When He Looks at You and Sees Himself

After a whole life of watching, John wrote one more line that I have to set in front of you. Read it slowly. There is more folded inside it than it first shows.

"No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God resides in us, and His love is perfected in us." — 1 John 4:12 (NET)

Two things happen at once, every time you love.

The first: you make the God no one can see visible. No one has ever laid eyes on God. He cannot be caught with the eyes in your head. But when you love someone at real cost — when you forgive the one who doesn't deserve it, when you stay where everything in you wants to leave — the people watching are seeing God, whether they would name Him or not. You become the one window the world gets, the place where the invisible love shows through. You are His likeness, made visible again.

The second: His love is perfected — brought all the way home, finished, arrived at last at what it was always reaching for. God's love did not stop at the cross. The cross threw the door open so His love could pour into you. And the love is not finished — has not done the whole of what it set out to do — until it runs through you and out into someone else who is thirsty for it. He made love to move. When it moves through you, it has finally done its work.

And when that happens — when His love runs through one of His children and out into the world — the Father looks, and He sees Himself.

This is the thing I woke up wondering about, that morning before the house was awake. This is what makes Him glad. Not a performance that scraped a passing grade. Not rules kept through gritted teeth. When a father watches his child and catches, in the child, his own habit of generosity, his own way of sitting with hurting people, his own refusal to give up on somebody — something rises up in that father that runs deeper than approval. It is recognition. There it is. That came from me. She has my heart in her. That is what God feels when He sees His love alive in you.

Let me tell you about something I have seen with my own eyes, because I think it is the plainest proof of everything in this book.

Every so often you meet a person, and there is something coming off of them. Not a trick of the light, not just a pleasant way about them — something deeper, a warmth you can feel in the room before they have said a word. You leave their company lighter than you came in. I have come to believe that what I am seeing in those people is the Spirit of God, alive in them and spilling over. They have stayed close to Him so long, let His love run through them for so many years, that it has begun to show on the outside. The old artists were not making things up when they painted a ring of gold light around the heads of the saints. An artist is someone who finds a way to show you what cannot be said in words — and they had seen this, and they were straining to put it on the wall. They were not decorating. They were testifying. The light is real.

And here is the strangest part. When you have His Spirit in you, even a little, you can recognize His Spirit in someone else. It is like a candle leaning toward a candle. The light in you knows the light in them. You do not reason your way to it. You feel it — there is the Lord, in that person — and something in you answers.

This is the love being perfected that John meant. It begins invisible, down where only God can see it. But give it years of running, and it works its way out until other people can see it without being told. That glow is not the person's own. It is borrowed light — the Lord shining through a window so clean you forget it is a window at all. That is what a fully alive image-bearer looks like. And that is what He is making of you, slowly, whether you can see it in yourself yet or not. You almost certainly cannot. The ones who carry the most of it are nearly always the last to know they carry any.

He is looking deeper than your hands, you understand. The LORD looks on the heart. The doing matters — we will come to that, love is never only a feeling — but He is not content with right actions coming out of a cold heart, and He is not fooled by them either. What He is after, He named long ago in a promise: I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within you. I will take the heart of stone out of your body and give you a heart of flesh. He does not want you managing yourself into good behavior. He wants to change the heart, so the love comes out of you on its own, because by then it is simply who you are.

That is what He is hoping to see when He looks at you. Himself. His own love, alive in His child.