“But the Lord said to Samuel, “Don’t judge by his appearance or height, for I have rejected him. The Lord doesn’t see things the way you see them. People judge by outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”” 1 Samuel 16:7 (NLT)
Recently, I had a surgery to have a part of my body removed that was causing problems because it was not functioning properly. After the surgery, the surgeon came out and told my husband that it was a good thing we removed the part because it was in bad shape. Then he said “The rest of her insides are textbook perfect.”
I laugh at that because it seems funny to me to have my insides compared to a biology book. But it made me think. Here I was walking around with a diseased body part. It was causing me some problems but only the people closest to me knew my struggles. From the outside, I looked just fine. From the outside, no one could see that I had this chaos going on. And really, I didn’t even know how bad it was.
God told Samuel that we would do this. We look on the outward appearance of someone and decide how their life is going. We look at how they look, what they do and the responses that we see and make assumptions.
In reality, few of us advertise the things we struggle with. We want to put our best foot forward and look great! Sometimes, we know we are doing this. Sometimes, we don’t.
The Bible says we are all broken on the inside. We all sin. We all fool ourselves. That is until we compare ourselves to Jesus. When we spend some time looking at him, we realize how much we fall short. We know we need help. We know that our hearts are not as great as we pretend they are.
Now if you are OK looking great on the outside and being broken on the inside, stop reading. If you want to grow the heart that God is looking for, stop pretending. Spend some time with Jesus. Talk to him, read his Words and linger. The Holy Spirit will begin an unseen work on your heart. After a while, you will become Jesus perfect. And that is the only perfect that matters.