MIRROR, MIRROR OF MY SOUL -- Devotional for March 20, from "Good Seeds"

He who is a hearer of the word but not a doer is like a man who sees his face in a mirror just once, but then no more. Eventually he forgets what he looked like. But he who looks steadily into God’s law will not only remember it, but do what it says, and God will greatly bless him for it. (James 1:23-25).

Anyone in his right mind would far prefer to be identified by his strengths and known for his abilities, than to have exposed to a watching world the glitches of his personality and flaws of his performance. But all too often this preference leads to exerting more effort to mask failures than to overcome them! Certainly it would behoove all of us to follow the counsel of old Socrates when he said, “Know thyself.” We must know our limitations and weaknesses if we are going to survive in the real world. We must become enlightened about our dark side before we fall headlong into the pit it so steadily and stealthily digs for us! To know our weaknesses and sins, however, is not to wallow in them, but to more intentionally and intelligently war against them. We face our liabilities as the enemies of our souls in order to overcome and eradicate them. A little child is so quick to say, “I can’t,” even to a fault. Enter a caring parent or teacher, who says: “How do you know you can’t – you haven’t even tried.” But as the child enters the teen years the opposite often occurs: the confidence of youth quickly morphs into arrogance, eventually colliding with ignorance, tuning him into a know-it-all. Such ones begin to think of themselves as invincible (which explains why so many young drivers are killing and being killed out on the highways). Wisdom tells us to look in the mirror, intently and constantly, not to admire our own beauty, but to find faults and get rid of them. The Scriptures describe the kind of mirror we must use: not one of shallow, egocentric introspection, but of deep, Christ-centered inspection. The wicked-but-beautiful queen in the story of Snow White finally heard what she had long been dreading from her brutally truthful magic mirror: she was no longer “the fairest of them all!” God’s Word is that mirror for you and me, and we would do well to go to it daily to hear God’s candid assessment regarding the state of our soul. Any weaknesses it reveals must not send us into a fury of jealousy of others, or rage against the mirror, but send us rather to our knees in contrite confession of sin, and of God, humbly asking Him to set us free from the misery brought on by our own arrogant ignorance.