Episode
Who is that in the Mirror?
- Podcast
- Grace for All
- Published
- Aug 17, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 305
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Summary
Who's that in the mirror? Second Corinthians, chapter 3, verses 17 and 18 say, "The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Lord's Spirit is, there is freedom. All of us are looking with unveiled faces at the glory of the Lord as if we were looking in a mirror. We are being transformed into that same image from one degree of glory to the next degree of glory. This comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit." There's a famous painting by Norman Rockwell called Triple Self-Portrait . It shows the artist with his back turned to the viewer, looking at himself in a large mirror, and painting a shades-of-gray self-portrait. The Rockwell in the mirror wears glasses, but we cannot see his eyes; the lenses are flat white. The Rockwell he is painting wears no glasses, looking straight at the viewer with no obstruction. Obviously, when Rockwell looked in the mirror, he saw Rockwell—that is, he saw himself. But he transformed what he saw as he painted. When you or I look in a mirror, we expect to see ourselves. But when we look into the mirror that is the glory of the Lord, which seems to be a phrase that means Jesus Christ, we see not ourselves as we are, but as we can be. John Wesley talked about three kinds of grace: prevenient grace that draws us to God, justifying grace by which we are forgiven and made right with God through faith in Jesus Christ, and sanctifying grace—the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in our lives that transforms us into the likeness of Christ. Paul here tells the Corinthians about that ongoing work of sanctifying grace. There's another key idea in this scripture: transformation is an ongoing project. The Common English Bible accurately translates the original verb with the phrase "we are being transformed," not "we were transformed," or "we are transformed," or "w…