Hi, this is Pastor Diego. Welcome to the Daily Five. Thank you for joining us today. This podcast is designed to give you a short daily 5 minute word of encouragement to inspire you to think and act on God's word.
Hey, everyone. Welcome to today's episode. Today's episode is called the man in the Mirror. When we wake up in the morning or go out in public, most of us instinctively look at our reflections in mirrors or windows.
And it's common for us to see how we look right. We want to make sure there's a piece of broccoli or something stuck in our teeth before we go out in public. But the type of mirrors I want to talk to you about today are spiritual. And I think there's two mirrors in each of our lives.
One mirror reflects the world's values and the other reflects God's truth about who we are. And way too often we're looking into the wrong mirror and we're drawing the wrong conclusions. Man, we draw the wrong conclusions about ourselves. We draw the wrong conclusions about God and about our purpose in life from staring into the wrong mirror too often.
So let me break down these two mirrors for you. It's like when you go to the carnival and you go into the fun house and you stare into that weird shaped mirror, the one that distorts your image. And sometimes it makes you look tall and skinny, or sometimes it makes you look short and fat. And even though we laugh at each other or we laugh at ourselves, in those moments when we're at the carnival staring at ourselves in that mirror, having a distorted self image is serious, and it's nothing to laugh about.
Because when we have the wrong self image, it ruins our motivation, it steals our joy, and it damages our relationships with the people that we love the most. The world's mirror that we stare at every single day tells us that success and pleasure and approval and physical appearance, intelligence and swag determine who we are and how high we can go. If we measure ourselves this way, you know what's gonna happen. We feel either shame or we feel prideful.
When we think we're doing better than the person next to us, than our neighbors, then we feel superior. But when we realize that there's other people that are smarter, richer, better looking and have more friends than us, then we feel like failures. What happens when we look in the world's mirror too long is we constantly compare ourselves to other people. And then what happens is we spend too much time and money and energy trying to manage our image and we start wearing these masks too.
Try to impress people because we're scared that other people are going to see the real us. And we don't want anyone to know how fearful and insecure we really are. Now, I'm not sure if that rings the bell, but I want to tell you today that fame and money can't feel the void of an empty heart. I want you to think for a second about Adam and Eve after they stayed in the garden.
It says that they wore fig leaves to hide their nakedness, physical nakedness. But being naked wasn't just a physical thing. What the Bible's trying to tell us is that they were completely exposed before God and that's what made them hide from God. Listen, when we put our faith in Jesus, faith means knowing that God knows every detail about us, even our deepest thoughts, and that he still loves us.
The second Mary is God's omniscience. It reveals God's truth about us. Omniscience is just a fancy word for all knowing. Look at King David.
He understood that God knew everything about him. In Psalm 139:1 4, this is what he says. O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise.
You perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down. You're familiar with all of my ways. Before the word is on my tongue, you know it completely.
O Lord. This is King David in the Old Testament, acknowledging that God knows everything about him but still loves him. So does God know your hidden feelings? Yes.
Does God know our selfish thoughts? Yes. Does he know our deepest and most evil desires to sin? Yeah, of course he does.
But he's quick to forgive. God didn't ignore our sin. He forgave us of it. God didn't make excuses for humanity.
He sent Jesus to pay the price for it. And because of grace, we can be fully, totally and completely honest with God about every single sin in our life. Because the cross is the promise that God won't condemn us. If we had to earn God's approval, man, we'd be in serious trouble because we can't meet God's standard of holiness.
But Jesus did meet that standard. And when we receive the forgiveness offered in the sacrifice of Christ's death on the cross, then we are free from condemnation. So what marriage do you spend the most time looking into? The one that tells you who you should be?
Or the one that reveals the truth about God's love for you? God bless you. See you tomorrow. You've been listening to the daily 5.
Apply the word and make today.