What do you see when you look at yourself in the mirror?

Usually, this question is meant for a self analysis. Every time someone asks you that, they mean to know your true self. Not the image that other people see, but the image that you see. Your true reflection.

We usually use several “masks”. Most of us don’t mean that for bad. Sometimes we use the masks to protect other people from seeing our true nature. Sometimes, we do that to get other people’s approval.

What may be terrifying is that God always sees us without our masks. He knows our heart, He knows our true self, our true image. And you know what is more terrifying than that? He still loves us!

No matter how scary is the image on the mirror, He still loves us to death. He proved that.

However, He wants to destroy all our masks and change our reflection, our inner image. He wants us to look in the mirror and see… Jesus. He wants people to look at us and see… Jesus. He wants one single image being projected by us: JESUS.

We aren’t capable of completely changing into Jesus. But we can resemble Him like a child resembles their father or mother. When you look at the child, you can immediately tell who are their parents. God wants people to look at us and identify us with Jesus.

But He doesn’t want us to do the work by ourselves, we just can’t change like that on our own. The only way we can do it is to allow Jesus to live His life in us, like the apostle Paul did:

“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20)

Christ lives in us when we choose to do God’s will and obey Him. Obey Him no matter what. Like Jesus did:

[Jesus] made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross! (Philippians 2:7-8)

How do we know what is His will? He left it written down for us. It is all there for us, in the Bible. The Bible is the true mirror that we can look at and see our true reflection, no masks, no pretense. And we can see how well we are doing God’s will, how well we resemble Jesus.

But let me warn you: it doesn’t mean that you will be popular or admired, on the contrary. Jesus told us:

“Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matthew 5:11,12)

People don’t necessarily enjoy looking at a reflection from Jesus as much as many people didn’t like looking at Jesus himself when He walked among us about 2000 years ago.

Your reward will be knowing that you’re following Jesus’s footsteps and doing His will. Then someday you will meet Him and you will be able to hear Him say:

“Well done, good and faithful servant!” (Matthew 25:23a)

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This post is part of the One Word at a Time Blog Carnival hosted by Peter Pollock. Check out other posts that were written based on the word “reflection”.