DON’T
LOOK AT ME

Topics: Behavior; Darkness; Disobedience; Hiding; Lifestyle; Light; Sin; Temptation; Worldliness

References: Genesis 3:8–10; John 3:19–21; Romans 3:23; 1 Corinthians 4:5; Galatians 5:1, 13; Ephesians 2:3; 5:11; James 1:14–15, 22–25; 1 John 1:5–9

A little girl discovered the secret to making mud one day, which she called “warm chocolate.” After her grandmother cleaned up the mess, she told little Larissa not to make any more chocolate.

The little girl soon resumed making her chocolate, saying sweetly, “Don’t look at me, Nana. OK?” Nana, being a little codependent, agreed.

Larissa continued to work the mud, but three times she said, “Don’t look at me, Nana. OK?”

“Thus the tender soul of a little child shows us how necessary it is to us that we be unobserved in our wrong,” writes Dallas Willard, a professor in the School of Philosophy at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and author of numerous resources on spiritual formation.

Anytime we choose to do wrong or to withhold doing right, we choose hiding as well. It may be that out of all the prayers that are ever spoken, the most common one—the quietest one, the one that we least acknowledge making—is simply this: Don’t look at me, God.

It was the very first prayer spoken after the fall. God came to walk in the garden to be with the man and the woman and called, “Where are you?”

“I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid,” Adam answered, “so I hid.”

Don’t look at me, God.

—John Ortberg, God Is Closer Than You Think (Zondervan, 2005)