Are any of you superhero movie fans? Have you watched Spider-man recently? I think my favorite part (ok, one of them) is when Peter Parker become Spider-man for the first time, wakes up, and goes to put his glasses on and… it’s blurry! Whoa, that’s surprising. So, he takes them off and all of the sudden, he can see clearly!
As someone who’s stuck with glasses/contacts, I always dreamed of waking up one morning and suddenly being able to see perfectly without putting my contacts in. I wanted to wake up with Spider-man vision.
Well… as Christians, we don’t necessarily see 20-20, but we do need to wake up with someone else’s vision – God’s vision. In case you haven’t noticed, God looks at things a little differently than we do… or perhaps I should restate that: we look at things very differently than God. A part of being conformed to the image of Christ as we are sanctified is the transforming of our vision to God’s vision.
And one major blur in our worldly vision that must be cleared in order to become like God’s vision, is how we see others. Ultimately, how we see others affects how we love them. Our worldly vision does not affect just how we see and think, it affects how we act. When we allow our eyesight to be transformed to the measure of God’s vision, our lives will be transformed.
How do we view others?
Not just friends and neighbors, close family members, but total strangers, the random people we come in contact with throughout the day. How do we view them? Is our first impulse to judge and shy away, rather than to love and pray? When that difficult person is giving you a hard time and won’t leave you alone, what is your first impulse – to get angry, to walk away, ignore them, talk bad about them to the next person you meet?
Romans 5:8 “But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
We were not righteous when Christ died for us. We were sinners, enemies of God. And yet, Christ loved us enough that He paid the penalty for our sin, so that we might become saved, our sin washed away by His blood.
I pray that we would see others, not through our own eyes, but through the eyes of Jesus Christ! That we would see them as someone created in the image of God. Christ was willing to die for that person. How can we do anything less? Imagine if you could truly see everyone through God’s eyes for just a moment… wouldn’t it completely change the way you treat them?
Ephesians 5:1-2 “Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.“
As we have been loved, so must we love others. What would it look like to truly live a life of love?
This is another instance in which we need to clean the worldly fog off our eyes and see through God’s vision. The world’s view of love is completely different from God’s view of love. The world’s view of love is all about me – what makes me feel good. God’s view of love is not about me, it’s about others. I wrote a post about love a while back – you can read it here A Call to Love – “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love” – so I won’t go into all of this again.
I’ll just give you a few verses to think through.
John 15:12-13 “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.“
Romans 13:8 “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellow man has fulfilled the law.“
What would it look like to truly love those around us? I believe that it would totally change our lives. So much of what we do is directed or motivated by love for self. Even if we may not be “selfish” (from the world’s perspective) if we look at what we do every day, we’ll see that we really do want what’s best for us. Even in the simplest things like trying to get to the front of a line, or brushing someone off because we’re in a hurry. But we’re not called to be selfless from the world’s point of view, we’re called to love as God loved.
Selfishness is the complete opposite of love. Where selfishness thrives, love withers.
And do we love? I would say, no, not all the time. And is it any wonder that people view Christians as hypocrites when we cannot even love each other?
Yet what is impossible for us as humans, is possible through God’s strength. We cannot perfectly love because we are not perfect. It sounds so wonderful on paper, it looks so easy in print, but actually living it out is not so simple. But we can pray that God will change our vision to His vision, that we will see people as He sees them, that we will love as He loves.
And this is my prayer: that as I go throughout my day that God will transform my heart to love like His, my eyes to see like His, so that I will see others as created in God’s image, as people He gave His life for, people He loves.
~ A Servant of the King
The Director says
Thanks for the very, very good reminder Gil. :)
Lord bless!
Ryebrynn says
Gillian Adams….. Amazing I think you have outdid yourself….
The Elven Swordmaiden
-Ryebrynn