The Vision God Gives
The Bible has a miraculous message about how we see the world each day.
The more I live and the more I read, the more convinced I am that one of the most fascinating elements of human life is perspective. What do you see, and how do you see it? And what sorts of changes come because of your shifting experiences and the giant hands of God pressing in on the wet clay of your soul?
How we see is a reflection of where we’ve been, where we are, and where the stern of our ship points at the horizon.
Walk into the rustling leaves of Scripture, meander through the seasoned decades, and it’s clear: life is all about the shaping of your perception. As the world around you changes, you change. As circumstances shift, you shift. Why? Because your perspective expands, pivots, or deepens. You see more, and you grow as a result. That doesn’t mean truth and beauty and goodness are relative or amorphous; it just means that you change in relationship to everything you see: embracing the grace around you with greater gratitude and fuller depth.
For example, I loved my children as infants, when I first looked at them in the hospital room, taking in the blurred colors and shapes with wide eyes and new skin. But they are each a long way from infancy now, and I love them more deeply, more fiercely all these years later. Why? Perspective and growth. They have shaped me, and I have shaped them. They have moved with me, and I have moved with them. How I see them today is a result of a thousand yesterdays. And that’s how it is with our perception. How we see is a reflection of where we’ve been, where we are, and where the stern of our ship points at the horizon.
This applies not just to how we see other people but to how we see God. King David wrote a psalm that draws this out.
Seth Logan’s perspective in The White Door changes dramatically because of what happens to him and his family.
What David Sees
Psalm 18 is the victory song of David after his life is spared from the killing chase of King Saul. Amidst his joy and relief at being protected and defended by God, he says something striking about perspective.
25 With the merciful you show yourself merciful;
with the blameless man you show yourself blameless;
26 with the purified you show yourself pure;
and with the crooked you make yourself seem tortuous.
27 For you save a humble people,
but the haughty eyes you bring down.
28 For it is you who light my lamp;
the LORD my God lightens my darkness. (Psalm 18:25–28)
Notice what he’s saying, by the Spirit of God. The heart affects the eyes. What happens inside us governs what we see outside us. A merciful heart sees a merciful God. A pure heart sees a pure God. A crooked heart winces at God’s holiness; God’s goodness feels tortuous to him. In all cases, God is a spiritual ophthalmologist. What he’s up to inside us is shaping our vision—altering, expanding, and deepening our perspective. He brings down the eyes of the proud, and he lifts up the eyes of the humble. He’s the Prince of perspective, the Lord of light, the Giver of sight.
The Problem
This all sounds encouraging. Who wouldn’t want the Lord of perception to be working on their daily vision, especially their vision of God himself? But we don’t see so well right now, do we? Each day we have trouble seeing God as he truly is—merciful, blameless, pure, kind. We don’t perceive his rich grace or his abundant gifts or his lingering long-suffering. We don’t see . . . well, much of anything if we’re honest. We may know things conceptually about who God is, but we don’t live our lives in faithful response to what we know. And because of that, we don’t change. Our vision is not sharp enough to beckon our behavior. And as David Powlison wrote, “People change when biblical truth becomes more vivid and louder than previous life experience. People change when they have ears to hear and eyes to see what God tells us about himself” (Take Heart, 99).
But how do we get ears to hear and eyes to see? We can’t be our own spiritual ophthalmologists. We need divine help. We need divine rescuing. We need Jesus Christ. We need God’s own Seer.
Jesus Sees
One of the less-publicized threads of Jesus’s ministry was to restore vision and grant God-honoring perception. We think immediately of the physically blind, but that’s not the central problem for humanity, even for those who suffered from physical blindness. The real problem was spiritual blindness. That’s why Jesus was so harsh with the Pharisees: they were willfully blind. In Matthew 23, Jesus calls the scribes and Pharisees “blind guides” (v. 16, 24) and “blind fools” (v. 17). The same Greek word, tuphlos, is used throughout the passage, the same word Matthew uses when narrating Jesus’s healing of men who are physically blind (9:27–28; 12:22; 15:30–31; 20:30; 21:14). Blindness is no mere problem of the body; it is a problem of the heart. If we want to see well—if we want to perceive truth and all the attributes of God on display in our daily lives—we need a Savior.
And Jesus is the one. He was sent by the Spirit of God to do many things, but healing our rebel-heart blindness was among them. Jesus said,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed . . . (Luke 4:18; emphasis added)
You and I—we need our sight recovered. And Jesus did it. If we have him, we have that.
The Spirit of Sight
So, how do we actually gain access to the sight we need, the sight Jesus recovered? We go to the Spirit of the risen Christ, and we ask. Jesus said that the Spirit will guide us into all truth. A guide is a giver of sight, a director of vision. The Spirit grants vision to those in Jesus Christ.
So, what do you want to see today? Where are you lacking perception and perspective? And how is that keeping you from growing? Ask the Spirit for help.
A Patience Problem
I’ll end with an example from my own life. I’m not a very patient parent. I want to be, and I know I should be, but I’m not. I get frustrated so easily, and then I don’t speak words of love and encouragement. I don’t slow down to see what my kids are trying to show me. I rush. I try to get tasks executed, requests fulfilled, responses met. But the impatience bleeds through in my tone of voice and lack of attention.
This is a perspective problem. Like David in Psalm 18, I could say, “With the patient you show yourself patient.” I’m not seeing the patience of God. That’s a reflection of me not being a patient parent. I need the Holy Ghost to work patience in me if I’m going to perceive the patience in God. The patience in God is there. He’s always patient. But I won’t see it until I am patient. And for that to happen, I need a miracle. I need a work of the Spirit.
Gerard Manley Hopkins once asked,
And where is he who more and more distils
Delicious kindness?—He is
patient. Patience fills
His crisp combs, and that comes
those ways we know.
God is patient . . . so very patient. He fills our lives with his patience as the bees fill combs with honey—ever at work, buzzing with benevolence.
I need to ask the Spirit for patience. And then, when he works, I will be able to see the patience of God, and that will only make me even more patient as a parent. Perhaps this all starts with me realizing that I’m a child in need of parental patience. As George MacDonald prayed,
Up from Thy depths in me, my child-heart bring—
The child alone inherits anything.
And so I pray. God, grant me the vision to see as a child, so that I might truly see my own children.
We all need vision in a thousand ways. Getting it is always a matter of asking. So, ask. And then read the Bible and pay attention to what the Spirit shows you next. Perspective is always tethered to the heart. It is only by God’s work inside us that we will see both what and how God wants us to see.