James 1:22-24 – But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: for he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was.
Mirrors are deceptive aren’t they? They hide some flaws, and accentuate others … and might give a completely false impression.
It can be the same in life as well. There are different mirrors that show us different pictures of ourselves. We’ve all seen the reflections …
There’s the mirror held up by other people. It’s an interesting mirror because it can be (at least) two-faced! There’s the picture of you that people show you face-to-face, and then there are the reflections that bounce of other people. Two proverbs come to mind: “He that hideth hatred with lying lips, and he that uttereth a slander, is a fool. (10:18) and “A lying tongue hateth those that are afflicted by it; and a flattering mouth worketh ruin” (26:28).
Another mirror is the mirror of experience. Another potentially two-sided glass! We can see ourselves positively and negatively. It often starts in childhood. One UK website describes our basic view of ourselves as “the Bottom Line: usually formed in childhood, biased and inaccurate, based on a child’s-eye view … formed on the basis of misunderstandings about experience, because you had no adult experience with which to understand properly what was going on.” Once the baseline — positive or negative is set — we tend to reinforce it when things happen by those things that support our view of ourselves, and ignore those that don’t. The Bible is full of advice about how to deal with a faulty self-image. One of my favorites is Psalm 139 verses 14-16. God knew me in my mother’s womb — I am no surprise to Him, and I am “fearfully and wonderfully made” — but by no means perfect!
The one other mirror I want to mention today is the mirror provided by society. Isaiah 30:9-11 says “This is a rebellious people, lying children, children that will not hear the law of the Lord : which say to the seers, See not; and to the prophets, Prophesy not unto us right things, speak unto us smooth things, prophesy deceits: get you out of the way, turn aside out of the path, cause the Holy One of Israel to cease from before us.” We live in a world of false messages, where white is black and black is white. The world’s mirror may be the worst of all.
There is a true mirror of course … God’s word can show us who we are … but it is easy for us to forget who we are and slip away. The reward for clear sightedness is great. If we pick the right mirror and look honestly into it one day we will see ourselves very differently “But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.”