1 Samuel 16:7 says, “For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”

I remember a time when this verse was a great comfort to me. I thought, “Thank God that he sees my heart—that he doesn’t evaluate me the way others do. Others reject me based solely on what they see, but God sees my heart. He sees the real me. He sees behind the curtain of my rough exterior to the softness of my well-intentioned heart.”

Then I realized this awful truth: I have hate in my heart. I have envy in my heart. I have lust and pride and greed and selfishness in my heart. My heart is “deceitful above all things and desperately sick” (Jeremiah 17:9). I realized then that I’d actually be a lot better off if God saw as humans see. Far from taking comfort in the idea that God saw the “inner beauty” that no one else could see, I realized that God actually saw the inner ugliness that I was able to hide from almost everybody else. Like the rest of humanity, I’m good at tricking people. I’m good at covering over the worst parts of myself and concealing my internal darkness from human eyes. Unfortunately for us, God sees all that stuff that we hide from others.

Though I might wish that God sees as people see, I’m glad that God doesn’t do what people do. Most people only give me what I deserve. But God gives me much better than that. God sees the real me, the me I hide, the me that others would run from if they could see. BUT GOD sees it all. And he stays. And he loves. And he promises that nothing I do or fail to do will ever tempt him to leave me or forsake me.

 J.I. Packer put it this way:

There is tremendous relief in knowing that God’s love for me is utterly realistic—based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst of me—so that no discovery now can disillusion God the way I am so often disillusioned about myself.

Because of what Jesus has done for me, God gives me what I don’t deserve (grace) and withholds the judgment that I do deserve (mercy). And that means that God doesn’t love us as we are. The news is so much better than that. He loves us AS JESUS IS.

So, our hope and assurance and confidence does not come from what is in our heart for God, but rather what is in God’s heart for us.