Touré Roberts - Mirrors

What I want to talk to you about today is mirrors, and my prayer is that we will leave here with a healthier understanding of our inner mirror so that we can live in God’s reality and not in a reality shaped by our brokenness or influenced by what someone else is projecting onto us. Are you tracking with me? That’s the direction I want to go today. I want to spend a bit of time—maybe 6 or 7 hours—talking about this with you. We’ll lay a foundation with this passage from 1 Corinthians 13:12, which says, «For now we see in a mirror dimly, not clearly.» We’re wrestling with this, for now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face. He says, «Now I know in part, but then"—and these are powerful words—"I shall know just as I am also known.» In other words, I’m working toward a point that will allow me to perceive just as I am perceived. I will walk that out and talk it through with you today. He is saying that God sees me perfectly. He knows who I am, and what I’m trying to do is get to a place where I understand myself as God understands me. Are you with me? But he’s admitting that I’m not there yet because I’m looking into this mirror, and this mirror is dim. I haven’t perfected my mirror. There’s a chapter in the book called «The Cracked Mirror,» which deals with how things in our lives begin to distort our mirrors. Have you ever been to a funhouse? I used to enjoy amusement parks and funhouses, and some of those amusement parks had funhouses. Is anyone old enough to remember funhouses? You would go in, and there were mirrors, but they weren’t regular mirrors; they were distorted mirrors. They distorted the reflection of the object, and the tricky thing was that they didn’t completely distort the object—just parts of it. So, you’d walk in, and maybe your head would be huge while your body was tiny, making you look like a Martian, or your feet would appear gigantic. It’s tricky because if you hadn’t had an experience with an actual mirror, you might start to believe that was your reality. Are we tracking together? I am concerned, and I’ve got some notes and additional passages I want us to cover. One important thing to understand is that the mirror never introduces itself; it simply reflects. The mirror that reflects your image does not identify itself; it just reflects, and then we respond based on how it reflects. Let me show you a couple of images really quickly. You’ve probably seen these before if you’ve been on social media for two seconds. Let’s put the first one up there really quickly. You’ve seen this one—it’s so encouraging. You’ve seen it before, right? You get all excited, and you like it and leave comments like, «That’s me! I’m aligned!» and that’s all wonderful. However, the truth is that the reality of it is more like the second image because we don’t know who we are; we’re trying to figure it out. I say all the time, in Jeremiah, God says, «Before I formed you in your mother’s womb, I knew you.» God has a perspective of us that we don’t yet have, and we are trying to get there. That’s what Paul was talking about in 1 Corinthians chapter 13—he’s saying, «I see it dimly. I know that there is an accurate mirror for my life, and I know there is a reflection of who I truly am, but right now, I’m seeing it dimly. I get glimpses of it.» There are moments like last week when Pastor Sarah talked about «Unleashed.» Come on, somebody! I almost came today just to play the video for you, to be honest. That was a moment when God raised up a mirror, and that’s why we felt empowered and enlightened. What she tapped into was the reality of God’s truth, and it held up a mirror for us to see ourselves. Right? Some of you walked out of here saying, «In Jesus’ name,» and your new mantra became, «In Jesus' name!» On Monday and Tuesday, you believed, «In Jesus’ name, I will run through troops and leap over walls.» By Wednesday, it was, «I run through troops,» and by Friday, it was just a «run.» Why? Because the difficult thing is that God only lets us see the mirror in flashes; He allows us to glimpse it and recognize it as truth. The challenge is that I have to learn how to access that accurate mirror because every single day there are other mirrors—inner mirrors and external mirrors—that distort the image. See, last week it was the first image, and we saw, «Oh, I thought I was a cat, but I’m really a lion, and I can do anything! Hallelujah!» Then you walk out of here and have to deal with the other mirror. The first one told me who I was, despite the…