point of view

“So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer.” 2 Corinthians 5:16

See yourself as God sees you. Not as your mother saw you. Not as your ex saw you. Not as the doctor, the teacher, or the version of yourself you replay at three in the morning. I have heard some believers say to themselves, when something’s gone wrong, “Stupid! I’m so stupid!”

Psalm 139:14 says, “I praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvellous are Your works.” Genesis 1:27 reminds us, “So God created mankind in his own image.” You are not a label. And what you believe about yourself is what you end up living out. That matters more than we like to admit.

There’s a study that shows just how powerful a label can be, and how easily it outlasts the truth. In 1973, psychologist David Rosenhan sent eight healthy volunteers into psychiatric hospitals, each one claiming to hear a voice say a single word, then behaving completely normally from that point on. All eight were admitted and diagnosed with serious mental illness. None of them were actually ill, but once they’d been labelled, everything they did got read as a symptom. One man taking notes was logged as “writing behaviour.” They stayed an average of 19 days, and not a single one was discharged as healthy; their notes simply read “in remission.” Staff never once suspected anything was off. These were sane people telling the plain truth, and they still couldn’t talk their way out of a label once it had been written on them.
When the study made headlines, one hospital was convinced it would never fall for the same trick. Send us some fakers, they told Rosenhan, and we’ll catch every one. He agreed, but never actually sent anyone. Over the following months, the hospital still flagged 41 out of 193 genuine patients as impostors. Once a label gets attached to someone, it’s remarkably hard to see past it.

Think about that for a second. Not one of those volunteers could reason, behave, or explain their way out of a label that had already decided who they were. That’s how heavy a wrong word can be. Now think about the words you have been carrying, maybe for years: failure, unwanted, damaged, too much, not enough. Someone else wrote those over you, and you have been living inside them ever since, letting them read your every move back to you as proof. That’s not something to shrug off. It’s a false word sitting in the place where God’s true word belongs, and it’ll keep shaping you for as long as you let it stay there.

But that label isn’t your final word. 2 Corinthians 5:17 says, “if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” Whatever the world has written over you, unstable, broken, not enough, God has already written over it. Ephesians 2:10 calls you his workmanship, made on purpose, for a purpose.

A true word left unspoken doesn’t do you much good, though. You have to actually take hold of it, speak it over yourself, and push back the old label when it tries to have its say again. This isn’t just a nice idea. It’s a choice you make daily: whose word will you believe about yourself today, the one written by people who only ever saw the surface, or the one written by the God who made you? Hold onto His word about you the same way you’d defend your own name, because that’s exactly what it is now.

“The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” 1 Samuel 16:7

Now I speak over you the words spoke over Isreal: “I will say to the north, ‘Give them up!’ and to the south, ‘Do not hold them back.’ Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.” Come forth and be whom you are created to be in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Kay Alli