When I was a kid, there was this song in our church hymnal that I can remember us actually singing a few times over those early years called, “There’s An All-Seeing Eye Watching You.”  Now, with all due respect to the one who wrote the song, who I’m sure was most sincere and perhaps even inspired, that song is just plain scary.  It was scary to me as a boy simply in the mental picture it conjured.  He must have seen me eat Mellorine (Yeah, it was a cheap, sweet, nasty-tasting ice cream-substitute for poor people) out of the refrigerator (and probably with a previously used spoon!) I was specifically told not to eat.  And, he must have seen me “accidentally” run my brother into the basketball goal post in order to pick him off so I could get a good shot.  Or, seen me put grass burrs in the pillow case of the same brother just before bedtime.  And, oh-my-gosh, if he could really see inside my mind—what I was actually thinking and feeling—I was completely burned toast!

Yeah, it was scary to me as a child, but in another way, it’s even scarier as an adult.  Getting one’s mind around the idea of the nature and personality of God is the most difficult of human challenges.  Every aspect of God’s nature looms just plain huge.  There’s a song that says it best in praise to God: “You are beautiful beyond description, too marvelous for words, too wonderful for comprehension, like nothing ever seen or heard.  Who can grasp your infinite wisdom?  Who can fathom the depths of your love?  You are beautiful beyond description, majesty enthroned above.  And, I stand, I stand in awe of you…”  Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3:14-21 bespeaks this challenge in his prayer for the Christians’ comprehension of the magnitude of God’s love: “I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”  Wow!  

If only we could really see God seeing us.  Someday, I hope God leads me to write a book titled as this article, “Seeing God Seeing You.”  There’s a double entendre in this title.  First, it is to see God’s way of thinking and feeling about each of us as his creation and then as his specially adopted children.  Second, is then to be able to see yourself in that light.  The human belief system is based on three great beliefs: our belief about God, our belief about ourselves, and our belief about others.  It is only in a true and right belief about God that we can exact our view of ourselves.  And, it is only in a true and right belief about ourselves that we can exact our view of others.  The great king of Israel, David, the king God himself said was “after His own heart”, said in his charge to his son Solomon and all Israel, “If you seek him, he will be found by you…” (1 Chron. 28:9).  

Jesus said, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent” (John 6:29).  Yeah, it takes work to believe because it is against our very fallen nature to believe there is a love that is greater than our sin.  It takes work to believe the truth of the gospel because what Christ did is so against our own selfish, sinful natures.  Hence, we are superimposing “us” on him.  And, then we end up serving ourselves in a strange and ridiculous way.  So, we “exchange the truth of God for a lie and worship and serve created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised” (Rom. 1:25).  When we fail to grasp the glory of God, focusing rather than our own fallen natures, we fail to do the “work” that it takes to really believe the truth of the gospel—we miss it.  We miss God.  Not the idea of God, but the true glory of God.  And, when we miss that, we miss the sense of awe such an awesome wonder inspires.  “God demonstrates his love for us in this: While we were still sinners [literally, "enemies", v. 10], Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8).

So, in his prayer, Paul concludes in this praise (Eph. 3:20-21): “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever!”  What God can do that we just can’t imagine is to love us unconditionally and to forgive us of our repetitive sinfulness.

You see, God’s plan all along was to see us through the eyes of the crucified Savior, “He chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight” (Eph. 1:4).  And, he wanted, through his loving and forgiving relationship with us, to “show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:7).  And further, he wanted to use his relationship with us as his children, the church, to demonstrate to Satan and his evil empire his manifold wisdom (Eph. 2:10).  God wants us to be the living expression of his love, grace, and goodness.  He wants it to show on our faces.  He wants us to exude it in our very lives.  He wants it to ooze from our pores—“streams of living water will flow from within him.”  Literally, a river of God’s Spirit—the ultimate loving Spirit—will erupt from the believer’s heart, the believer who gets it, who really gets the unbelievable magnitude of the love of God as Paul prayed we would.  Further, God says, “You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands…this will be for the Lord’s renown…” (Isa. 55:12-13).  God causes nature to sing for us and to clap its hands for us.  He wants the world to know that He is our biggest fan!

God sees you, in Christ, as holy and blameless, as he planned from the beginning.  In Christ, you are an offshoot of him and it is God himself that "gardens" you.  “I am the vine and my Father is the gardener.”  “I am the vine and you are the branches.”  “Remain in me and I will remain in you.”  “If a man remains in me, and I in him, he will bear much fruit.”  “You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you” [John 15:1-5, verses rearranged for effect].  If we will attach to the wonderful Savior and stay attached to that love, Christ will be able to truly reside in our hearts.  Again, “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners [enemies] Christ died for us.”  If Christ is residing in our hearts, unimpeded by our own unbelief and worldly self-views, we will bear his fruit—the fruit of being living demonstrations of his love, the love that surpasses our ability to reason out (Eph. 3:19).

“So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer” (2 Cor. 5:16).  If you want to how God sees you, stop looking at yourself from a worldly perspective and look at yourself through the mirror of Christ’s life and love and see God seeing you.  Look down with him from the Cross because it's the right view and perspective.