Pondering Mirrors
The Lord has been revealing some very intimate things to me lately. I have been joining my heart to this prayer movement called The Upper Room in Dallas. Wonderful people who call God Daddy. I love it. Oh yeah… Dallas… Well I am here now. Long story which we can get into at some point. If you know me well, you already know. If you don’t know, find me on Facebook and I will explain or point you to posts about the big reset button and why I am restarting here alone and fresh.
The intimate things the Lord is doing in me is part of a personal renewal project…. not mine, but His. My own strength has failed me, so now it is His workmanship that is renewing me, wrecking me from my old world-view and liberating me to discover again how incredible is His love for me and how perfect His one-time sacrifice was that satisfied all that was needed to transform me from a failure scourge to a favored son. Yes and amen. I am going to re-declare what God is doing here, and it will stretch beyond India. It will be about Christ the Gate. The gate to salvation, wisdom, truth, life, love, compassion, vision and intimate fulfillment. Jesus the end in my journey, not a mere means to meet my needs.
So, about mirrors.
I have been having a great time in Corinthians lately. Both of them. 2 Cor 3:17 declares, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty”. Context? Well it is about us getting to behold a glory that does not fade. Not only does it not fade away, but we get to see it and we don’t even want to shade our eyes from its brilliance. It is an inviting, wonderful, radiant, approving look of love from our Father. Our pupils get bigger, as we get to cast off our veil of the old self and see His glorious countenance. Now, take a look at verse 18 if that seems just too cool to be true.
“But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.”
There are two amazing things here. First, we are perhaps not to be looking quite the way you might think. It says, “beholding as in a mirror”. That has bothered me for years. I always wondered why Paul did not say, “as through a window”, or “directly across the room”, or “intimately face to face”. I don’t know about you, but I don’t use a mirror to look at someone else. I use it to check out my own face (for fixable flaws, and make myself laugh… what?). Mirrors were a fairly new invention in Paul’s day… they were blurry and rough, and Corinth was a town that traded in them to those who could afford one. Think of it as the iFace beta. For the first time, people could see themselves without having to look into a pail of water. This was the dawn of a new kind of physical self-awareness.
So here Paul is talking about seeing the glory of the Lord via a mirror. He did it before at the end of 1Cor 13 as well, (and that bothered me too) so this is not just a one-off. Perhaps we should be willing to consider that the best place on Earth to see the glorious workmanship of God is in the face of His most glorious creation - You. Now I know that to suggest that we can see the Lord in our own faces is both dangerous in our narcissistic culture, and offensive to our self loathing nature. Nonetheless, does not the Word declare you and I as new creation wrought in Christ? Is not Christ in you, the hope of glory? Does not even creation itself long to be set free into the glorious liberty of the children of God (Rom 8:21)? Are you not the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus? And, do you not have the same access and opportunity Moses had to the Lord, allowing His light to shine upon you and reflect visibly?
So if we look at ourselves via the mirror of the Word, all this begins to make sense. But if we look at other mirrors, then we see ourselves improperly, and more importantly, we see the Lord improperly. Other mirrors are outward, and therefore make the Lord appear far away and disinterested. Physical mirrors really are about us. The ‘vanity’ in my bedroom is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. For many, our identities are too closely tied with appearances, and thus we obsess over our selves. The world is a powerful mirror. All that look in to it to see themselves are never satisfied. The image we see always has lack, as there is always someone bigger, better, smarter and faster, making us not measure up. Stop looking into other mirrors! They do not reflect a true image.
The word of the Lord with all this… “be free my child from looking at yourself as separated from my glorious work. I do it all with your full participation, and delight to mold you in My image. Marvel my beloved, as my greatest workmanship you will ever see is of yourself in the mirror of my love toward you.”
Selah.
Finally, amidst the beholding of the image, the verse declares that we are being transformed into the same image. The image of what? Of Christ Himself. From glory to glory. Glories can be in minutes during worship, days and seasons — in all phases of how the Lord works with us. Each time you look in the mirror of the Lord and His Word, expect yourself to look a little more like Jesus each time.
Have a great week in the Lord!
