“So I get the bottle open, but something’s hit a nerve. And I’m looking in the mirror at the face that I deserve.”

These lyrics are from Mark Knopfler’s tune, “River Towns,” which appears on his latest album, Tracker. The song centers on an itinerant tugboat and barge worker who finds himself friendless at Christmastime in a small town along the Ohio River. A chance liaison with a young woman provides only momentary physical companionship, a shallow and ultimately meaningless substitute for what is truly missing in his life. He is left alone in a cheap hotel room with a bottle of alcohol and his own sad reflection in the mirror, a weathered, weary, and worn face staring back at him. “The face that I deserve” strikes me as such a tragic phrase, one that is overflowing with disappointment, regret, guilt, loneliness, lostness, grief over shattered dreams and aspirations, and a sense of hopelessness.

It is truly an unfathomable blessing that, through salvation in Jesus Christ, we are able to see ourselves, not as the world might think us to be or even as we once may have viewed ourselves, but as God sees us. What the Father beholds when He looks upon me as a son is not the face that I deserve, but the face of a child whose innocence and purity have been reclaimed and restored. The spiritual stains of transgression and the moral marring of iniquity have all been removed. The imperfections, wounds, and scars that sin so brutally inflicts upon our visage are entirely erased.

Where there was the sight of scarlet, there is now a blinding, snowy white; the reddest crimson now has the appearance of the whitest of wool. This is no mere surface transformation. It’s not just the creative retouching of our spiritual profile picture. It isn’t cosmetic, it’s intrinsic! Our very nature and essence have been changed. Through the grace and mercy of God extended through the sacrifice of Jesus His Son, God looks upon me just as I look upon Coleman; pure, innocent, whole, and guileless through the continual cleansing of the blood of Jesus.

“He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.” (Psalm 103:10-12)

“And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.” (II Corinthians 3:18)

The transformation is still in progress, and I’m still seeing the image in the mirror rather dimly. But, one day, face to face!

The face I don’t deserve.