A Face That Never Showed Anything

There is a man out our way whose face has never once told anybody what he was thinking.

It is not coldness. I want to say that at the top, because people who do not know him get it wrong. He is one of the kindest men on that road. He has pulled more people out of ditches at two in the morning than anybody I could name, and he does not talk about it, and if you thanked him he would say something about the weather.

His face just does not move much. It did not move at his father's funeral. It did not move the day the barn went. It did not move when his daughter got married, and he cried in the truck afterwards for about a minute and a half with the engine off, alone, where nobody would ever know except that he told me once, years later, in the way men tell each other things sideways.

Now here is what that has done to him, and it is the reason I am telling you about him at all.

He has a matter with God, and he has never brought it, because he has been watching his own face.

He goes over it, and he notices that he does not feel much, and he takes the not feeling much as the verdict. He reasons like this, though he has never laid it out this plainly: a man who was genuinely sorry would show something. I show nothing. Therefore I am not genuinely sorry. Therefore bringing it would be a kind of lie.

Two years of a man using a face that has never once worked as a witness, as a witness against himself.

And I know his face. I have known it thirty years. It did not work at the funeral either, and he loved his father more than anybody in that county.

That is you at the mirror.

You've been reading your own outside as though it were a report on your inside. And your outside has never been an accurate instrument, not once, not at any of the big moments of your life, and you know that about every other occasion and you have made an exception for this one.

Scripture says the outside is exactly what God is not reading

Samuel is standing in a house looking at a row of sons, and he is doing what every one of us does, which is judging by what he can see. And God stops him mid job.

But the LORD said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature, because I have refused him: for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart.1 Samuel 16:7

Look not on his countenance. Countenance is the face. God's first instruction to the prophet is to stop reading faces, and He gives the reason: it is not the instrument He uses.

Now apply that where it has never been applied in your life. You have used it, if you have used it at all, to stop yourself judging other people, and that is a good use. What it also says, and this is the part that has never been handed to you, is that your own face is not evidence about your own heart either.

You are seen by a God who is reading something you have no access to and cannot verify from the outside, and I am not making that convenient: 1 Samuel 16:7 says the Lord looketh on the heart, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can get that to a man watching himself for a reaction.

Here is what makes this so hard for a certain kind of person, and I have watched it for thirty years. A man who does not show much has usually been told, somewhere along the line, that he is hard. Perhaps kindly, perhaps not. And once you have been told that, you start checking, and every check comes back the same, because a face that does not move is not going to start moving because you are watching it.

You have been giving evidence against yourself from a witness that Scripture disqualified, which is written into that verse rather than into my long acquaintance with you, with the Spirit of God able to reach a place two years of self examination has not.

And there is one more thing in that passage worth having. God is not saying the outside is a poor guide but the best available. He is saying He does not use it at all. Not as a supplement. Not as corroboration. The LORD looketh on the heart, and that is the whole of His method, and He has never once needed a face to work out what was underneath it.

This has been read all along by the only One who can read it, and He has never asked you for a demonstration, because Scripture puts the looking where it puts it, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that out to a truck at golden hour.