see this?”
How Do You See God?
I grew up in the Lord around wonderful people who really believed in faith, but when it came to finances, they carried a missionary-style message: you can believe God, but you are really going to suffer. God will provide, but only just. If you serve God, you wear second-hand socks. Let me be clear: everybody should be willing to do anything for Jesus. Yet for years I believed God was always late and would only just pay, and because I believed God would only just meet my needs, He only just met my needs. I drove a twenty-year-old car held together by prayer and duct tape. I ran out of fuel more times than I can count, putting two or three dollars of gas in and praying in tongues over the meter. I have great stories of nearly starving and people bringing groceries, but it is a horrible way to live. I had to realize I had heard it that way, but God was saying, “I’m not like that at all. That is not My nature.”
Could I lovingly suggest that many of us walk around with ideas about God that did not come from the Bible, or that come from a twisted interpretation of it? We even read the Bible through the lens of those religious ideas, and we conclude that God is harsh, mean and difficult to please. He is not like that at all. Remember the elder brother in the story of the prodigal son: “I slave away for you, and you never even gave me a young goat.” As it is written in Luke 15:31, “Son, you are always with me, and all that I have is yours.” How we think about God determines how we relate to God. If you believe God is harsh and mean, that is how He will be to you, not because He is that way, but because we limit the Holy One of Israel with false beliefs.
As a pastor I have learned this. I might email someone on a Wednesday and ask to talk on Sunday, simply to tell them how great they are or to invite them into something. Some people would not sleep for four days. In their minds it was like being summoned to the headmaster’s office or a visit from the tax authorities. They would walk into my office shaking, and I just wanted to hug them. It doesn’t matter that I am not like that if they think I am like that.
God’s goodness is scandalous to our minds. He is so good, so generous, so kind, so holy, so righteous and so pure. Everything we do dumbs God down to our level. Years ago, living far from God in Lyon, France, Jesus walked into my apartment. I wasn’t looking for Him. I felt the glory of God come into the room, and I thought He was going to kill me; I saw how holy He was and what a mess I was. He looked at me and said, “I love you.” It wasn’t information. Suddenly everything in my life became about this: I am loved by God. Not used, not tolerated, loved. So let me encourage you to pray, “Lord, open my eyes and show me who You truly are.”
How Does God See You?
Secondly, pray, “Lord, show me how You see me.” The only opinion of you that really counts is God’s. We grow up constantly thinking about what other people think of us, but God has an opinion about you, and He wants to sow it right into your soul, so that everything anyone else thinks about you bounces off like water off a duck’s back. We shouldn’t live for the praise of people or for their censure. At times people will love you and at times they will hate you, and it is foolishness to live for their opinions. As Paul prayed in Ephesians 1:17–18, “that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened.”
Whatever you are struggling with, the key is to allow God to give you an identity. Most of us play a game: if I do this, I will be this; if I stop doing that, I will stop being that. We try to change our identity by what we do and don’t do. In the kingdom of God it is the other way around. God comes to us and says, “You are My child. You are free.” When Jesus met the woman at the well, He was not pretending her relationships were fine, but that was not why He came. He came to give her living water. Once He changed her, that change would work its way through every relationship. Sin is sin, but people jump from one relationship to another because they are not drinking from the living water and they don’t know who they are.
God wants to anchor in your soul who you are, whose you are and what He thinks about you, so that you live for an audience of One. If God is not happy with me, I want to know it. I don’t always enjoy it, but I would rather be rebuked by Him than live in a fantasy, because those He loves, He rebukes. So keep praying for a season: “Lord, show me me. Open my eyes to see me as You do.”
Seeing People as God Sees Them
Thirdly, pray, “Lord, show me how You see other people.” God has never seen a person He doesn’t love. There is not one person on planet earth that He doesn’t look at and say, “I made that. That person is a masterpiece.” You are more valuable than a million Mona Lisas. Sin and the fall marred the image, but God still looks at you and says, “You are the most valuable thing in the universe.” As written in Ephesians 2:10, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works.”
The selfishness of this world wraps us up in our own little lives. God could give you a flying car if you wanted one, but what He is really looking for is people who go into the streets because they love people. Sometimes we should sit in a shopping mall and pray, “Lord, show me these people as You see them, behind the youth, the age, the cool clothes and the poverty.”
The problem in the church is that we try to like people. We find people who are like us and likable, and we try to love them with the “like” of the Lord. God did not so like the world. He puts us with people we cannot naturally like, so that we run out of human love, phileo, and have to love with His love. When Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love Me?” He used agape, and Peter answered with phileo. I believe Peter did love Jesus, and Jesus knew it, but Peter didn’t know it. Broken by his denial, he needed revelation. Jesus said, “Feed My sheep,” not so that Peter could prove his love, but out of a love already settled. You don’t do things for God to prove you love Him. You love Him, and because you love Him, you do things for Him.
I have a friend who used to drive into London every day from the countryside, a successful businessman and a Christian, though not a dramatic one. One morning a flood forced a detour through a village he had never visited. He stopped for a coffee, and standing outside that quaint village he began to hear screaming and moans of pain that nobody else seemed to hear. It happened three mornings in a row. He shut himself away to seek God, and the only answer he got was, “Take your wife for a coffee.” When he did, she heard it too, and the Lord spoke to them both: “I am showing you the pain in this village: the broken-hearted, the people thinking about suicide, the alcoholic, the abused child.” The Lord told him to sell his business. They bought a row of houses, knocked the walls through, opened a centre and spent around twenty years loving that town, because they began to see people as God saw them.
Seeing Your Circumstances Through His Eyes
Finally, pray, “Lord, show me my circumstances through Your eyes, not through what I have heard, what my culture says or how I was raised.” Nothing that has ever happened to you has surprised God. You have never had a bill that surprised God. Every time I received a bill I couldn’t pay, I used to slide into a mild depression and put it on a shelf, where it sat like an enemy. Then the Lord said to me, “Graham, you will never have a bill in your whole life that I can’t pay. I have a bigger pocket than you. Stop looking at your pocket; look at Mine.” He trained me to hold up every bill and praise Him for an opportunity to prove His provision. As it is written in Philippians 4:19, “And my God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus.” Since I learned that, many years ago, I don’t believe Leah and I have had one need God didn’t meet.
The same is true of our bodies. The world tells us that every ache means we are getting old, and we even pray “prayers of agreement” that we are getting old. I have learned to say, “Thank You, Lord, for reminding me that by Your stripes I am healed and that You renew my youth like the eagle’s.” God is looking for people like Paul and Silas, who turned a prison into a praise meeting. A friend’s son was competing in a fishing contest with thousands of entrants and catching nothing. She felt the Lord prompt her to tell him to ask God, and before the contest closed he landed the biggest fish of his life and won. God cares about your fish, your business, your job, your relationships and your children.
The twelve spies saw the same land, but ten of them saw it through a heart of unbelief: “we were like grasshoppers in our own sight.” Joshua and Caleb saw the same hills and vineyards and said, “Let us go up at once and take possession, for we are well able to overcome it.” Years ago the Lord told me, “Graham, you don’t see things as they are. You see things as you are.” It is not the world around me that needs to change; it is my heart. When we see things as God sees them, every attack becomes an upgrade in our walk with Him.
Many of us also carry baggage from abuse, trauma, loss or failure, and before we can learn to see, we need to learn to unsee. At about nineteen, I was a passenger in a car that flipped over and over on a motorway at around ninety miles an hour. I was sure I would die. I walked with a cane for a week or two and thought I was fine, but for years, whenever someone else was driving, I would be in terror, clawing at the dashboard even at twenty miles an hour. Fear doesn’t live in your mind; it lives in your heart. Perhaps you were abused or went bankrupt, and you think you have moved on, yet you look at something new God wants to give you through the eyes of who you were years ago. Pray, “Lord, show me what I need to unlearn.” That experience will always be part of my history, but it is not my identity. God defines my identity.
Let me challenge you to pray this, again and again: Lord, show me who You really are. Show me how You see me. Show me people as You see them. Show me my circumstances through Your eyes. You have heard it said, but He says to you something far better.
Scriptures for Study
Matthew 5:21–22, Matthew 5:27–28, Matthew 5:38–39, Matthew 5:43–44, Psalm 119:18, Philippians 3:20, Luke 11:20, Luke 10:9, Luke 15:25–32, Ephesians 1:17–18, Ephesians 2:10, John 4:13–14, Revelation 3:19, Hebrews 12:6, John 3:16, John 21:15–17, Psalm 139:14, Philippians 4:19, Isaiah 53:5, Psalm 103:5, Acts 16:25–26, Numbers 13:30–33, Numbers 14:28, 2 Corinthians 5:17, Romans 12:2
10 Questions for Reflection
- What cultural or family assumptions shape the way you see things without your noticing?
- Where have you “heard it said” one way, while Jesus says something different?
- What ideas about God have you carried that did not come from Scripture?
- How might your beliefs about God be limiting what you receive from Him?
- Whose opinion of you carries the most weight, and why?
- Where are you trying to change your identity through what you do or don’t do?
- Who is God asking you to love that you would never naturally like?
- What would change if you saw the people in your town as God sees them?
- Which circumstance in your life do you need to see through God’s eyes?
- What past experience do you need God’s help to “unsee”?
