Thursday, January 19, 2006

Are Your Eyes Closed?

It might be somewhat funny to watch someone to standing in front of a mirror with his eyes closed, trying to get ready for work. It would be pretty sad if he thought he was actually being effective. It would be tragic if he stood there for forty, forty five minutes and really believed he was accomplishing something.

Yet that's what many of us do week after week with the mirror of God's Word. In the next few blogs, off and on, I want to think about some of the things that keep us from really seeing ourselves in God's Word.

1.) We have a warped sense of who we are.

You want proof of that, just watch American Idol.

How does that happen? Somebody who thinks they can sing when they so can't! I'm afraid that spiritually, some of us are a whole lot more out of tune without realizing it.

We so want to think well of ourselves that we'll latch onto the smallest compliment someone pays us and then exaggerate it into something it's not. I remember as a kid it took me a long time to figure out I wasn't that good a basketball player, because someone paid me some kind of compliment way back when just to be nice.

While there are some people who are great at hearing the negatives and tuning out the positives, there are other people who are great at hearing the positives and tuning out the negatives.

I know I've said this before, but running I'm always shocked at how slow the people who pass me are going. I feel like I'm going so fast - how can someone be running that slow and still pass me? My perspective is warped just like ours is often when we come to listen to God's Word. Somebody can be speaking directly to us, completely about us, and we don't even realize it because we have such a wrong perspective of where we really are at.

I'm not sure I have the greatest solution to this, except one, for us to fall on our knees as we come to God's Word. God help us! Two, for us to develop relationships with people who will tell us the truth and ask for it straight up. And three, why not just assume the passage is speaking about you?

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