He Looks at the Heart

The third time was the one that did it, and it was not even said unkindly.

A woman she likes, in a corridor, arm out, warm as anything: you want to let go a bit more, love. Let it out.

She said something pleasant back and went and sat in her car for ten minutes before driving home.

She is forty-eight. She has been at that church for sixteen years. In sixteen years she has run the Tuesday group, done the rota, sat with two families through the worst weeks of their lives, and been quietly asked to step in at least four times when something needed doing that nobody would see.

She has never been asked to do anything at the front.

She is not bitter about that and she would be embarrassed by the suggestion. But there is a pattern she has watched for sixteen years, and it is not subtle, and it goes: the people who are visibly moved are the people who are given things.

And the sentence she has arrived at, the one that was waiting in the car, is not that is unfair. It is worse than that. It is: maybe they can see something I cannot. Maybe what shows is what is actually there, and there is less in me, and they have all worked it out.

God declines the visible measure

There is a moment where God stops a prophet mid-assessment, and He does it because the prophet is doing exactly what has been done to you.

Samuel is looking at Eliab and he is impressed. Height, bearing, the obvious thing. And God interrupts him.

for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart.1 Samuel 16:7

Notice that God does not say Samuel is being unkind. He says he is using the wrong instrument. This is not a correction about attitude; it is a correction about method.

Man looketh on the outward appearance. That is stated as a general fact about people, without malice. It is what human beings do, including good ones, including the woman in the corridor with her arm out, who meant nothing but warmth by it.

But the LORD looketh on the heart. Different instrument, different reading, and His is the one that is accurate.

You have been assessed with the only instrument people have, and it was never the one that reads what you are. That is not me consoling you for being overlooked; 1 Samuel 16:7 has God saying the outward look is not how He sees, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old interruption and lays it over ten minutes in a car park.

Two things this does not mean

Now let me guard this on both sides, because there is a cheap version of this article and I am not going to write it.

It does not mean the people who are visibly moved are shallow. That is the comfort that quiet people reach for and it is not true and it is not kind. Some of them are exactly what they look like. A woman who weeps in a service is very often a woman whose heart is doing precisely what her face says it is, and God is not measuring her by her volume either, in her favor or against.

And it does not mean you are secretly the deeper one. That would just be the same instrument again, held the other way up.

What it means is narrower and better: the measure is not available to anybody. Not to them about you, and not to you about them. It is His, and He has never published the results, and the whole sorting exercise that has been running in that building for sixteen years is running on an instrument that cannot read the thing it claims to be reading.

You are not below anybody on a scale, and the scale itself was never in human hands. The written word puts the seeing with God and takes it out of everybody's, and the Holy Spirit does not rank two believers by how they look on a Sunday.

And now the sentence you took to the car, because that is what this is actually about. Maybe what shows is what is there. That is the one that has to go, and it is false in a way that is easy to prove: God interrupted a prophet to say it is false, and He did it before it could produce a decision about a person.

You are read accurately by Someone with the right instrument. Scripture says the Lord looks on the heart, and the Holy Spirit has been reading a woman correctly through sixteen years of a room reading her wrong.