Good morning, my brothers! My prayer changed just slightly, but God opened the floodgates to better understanding: Seeing Him for who He truly is. Let’s go! 4-min, 26-sec read.

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Years ago, my friend Thad taught me a simple prayer to begin my mornings with the Father. Before I opened my Bible, I would pray: 

“Father, make me teachable. Teach me what You have for me today. Help me remember what You show me, so I leave our time together changed.”

I prayed those words for years. They became the doorway into my time with the Lord, before my schedule, before my phone, before the noise of the day could tell me what mattered.

Then, quietly, another sentence found its way into that prayer, as I mentioned in Wednesday’s newsletter. 

“Father, show me Yourself. Show me who You truly are.”

It felt like a small addition. Looking back, I can see it changed the whole direction of the conversation. I had been asking God what He wanted to teach me. In reality, He first wanted relationship.

Earlier this week I opened Matthew's Gospel expecting an ordinary morning in the Word. What I found instead was a pattern I had read past a hundred times without ever really seeing it.

Wise men from the East followed a star for months, maybe longer, crossing deserts and kingdoms, following a star. When they finally knelt in a small house in Bethlehem, in front of an infant who could not yet speak a word, they did not ask Him questions. They opened their treasures and worshiped.

What makes men travel that far for a child they have never met?

I turned to Luke and found an old priest named Simeon, a man who had spent his whole life waiting for one moment. The Spirit had promised him he would not die until his eyes had seen the Lord's salvation. When Mary and Joseph carried the baby Jesus into the temple, Simeon took Him into his arms and said he was finally ready to go.

Ready. After decades of waiting, one look and he could let go of everything.

Down the same hall was Anna, eighty-four years old, a widow who never left the temple. Decades of fasting. Decades of prayer. Decades most people would have quietly called wasted. Then she saw Him, and she could not stop telling everyone who would listen that the Redeemer had finally come.

Centuries before either of them, Isaiah was given one glimpse of the Lord seated high on His throne. He did not respond with theology. He said,

One look at Glory, and Isaiah saw his own life differently than he had five minutes earlier.

Then there is John. Not a stranger to Jesus. A man who had walked three years at His side and once leaned against His chest at the table. Decades later, exiled on an island, he sees the risen Christ in unveiled glory and falls at His feet like a dead man, until Jesus reaches down and touches him.

Different centuries. Different lives. Different measures of failure and faithfulness. But the same thing kept happening to every one of them, and by the time I reached Revelation, I could not unsee it.

People see Jesus, and they are never the same.

That sentence is why Paul's words in 2 Corinthians came back to me in such a new way this week.

Paul is not describing a study method. He is describing what the Spirit does in a man the moment he actually beholds Christ, not merely reads about Him.

We are not changed because we memorized something new. We are changed because we saw Someone more clearly, and seeing Him rearranges everything else.

That is also what gives weight to Jesus' words to Philip, 

Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father.”

 Every page of the Gospels is an invitation to know the Father's heart by looking carefully at His Son.

The more clearly we see His faithfulness, the more naturally we trust Him. 

The more deeply we see His holiness, the less appealing sin becomes. 

The more fully we see His mercy, the quicker we run back to Him when we fail.

The Spirit takes what we see of the Father in the Son, and He quietly reshapes what we think, what we love, and who we become. We become like the One we behold.

Most of us were not shaped by beholding. We were shaped by performance, by the fear of falling short, by the anger that shows up when we do. Some of us were shaped by success and what it cost us at home. Some by comfort, by shame we never said out loud, by a quiet vow to never need anyone again.

Seeing Jesus does not erase that history. It restores what it was always meant to produce, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

A husband stops managing his wife's emotions like a problem to solve and starts sitting with her like a man who is no longer afraid of what he cannot fix. A father stops performing strength for his children and starts letting them watch him need God. A grandfather finally says the words his own father never said to him.

A friend stops hiding behind jokes and tells another man the truth about where he actually is. A leader stops needing to win the room and starts asking what is best for the people in it. A man who has spent years controlling everything within reach finally lets his Father hold what he cannot.

None of that comes from trying harder. It comes from beholding, and being changed by what you see.

Tomorrow morning (or even right now), before the world starts telling you what matters, sit down with your Father. Open His Word slowly. Ask Him to show you Himself,  and stay long enough to actually see Him.

Then pray it the way it was given to me. 

“Father, show me Yourself. Show me who You truly are. Make me teachable. Teach me what You have for me today. Help me remember what You show me, so I leave our time together changed.”

Do not begin with self-improvement. Begin with the Father. Open your Bible and let Him speak to you. Some days, His voice will be clear; others a little quieter. Know that He’s always there.

I’m coming to realize: transformation is not the pursuit. Knowing the Father is the pursuit. Transformation is the fruit, and it grows in every man who lingers long enough to see Him.

 -Will

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