WE BECOME WHAT WE BEHOLD, A Weekly Reflection by Pastor Lap Dinh on Psalms 58–60; 2 Corinthians 3

We keep trying to change ourselves by staring harder at the rules. If I could just be more disciplined. If I could just try harder, read more, white-knuckle my way into the person I am supposed to be. But it never works, not really, because rules can never change us. They can tell us what is wrong. They cannot make us right. Paul says it flatly: "the letter (law) kills, but the Spirit gives life" (2 Cor 3:6).

Here is the problem the law could never fix. Our real trouble is never a lack of information. It is a heart that could not hear. Listen to how the psalm describes it: the wicked "are like the deaf adder that stops its ear, so that it does not hear the voice of charmers" (Ps 58:4-5 NVB). A snake with its ear stopped. You can read the law to the heart at full volume for fifty years, and nothing gets in. That is what Paul calls the veil: "to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted" (2 Cor 3:14). A veiled heart, a deaf adder, a stone that no amount of trying can soften.

So what could possibly un-deafen us? Not more effort. A new covenant, "written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts" (2 Cor 3:3). The Spirit does what the rules never could: He takes the stopped ear and the stone heart and makes them alive. "When one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed" (2 Cor 3:16). We do not tear our own veil off. We turn, and He lifts it.

And then comes the sentence that changes how transformation actually happens. "And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another" (2 Cor 3:18). Read that slowly, because it is the opposite of everything we have been trying. We are not transformed by striving. We are transformed by beholding. We become what we behold. Look at Him, and you start to look like Him.

Lord, we have been straining to change ourselves. Turn our faces to You instead.

This is what David was reaching for when he said, "O my Strength, I will watch for you... My God in his steadfast love will meet me" (Ps. 59:9-10 NVB). The unveiled face is a face that watches for God, and God meets it. Not a face buried in the rulebook, grinding away. A face turned up, beholding, and being changed by what it sees.

And notice where the power comes from, because it is not from us. "Our sufficiency is from God" (2 Cor 3:5). The psalm agrees: only "with God we shall do valiantly" (Ps 60:12 NVB). The glory we are being changed into is not manufactured by our discipline. It is caught, like light on a face, from looking at Him.

So stop staring at your failures and your rulebook. That is the deaf adder's religion, and it kills. Turn your face to Christ. Behold Him in the Word, in prayer, at the table, and let the Spirit do what your willpower never could: change you, degree by degree, into the image of the One you cannot stop looking at.

Lord, we have worn ourselves out trying to transform ourselves by looking at our own performance. Lift the veil. Un-deafen our hearts. Turn our faces to the glory of Christ and keep them there, and change us into His image the only way it has ever happened, by beholding You, from one degree of glory to another, until we see You face to face. Amen.

Have we been trying to change by staring at the rules instead of beholding Christ, and what would it look like this week to turn our face to Him and let Him do the changing?

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Pastor Lap