When Love Opens Your Eyes
How the love of God changes what you see in people
There are people in your life right now you are struggling to see clearly.
Maybe it is someone who has hurt you and the wound is still too fresh to look past. Maybe it is a family member whose pattern of failure has worn you thin. Maybe it is a colleague you have already filed away under a label, or a person at church who frustrates you every time they open their mouth. Maybe it is someone in your own house.
We all carry a quiet gallery of people we have stopped expecting anything from. We are not cruel about it. We have just made our assessment and moved on.
But there is a way of seeing that is not native to us, and Paul tells us where it comes from.
Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us. (Romans 5:5, NKJV)
The word Paul uses here for “poured out” is ekcheo in the Greek.
It is the same word used of the blood of the martyrs. The same word used of the Spirit’s outpouring at Pentecost. It describes something that floods and overflows beyond the boundaries of containment. Paul is not describing a gentle trickle of divine warmth. He is describing the love of God breaking its banks inside the human heart.
And when the love of God floods a human heart, something changes. Not just how we feel, but how we see.
A Love We Could Never Produce
The love Paul is describing is not a stronger version of human affection. It is not the love of a parent for a child amplified, or the love of a friend for a friend purified, or the love of a spouse made more patient. It is another kind of love altogether, and it does not arise from us. Paul is careful with his grammar in Romans 5:5. The love is poured out, passive voice, by the Holy Spirit, who was given to us. The agency is entirely God’s. The love does not bubble up from our better nature. It is deposited from outside us, by a Person, into the place inside us where only God can reach.
This is what makes it supernatural in the strict sense. It is not a feeling we work up. It is not the fruit of disciplined kindness. It is agape, the love that has its origin in God Himself, and the only way it enters a human heart is by the Holy Spirit carrying it there.
There is something most people miss about this love. Human love is almost always response love. We see something attractive, worthy, or useful, and our love rises to meet it. We love what is already lovely. Agape runs in the opposite direction. It does not love what is already valuable. It places value on what it loves. The Father did not love us because we were lovely. We become lovely because He loves us. Agape is the only love in the universe that creates worth rather than detecting it. And when the Spirit pours that love into your heart, He is not just giving you warmer feelings. He is giving you a love that can confer worth on people who have none in their own eyes, and none in anyone else’s.
Human love, even at its best, has limits built into it. We love those who love us back. We love those who behave in ways we recognise as worthy of love. We love until we are betrayed, until the cost gets too high, and then we begin to ration. Our love is conditional almost by reflex, even when we are trying our hardest not to make it so. We are finite, and our love is finite with us.
The love the Spirit pours in does not work this way. It loved us when we were still enemies, as Paul says four verses later in Romans 5. It loves the unlovely without first negotiating terms. It does not weaken under the weight of someone else’s failure. It does not measure what it gives against what it receives. It loves the way the Father loves, because it is the Father’s own love placed inside us by the Spirit who knows the depths of God.
This is why you cannot teach yourself to love your enemies, your difficult relatives, the person who wounded you. The flesh has no category for that kind of love. It can manage politeness. It can manage forgiveness as a duty. It cannot generate the seeking, building love the Father has for the people who broke His heart. Only the Spirit can put that love in you, and He does, freshly, every time you ask Him to pour it out again.
A Different Way of Seeing
Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:16 that because of Christ we no longer regard anyone kata sarka, according to the flesh. That way of seeing catalogues only what is visible: a person’s history, their failures, their present state, their reputation. It evaluates by what is, not by what God has determined.
But when the love of God has been poured into us, we begin to carry another gaze entirely. The Spirit sees a person’s destination while the flesh can only see the departure point.
This is not naivety. It is not soft sentimentality that excuses sin or ignores reality. It is a fierceness of love that refuses to reduce a person to their worst moment. It sees them through the blood of Jesus and in light of the call of God on their life.
The Father’s Gaze
When Jesus looked at impulsive, unreliable Simon and called him Peter, a rock, He was not describing what He saw in the natural. He was speaking what the Father had already determined. That is what love-shaped seeing produces. Not flattery. Not wishful thinking. The Father’s own verdict spoken over a life.
Think of the prodigal’s father. While the son was still a great way off, the father saw him, recognised him, and ran. The father’s eyes were already trained on the horizon long before the son’s repentance brought him into view. That is the gaze love produces in a heart. It is watching for the return before there is any sign of it. It is recognising the child in the rags. It is running while others are still calculating whether the boy deserves to be received.
When Jesus looked at the woman at the well, He did not see the five husbands first. He saw a worshipper waiting to be uncovered. When He looked at Zacchaeus in the tree, He did not see the corrupt taxman first. He saw a son of Abraham who needed to come down so salvation could come to his house. The flesh would have started with the failure. Love starts with the future.
You Cannot Manufacture This
You cannot work this kind of seeing up by effort. You cannot decide to be more positive about people and produce it. The eyes of love are the overflow of a heart that has been flooded.
This is why Paul prays in Ephesians 3 that we would be rooted and grounded in love and would know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. He is not describing a doctrinal lesson. He is describing a saturation. The more deeply the love of God settles into the soil of a human heart, the more naturally it begins to spill out through the eyes.
A heart that has not received love sees through suspicion. A heart that has been filled with love sees through the lens of what the Father is building.
Pray for the ekcheo again. Not as a memory of something that happened at conversion. As a present, daily, repeated flooding. The Spirit who was given to us has not run dry. He is still poured out. And every fresh outpouring changes what we are able to see in the people around us.
Prayer
Father, flood me again. Pour out Your love in my heart by the Holy Spirit, not as a memory of something that happened once, but as a present and living reality. Let it overflow into the way I see the people around me today.
Give me the eyes of Jesus. Eyes that see past the surface, past the failure, past the present state, into the gold of what You are building. Let me carry Your gaze.
Amen.
Going Deeper Today
Think of one person in your life who is hard to see beyond their present struggle or failure. Ask the Holy Spirit to show you what the Father sees when He looks at them. What is He building? What has He already determined? Carry that picture with you today, and let it shape how you speak, how you respond, and how you pray.
Word Study
Ekcheo (Greek): to pour out, to flood, to overflow. Used in Acts 2:17 of the Spirit’s outpouring, and in Romans 5:5 of the love of God. Not a gentle drip. An overflow.
Agape (Greek): the love of God. Worth knowing: this word was relatively colourless in classical Greek. Eros and philiawere the prestigious words for love. The early church did not borrow a famous Greek word for the love of God. They took a quiet, available one and poured a meaning into it the Greeks had never imagined a love could hold. The word we use today still carries the fingerprint of that revolution.
Kata sarka (Greek): according to the flesh. The way of seeing Paul renounces in 2 Corinthians 5:16. It evaluates a person by what is visible and present rather than by what God has determined.
If this devotional ministered to you, consider sharing it with someone who needs new eyes for the people in front of them.
Glenn Bleakney writes at Awake Nations, exploring the Gospel of the Kingdom, the supernatural life of the Spirit, and what it means to live as the awakened church.