I have been reflecting a lot on what happens when I pause to turn to God. When I take time to simply be in God’s presence, not trying to get Him to fix anything or do anything for me. When happens when I simply dwell in His presence, as Psalm 27:3 says, to seek the “one thing,” the beauty of the Lord.
When we take time to be with God and gaze at Him, we respond to His deep longing to be with us. In our being with God we are transformed and remember who He is and who we are—His children created in His image to walk in communion with Him, the way it was intended in the garden of Eden.
Something mysterious and transformative happens in these moments. Ephesians 2:10 says we are God’s masterpiece, His poemia—a Greek term that serves as the root word for “poem.” God is masterfully working in us, transforming our lives into a beautiful work of art. He writes poetry through us, shaping and forming us into the image of Christ.
In this transformative process, we are called to pay attention to how God uses various aspects of our lives to draw us closer to Him. God works through Scripture and through His presence all around us and within us. He uses our worship, our relationships, our work, our stewardship of what He entrusts to us, and even all our circumstances, to transform and mold us. He is both the author and the artist behind our spiritual formation. This process is not one in which we remain passive.
Transformation summons our active participation—turning our attention to God, yielding to His work within us, and responding with worship. Wendell Berry once said, “We become what we behold.” When we turn our gaze to God in the quiet, we are transformed by His gaze upon us. Second Corinthians 3:16-18 says we are transformed into His likeness, from glory to glory as we look to Him, like Moses did when he met God face to face at Mt. Sinai in Exodus. I love the way the Message translation puts it:
Whenever, though, they turn to face God as Moses did, God removes the veil and there they are—face-to-face! They suddenly recognize that God is a living, personal presence, not a piece of chiseled stone. … All of us! Nothing between us and God, our faces shining with the brightness of his face. And so we are transfigured much like the Messiah, our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him.
Like a deep and secure relationship, over time we grow more comfortable simply being in God’s presence, where His nearness becomes the greatest gift, like a weaned child with his mother (Psalm 131:2). In these moments, we learn the sacred beauty of being together. This is poignantly illustrated in a story that author Anthony Bloom tells in Learning to Pray, about a French priest named Jean Baptiste Vianney. He once observed an old peasant who would sit motionless in the chapel for hours. Curious, Vianney asked, “What are you doing all these hours?” The peasant replied, “I look at Him, He looks at me, and we are happy.”
A similar image is seen in Luke 10:38-42 through the story of Mary, Martha’s sister. Mary sits at the feet of Jesus, intently listening and beholding Him, even as household tasks beckon her. When her sister Martha expresses frustration over Mary’s lack of help, Jesus commends Mary for choosing “what is better,” her attention on the “one thing” needed: being with the Lord.
Mary’s loving gaze at Jesus leads her later to respond in a beautiful and extravagant act of devotion and worship. In John 12:3, Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with nearly three-quarters of a pound of pure nard, a perfume of great value, and then wipes His feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of her offering.
It is not the cost or quantity of Mary’s gift that matters. Jesus commends her act as preparation for His burial, a gesture of profound love. Similarly, in Luke 21, Jesus praises a poor widow who gives two small coins. Though her offering is meager in worldly terms, Jesus declares it greater than all others because she gave all she had.
Both Mary’s and the widow’s offerings are acts of love, sacrifice, and wholehearted devotion. Jesus commended them, showing us that what matters is our hearts behind our responsive offerings to God—a heart fully yielded to Him in worship.
Jesus gave his own extravagant offering: Himself. Philippians 2:7-11 describes it best:
Though he was in the form of God, he did not consider being equal with God something to exploit. But he emptied himself by taking the form of a slave and by becoming like human beings… he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
When we behold and gaze upon Jesus’ humble and sacrificial offering of Himself—fully obedient to the Father for our sake—we are invited to respond in kind. As Romans 12:1 urges: “Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.”
To offer our bodies as living sacrifices like Christ is the call to pour out our entire ordinary and extraordinary lives to God as an offering, “your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life,” as Eugene Peterson paraphrases in The Message. This kind of worship only happens through a yielded heart willing to offer God everything—our thoughts, motivations, bodies, time, treasures, resources, relationships, and work—as an act of love and surrender.
When we spend time with God, sitting at His feet and beholding His face, we are transformed into His image, willing, like Him, to give God our everything. We reflect His image, radiate His presence, like the expensive jar of oil poured out, our lives a fragrant offering to God. God forms and shapes us like clay, crafting us into living vessels that carry and pour out His fragrance to the world around us through our worship. We go out into the world as people who radiate Christ, exuding His fragrance and ready to offer our lives sacrificially as He did.
Ephesians 5:2 exhorts us to “walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” Similarly, 2 Corinthians 2:15 says “we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.”
What is God’s invitation to you? How might He be calling you to behold His face, sit in His presence, and be filled so that your life overflows with His love? The world around us is so hungry and thirsty for the abundance of life and love that flows from the communion of the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. May we, in His name, be filled and overflow with His presence. Amen.
