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The Most Neglected Tool for Spiritual Growth isn’t the Bible, it’s a Mirror

When people accept Jesus, I think we should make sure we give them a mirror.

The same goes for baptisms, altar call prayers responses, seminary degrees, and church appointments.

That’s because a mirror is the most powerful, most underrated, and most criminally underutilized tool along most people’s personal spiritual journey.

And sadly the more we walk the road of faith, the less likely we are to pick one up.

The mirror is the place where transformation happens, because there in our self-reflection we find:

the person most responsible for our poor choices in the past.
the person with the most control over who we will become.

The mirror allows us to focus fully on the human being we have both the greatest impact on and the greatest responsibility for, and yet so often we ignore it, preferring to always be about the work of someone else’s renovation.

When it comes to fundamental change though, spirituality has always been about looking inward first. The real work of the soul has always been an inside job and the Bible itself testifies to this.

Those great Old Testament prophets were about holding a mirror up to the people of God and saying, “Take a good, hard look here at who you are and how you’re living and tell me if these things reflect the heart of God! The message was one that may have been heard corporately but had to take root individually.

Jesus would later preach about a Kingdom coming, but that new reality was always something to be received personally, welcomed internally first. The beautiful revolution would come to people’s hearts long before it would ever reach the streets. The very core of the Sermon on the Mount, is that we are to be altered from the inside and that this renovation would compel us to live in such a way that we become others-centered; that we would deny our preferences, position, and comfort for theirs.

Jesus would tell those wishing to follow after him that their most pressing spiritual act was not to judge others, but to love them. The primary calling, was to focus not on another’s actions but on our Christlike response to them.

Even when the Apostle Paul delivered letters addressed to local faith communities, these instructions were always to help believers understand how their personal transformation affected the whole, their place within the bigger body. Again, words heard in community but to be walked out individually.

Our modern Christian culture has largely lost any such thoughtful reflection or personal accountability. We’ve conditioned ourselves to believe that our faith is measured not by the lives we actually live and the contents of our hearts, but by the stances we take, the condemnation we dispense, the causes we defend, the people we chastise, the sides we choose.

We expend all sorts of time and energy looking for the reason our world is so badly broken, and rarely if ever assume it could be us. So few of us care to do the difficult work of relentless self-examination. We’d rather call others out from the false safety of own self-righteousness—habitually non practicing preachers. Most Christians can rattle off a laundry list of go-to Bible quotes, but so rarely do we dig deep to practice the kind or radical, counterintuitive love at the heart of them.

Jesus tells the would-be judge in all of us to deal first with the log of bitterness and hatred in our own eye before attempting to address the speck of such things in the eye of another. And yet, implied in the totality of the Scriptures, is the truth that we will never be finished, never reach completion, never arrive at the place where the priority to police motives or monitor behaviors is not still ourselves.

I can’t help but wonder how different the landscape of the world would look if professed people of faith spent more time in the quiet places seeking revelation, not about the evils of the world out there or regarding the moral failures of others, but about the darkness of our own hearts.

We each could surely devote every waking moment for the rest of our lives to purifying our own agendas and thoughts and actions—and never lack for heavy work.

Christian, do yourself a favor: put down the iPhone and the laptop, put away your signs and bullhorns, stop writing and preaching and proselytizing, set aside your favorite blogs and books, and yes even put down the Bible for a while.

Pick up a mirror, and with as much attention and honesty as you are able, consider what you see and then ask God what you should do about it.

You might experience more growth than you have in a long time. You may find mercy and forgiveness and compassion come more easily, judgment and condemnation less so.

Instead of changing other people, you might change the person you become as you encounter them. 

You might more clearly see the work you still have yet to do in perpetuating the image of Jesus, and you might become more passionate about doing it.

You might better reflect the God you say you worship—and the world might be beautifully altered.

 

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