so that you may become sons of light

From tomorrow:

A holy God sees us as we truly are: wretched creatures enslaved by sin. But one of the great things about our God is that He doesn’t see us just for our ugly sinfulness; He also sees what beauty can be wrought from us. The great artist Michelangelo is famous for his sculpture David among other things. When asked to describe how he created such works of beauty out of large slabs of ugly stone he replied that he was simply removing pieces of stone from the figure he could see inside the rock.

At dinner a few weeks ago, my daughter got really excited and pointed to the windowsill in the kitchen. She and my son had picked a bunch of weeds and given it to my wife as a present. Being the good mother that she is, my wife placed the weeds in a little vase on the windowsill. Now there was another little vase behind the vase of weeds that contained an actual flower. But from my daughter's vantage point at the dinner table, she saw a flower growing among the weeds, and she was excited to see such beauty grow from them.

Both the Michelangelo story and the flower in the weeds story are analogies of how the Lord sees you. Amidst the hardness of the stone of your heart, He sees a masterpiece. Amidst the weeds of sin and darkness that comprise your being, He sees a thing of beauty. The Lord doesn’t just see a sinner; no, the Lord sees a sinner saved by grace. The Lord sees you with Christ-colored glasses. The Lord sees what you can become through Him, and that beauty is not yet in you, but He sees it, and He rejoices, and He shepherds you down paths that are meant to make you that something wonderful. Our great, big God, our Shepherd wants you to become something wonderful. And that something wonderful means becoming more and more like Christ.