God’s Mirror

God’s Mirror

All of us who have had that veil removed can see and reflect the glory of the Lord. And the Lord—who is the Spirit—makes us more and more like him as we are changed into his glorious image.

2 Corinthians 3:18

When we look at a photo of the elderly Mother Teresa, dressed in her simple white sari and her head scarf with bands of blue, tending a homeless man in the streets of Calcutta, she doesn’t look beautiful by the world’s standards. At age eighteen she left her home in Albania to join a group of Irish nuns and served by teaching children and being a principal for seventeen years. Then God’s call came for her to pour out her life for the sick and dying, and in 1952 she opened the first Home for the Dying in India. Known as the “Saint of the Gutters,” Mother Teresa had a beauty that came not from makeup or fine clothes but from her humility, integrity, and sacrificial love for the poorest of the poor in India and around the world.

Long before she became famous and drew large crowds whenever she visited a city, she lived a servant’s life in hiddenness, seeking no glory for herself. However, as she gave herself to God and was transformed into his likeness, she became a mirror of the glory of the Lord, and all who were in her presence saw Christ and felt his transforming love.

Perhaps you think that only great ministers and servants like Mother Teresa are transformed into the likeness of Jesus. But today’s verse is for each of us who believe in and belong to Christ. Yes, when Jesus comes again, he will transform our bodies so that they will be like his glorious body (see Philippians 3:20-21), but he desires to change us and make us “more and more like him” to reflect his character, his love, and his grace here on earth. Give yourself for the first time—or again—but give all you know of yourself to God, body, soul, and spirit, and ask him to transform you from the inside out so you will be a mirror that reflects him to those around you. —CHERI

Lord, thank you for the knowledge that I am to become a mirror and reflection of your love and glory. I am unable to do this for myself, but I give myself to you and ask for your glorious power to transform me into your image and likeness more and more.

If Christ lives in us, controlling our personalities, we will leave glorious marks on the lives we touch. Not because of us but because of him.

—EUGENIA PRICE (1916–1996), AMERICAN AUTHOR