When Jesus looks at you.

To explain how God sees human sinfulness, Billy Graham writes:

Cliff Barrows and I were in Atlantic City many years ago with our wives. We had had a service, and we were walking down the boardwalk. A man was auctioning diamonds and other jewelry. We decided to go in. When we got married, I had given my wife a diamond that was so small, you couldn’t see it with a microscope.

So I decided to get her a better diamond. I had $65 in my pocket. I eventually bid it all and bought the diamond. It was a perfect diamond, I thought. The next day, I went to a jeweler, and I said, “Can you look at this diamond and tell me how much it is worth?”

He looked at it through his glass and said, “Oh, maybe $35 or $40.”

“What?” I said. “This is supposed to be two carats!”

“Look at it,” he said and gave the glass to me. I looked at it, and even I could see it was full of defects. 

And that’s the way God looks at us. We go to church and pray. We are good, moral people. But he looks at us through his own righteousness, and he sees in all of us the defects of our sin.

Thought

Christ has no body on earth now but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours.  Yours are the eyes through which to look out Christ's compassion to the world.  Yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good, and yours are the hands with which he is to bless us now.

 Teresa of Avila