How do you see people? Do you even notice others when you’re out and about? Or are you so absorbed in yourself and what you’re doing that you’d miss a crime if it happened right in front of you? How do you love?
I’ve been on a kick about how we, as Christians, should love recently. Why? Because it’s the most important thing for us to get right because without us showing love as we are called to, we have no purpose here. Literally our sole purpose is to be an extension, a visual representation, of God’s love on Earth, and I write about it a lot because we fail to be that far more often than we succeed.
“We love because He first loved us.” 1 John 4:19. Are we loving like He first loved us?
“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt should lose its taste, how can it be made salty? It’s no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled on by men.” Matthew 5:13.
I’ve been thinking about this verse a lot when it comes to determining how nonbelievers see us. Have you ever thought that the world has denied Christianity so hard because we’ve become useless? Because we’ve lost our taste? They’ve thrown out God because the salt he’s using isn’t changing the taste of the world.
That’s because we see too much with our own eyes and hearts. When we look at others through our own eyes, they’re hard to love. All we can see are faults and issues. That’s why we need to look at things through God’s eyes and love people through His heart.
Brandon Heath is one of my favorite artists, and one of his top songs is “Give Me Your Eyes.” And in it, he covers this subject fairly thoroughly.
Breathe in the familiar shock of confusion and chaos
All those people going somewhere, why have I never cared
This goes back to my opening point: are you really seeing those around you? Do you actually care about them? Is your goal to show as many people as possible to Jesus? Do you care enough about them to reach out and attempt to save them from eternal damnation? Because all the people you come across daily are going somewhere after they die.
Step out on the busy street.
See a girl and our eyes meet.
Does her best to smile at me.
To hide what's underneath.
There's a man just to her right
Black suit and a bright red tie.
Too ashamed to tell his wife he's out of work, he's buyin time.
There are two ways you can take these lyrics. One interpretation is that, if you pay attention, you’ll find that many people wear their hearts on their sleeves, and you can see right into their lives if you actually try to see them and not just glance past while moving about your day.
The other is that you don’t know what people are going through just by passing them by on the street. We are incredibly crafty when it comes to hiding the things that hurt us because we don’t want people to know what it is that hurts us. We don’t like being vulnerable. And here’s the point: it takes time, effort, and love to learn of what troubles people you meet. It’s hard to do, but it’s one of those things that makes us like salt, makes us different enough that the world will recognize it needs us, and more importantly, the God we serve.
It’s difficult, and we can’t do it on our own. Thankfully, He first loved us and gave us the ability to love like He loves.
Give me Your eyes for just one second
Give me Your eyes so I can see,
Everything that I keep missing,
Give me Your love for humanity.
Give me Your arms for the broken-hearted
The ones that are far beyond my reach.
Give me Your heart for the ones forgotten
Three key things are here: eyes, arms, and heart. We have to see others the way God sees them in order to see what’s troubling them. We can’t see people as a liar or a thief. We have to see them as a person who is broken and lost in sin.
We have to reach out for them with the arms of God to show them the love that only He is capable of showing, to comfort them, and to hold on when our own grip is too weak to drag them out of the hole they’re in.
Finally, we have to love with God’s heart for mankind. We have to love with the kind of heart that had God sacrifice his own son for the sins of all. Sacrifice the humanity in yourself that says, “well they deserve it because they did—insert crime here—”and dedicate yourself to loving to save them from what they deserve because Christ saved you from what you deserve. We cannot afford to forget any. We cannot afford to forsake any. Christ did not; we should not.
Just moving past me by, I swear I never thought that I was wrong
But I wanna second glance so give me a second chance
To see the way you've seen the people all along
I know it feels like it’s not wrong to treat people like the crimes and wrongs they’ve committed. I know that I will never live up to what I’m writing here perfectly, and neither will anyone who reads this. But how much better off do you think the world would be if we stopped viewing people as the sins they’ve committed and started viewing them as God sees them?
What if we saw people as broken rather than horrid? What if we treated people as fixable rather than permanently destroyed? What if we were actually the salt of the Earth, meant to make this place so much better than the sin that permeates it?