How God Sees You – Healing 2024

Summary

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Though we can sometimes think that God will be repulsed by our sinfulness or ugliness, He loves us as a Father and will never abandon us. As we work on growing closer to Him as His son or daughter, we should try to be honest and direct in our conversations with Him, even when we are angry.

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Reflective Study Guide Questions

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“A slave does not remain in a household forever, but a son always remains.”

Jn. 8:35

1. We often have a tendency to feel that God will be too repulsed by our sins or our ugliness to love us, but He truly loves us despite any sinfulness or ugliness within us. Do you ever feel like God finds you repulsive? How can you focus more deeply on His delight in you?

2. A son or daughter has the security of knowing that they cannot be abandoned or kicked out by their father. We are God’s children, and He will not abandon us. How can you work on viewing yourself as a son or daughter of God, secure and free from the danger of being abandoned by Him?

3. Isaac suggests that we should express ourselves messily to God, even when we are angry with Him. Do you ever feel angry with God? What are you most angry at Him about?

4. We do not need to treat God as if He is fragile, as if He cannot handle our big feelings. Instead, it can be spiritually beneficial to really wrestle with God in our prayer. How can you work on being more direct and honest with God in your conversations with Him?

Text: How God Sees You

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Hello, I’m Isaac Wicker, a Catholic therapist, and today we’re going to be talking about how God sees us. Often we wonder if God sees us as good or if He sees us as bad. Before we get into that, let’s start with prayer.

Opening Prayer

In the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Come Holy Spirit, come be with us. Illuminate our hearts, illuminate our minds. Show us the truth of who we are and how God sees us. And let that truth, the truth of God’s love, sink into our hearts to the very depth of our being, so that in everything we may live out of His love and know that as truth. Amen. In the name of the Father, and of the son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

An Encounter With My Child

When my oldest was three years old, he woke us up around two AM calling out one night and he was kind of crying and sobbing and, “oh, daddy.” So I got up super tired and groggy and went and opened his door. And the first thing I noticed was that it just smelled terrible and then started to make out in the dark that he had thrown up all over himself and all over the bed, and that he was just miserable. Personally, I am fairly sensitive to smells. Um, and so walking into a vomit smelling room and seeing my son, there was a part of me that was, that just didn’t like it. There was, there was kind of like an objective, this is disgusting sort of thought.

But what I noticed and I was reflecting on later was my heart overflowed with compassion for my son that I saw him in that miserable state and I just wanted to go to him. And, and I went to him and picked him up and held him close and just gently, as gently as I could, brought him to the bathroom, stroking his hair, telling him how beautiful and good he is, telling him how much I love him, that we’re all going to be okay, that I’m going to take care of him. That seeing him there in misery, needing my help, that overcame all, all the other factors. I just wanted to be there and not just to fix things, to take care of things, but to show him deeply how good he was. I didn’t want this, this situation to make him feel bad at all. I didn’t want him to feel bad about inconveniencing his dad or making a mess. No, I just wanted him to know that he was precious and that he was going to be taken care of and we were going to be okay.

So I brought him to the bathroom, got him all cleaned up, talking to him gently, and then I got him down on the couch for a while to rest. And all this time, even just picking him up and holding him close, I got vomit on my shirt and I’m just around this smell and I’m taking care of it, but there’s a joy in my heart The whole time. I’m taking care of my boy, I’m serving him, I’m loving him. This is what I get to do as his dad. I get to love him here and now where he feels kind of ashamed and vulnerable where he feels miserable, I get to be the one that swoops in and picks him up. There was a real delight in it, even though all of my natural faculties hated it. I could objectively recognize that I hate these smells. I hate what this looks like. I don’t like the feel of this. But what dominated my heart was joy and love and compassion. When I was reflecting on it later, I had this this burst of a realization that I think this is how God sees us.

Calling Out to God

That’s how He sees me. Like I can have all of this disgusting broken parts of me that I’ve got all my sin and brokenness and the ways that I mess up and all these things that are wrong with me, and then I call for help. Say, daddy, I need you, daddy, daddy, and how much His heart must overflow with that compassion, how much He must long to just come and pick me up and take care of me and, and whisper beautiful words in my ear and show me how precious I am. It’s not that my sin isn’t ugly, but the ugliness of my sin doesn’t matter when He’s there because sees me. I’m His little precious one and He wants to pick me up and take care of me and tell me how proud He is of me, tell me how good I am. He wants to take care of everything. He delights that I would call out to Him and He could be the one that could come to me.

I think what gets us in trouble the most is that we don’t call out. We can see our own ugliness and we think that’s too much for God, that we won’t want to inconvenience God at two AM that we wouldn’t want to call Him into a stinky situation, but call out to Him, He’s your dad. Let Him come and clean you up, take care of you. And we think we can kind of wear them out because maybe I just threw up and I’ve been throwing up all night and I’ve been throwing up for weeks. Whatever that sin or whatever that weight or whatever that ugliness that you carry that you feel like it’s too much, too often, I can’t call out to God again. But again, He delights, He wants to be the one that you call. He wants to be the one that can come into your stinky room and pick you up and clean you up and lay you on the couch while gently stroking your hair and telling you how good you are.

We Are the Sons and Daughters of God

Apart from the John’s Gospel that really sticks with me is, I won’t get it quite right, but he talks about everyone who is a sin is a slave to sin. If the son makes you free, you’ll be free indeed, because the slave doesn’t have a permanent place in the household, but the son does. And when Jesus makes us free, He makes us sons and daughters. He makes us children of the house, and we have a permanent place. And I was thinking about this, is that the servant might actually act better, right? If you think about like the, the stories of big CEOs at a company and their kids come in and they’re kind of like, they’re terrible. They’re like, oh, my dad’s the, the CEO I can do whatever the hell I want. but the, the employee is like, my job’s on the line here, I could get fired.

So maybe the employee actually acts better, the servant actually acts better in the house, but the servant acts in fear. The servant acts in insecurity, whereas the son acts in security. The father won’t abandon me, the father won’t kick me out. And maybe that is what we’re called to a little bit, is to act maybe worse. Not trying to have it all together, not trying to do it exactly perfectly, but to be secure in Him, to be secure in His relationship. I have little kids now, and what do in the house is they have tantrums or they run around yelling or they’re too loud or they break the rules or they throw food on the ground. Or they tell funny jokes like they’re kids and they have all of their big emotions in this house in relationship with me and is actually coming out of a place of security. Because they know they belong, they know that any part of them can show up. That all of them, they’re welcome here. And so if they need to have big emotions, they can have big emotions here. They can mess up here, they can make mistakes. Maybe that’s actually what we’re called to in our relationship with the Father, to really rely on the security of being His little kids.

A Friend’s Struggle With God

I had a friend, who went through a reversion, few years ago, and just like really fell in love with God. She’d been away from God since her brother died years before or something. And so there was a lot of wrestling period, but then breaking through that, she really fell in love with God. But there were so many blocks in her heart still of how to deal with the anger that she still had. And I challenged her pretty directly. I said, you’re acting like God’s secretary, not like God’s daughter. She was super diligent, she would put herself to like big tasks and follow through, she would have long fasts. If she felt like God was calling her to go and pray with somebody, she would go and pray with that person. She was bold in following God, but at each step she was trying to do what she was supposed to do. She was trying to be God’s secretary. She was trying to be His servant and not His daughter.

And so what I challenged her to do, and actually what I challenge many people to do when they’re feeling stuck with God is to take a week or however long it takes and just tell God how angry you are. Tell God how angry you are at Him. Have tantrums in front of God, let Him see the big emotions, let it all come out. Call Him names if you need to. Blame Him, do whatever. You don’t need to follow the rules. Be a little kid with big emotions. And through that, God’s not going to be offended, God’s not going to be hurt. God’s not going to destroy you, but He’s going to work through that and actually develop a deeper security to say, yes, you are mine and I claim you in all of your big emotions, in all of your ugliness of sin. I claim you, you are mine And I love you. And so through that period, I think my friend took a whole month actually to just tell God how angry she was. And after that, a couple things happened.

She started to trust herself more, and she started to trust God more. Because before that, her anger was still there, but it was a part of herself that she couldn’t look at. She had to keep putting down. She couldn’t listen to that ever. So she was at war within herself. There was part of her that was good and part of her that was bad, and the good part was trying to keep down the bad part and destroy it, but the good part kept popping back, or the bad part kept popping back up. So she had this turmoil in herself where she couldn’t trust herself. So she was trying to understand God by listening to other people and doubting herself, disregarding herself. And because of that, she also couldn’t trust God as much because it felt like God didn’t really know her, that God was trying to impose His will on her.

But by being able to express herself really deeply, truly vulnerably messily, God was able to work through all of that and deepen the connection so she could start to see the real good within her anger. And God was able to actually show her more of the truth within her anger, while also showing her the distortion within her anger. So coming out of that, she learned to trust herself more. She learned to trust that she could hear God’s voice within her heart. And she learned to trust that God wasn’t trying to impose His will on her, making her do stuff like a secretary, but that He was aligned with her heart, that He was aligned with the true desires within her heart, and wanted to actually give her fullness, give her joy, draw her into eternal life with Him. And so, if you’re wrestling with this question of God, does God see me as good or bad? You are never going to answer that question just by keeping it theoretical. You have to put it on the line.

A Writing Exercise

So here’s a couple things I would suggest, is be honest and have tantrums. And this is how I want you to do it. We’re going to do a little writing assignment here. The first part of the writing assignment is I want you to write a letter to God. And in this letter, put it all out there, put it all out there. Write fast and messy. And I’m going to give you permission to say whatever you want. If you’re calling God names, if you’re telling Him how much you doubt Him, if you’re telling Him whatever you want, that you don’t trust Him, that you think He sees you as bad, whatever is coming up in your heart if you want to praise Him. So all the good things, all the bad things, all the messy things, have a little, just dump session on paper towards God, telling God what’s going on with his little kid, his little kid’s Got a lot in her heart or in his heart, and put it all in the paper.

And then after you’re done with that for part two, I want you to have God respond. Have Him write back to you. So take pen and paper and try to open yourself up to hear His voice, and then just start writing. Don’t, don’t think too much about it. Don’t try to like get too much into your theology or what God should say to you. But again, kind of fast and messy. Let Him respond to you. Let Him let Him speak back after you’ve just laid it all out there. Let Him say how he sees you. And in this, this is actually a practice that you can use going on, is to show yourself, and I’ve talked about this in, in the other talks that I’ve given too, show yourself to the Father and let Him see you. Let Him show you how He knows you, what He thinks of you, really wrestle with God. I’ve always described myself as having a fighting style with God because I like to put it on the line. I’m not going to treat God as if He’s fragile and soft.

But if He’s the almighty one and He loves me, I’m going to get into a fight with Him. I’m going to have a tantrum with Him. I’m going to really push into Him with my big questions, with my big emotions. I want to bring everything back to Him and fight. And through that interaction, He’s going to help me grow. He’s going to help me grow, founded in the security that I as a son, I have a permanent place in the house forever. He’s never going to get rid of me. He’s never going to cast me out. He’s never going to just say, oh, you didn’t make your, didn’t make your grades, you’re gone.

So take a risk on that and try it with this writing exercise, I found it to be really powerful. So the first step is just lay it all out there. You can have a think of it if you want, as like having a tantrum on the paper in letter form towards God. And then for the second part, let Him respond with your own writing. Try to open up and in a fast, messy way, like let Him respond and see what He says to you.

About Isaac Wicker

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