The Portrait of…

Today I read something that made me remember the book from long ago from which they made a movie, “The Portrait of Dorian Gray“. In it a very handsome and charismatic young man sold his soul to the devil in exchange for keeping his physical beauty for eternity.  All of his horrible deeds, cruelties and the sins he was guilty of showing only upon the face of the portrait that had been painted of him. The end of the movie shows us a man, when upon seeing the painting becoming so overcome with disgust at seeing what he had become that he took a knife and started shredding the portrait and ultimately killing himself.

There’s another movie I thought of, “Shallow Hal“, which shows us how a young and very shallow man only sees people for how they appear on the outside. He has an encounter that makes him see people as they are on the inside and the results were not only entertaining but also very insightful. I then wondered about our perception of each other, you of me, you of your self, me of myself, and wished I could see into each of those with clarity.

You see a doctor in a white coat in an office setting and you trust him to care for you, but what if you had seen him first out in a bar in a sleeveless shirt with a drink in his hand, acting wild and crazy… would you still trust him to care for your heart?

We see each other dressed nicely sitting in church, maybe even a hand raised in what we think is praise and worship and don’t see the witch-craft lurking behind the person’s countenance, or conversely the person digging in a ditch covered with dirt looking like the hind wheels of destruction with the heart of a saint. The point I am trying to make is this; we never know from the outward appearance what the inside of a person really looks like.

There is make-up, plastic surgery, different types of nips, tucks and tricks that can make us look better on the outside, however 1 Samuel 16:7 “GOD judges persons differently than humans do. Men and women look at the face; GOD looks into the heart.”

We look at how a nose is shaped, the color of our skin, the weight of our body and all these variances make a vast difference in how we see ourselves and sadly, the way others view us, but we know that there is One, the Creator the very God that made us, knows us, and loves us, and to Him we are perfect just the way we are. We can’t fool Him with our make-up and fancy trappings, Jeremiah 17:9-10 “The heart is hopelessly dark and deceitful, a puzzle that no one can figure out. But I, God, search the heart and examine the mind. I get to the heart of the human. I get to the root of things. I treat them as they really are, not as they pretend to be.”Psalm 139:13-16 Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out; you formed me in my mother’s womb. I thank you, High God—you’re breathtaking! Body and soul, I am marvelously made!  I worship in adoration what a creation! You know me inside and out, you know every bone in my body; You know exactly how I was made, bit-by-bit, how I was sculpted from nothing into something. Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth; all the stages of my life were spread out before you, the days of my life all prepared before I’d even lived one day.

Go look in the mirror and see the creation of God and love it. If you can’t love yourself, you leave little room for anyone else to do so.

I am asking you “How about your heart, is it right with God? That’s the thing that counts today”.