Jesus saw Zacheus well up in a tree and knew that he’d worked out ways to compensate for his lack of height. The short taxman climbed down at the Lord’s command and confessed that he was ready to put things right.
Our spiritual shortcomings are more the issue than our lack of physical stature though; the biggest being our inability to see ourselves as God does. Jesus saw a Samaritan woman’s life as being one of false securities and failed relationships. She later described his words as a summation of “everything I ever did.” It wasn’t. He had simply discerned the two biggest issues in her life.
Can we discern the biggest issues in our lives? Not until our reactions to prophetic insight brings to light things about us that we’d have preferred to have left private.
King Hezekiah was a good king overall. His spiritual model was King David. In the very first year of his reign, he reopened the temple, purified it, and cleansed the priest’s quarters. He restored true worship after the Davidic manner, reinstated the Feast of Passover, cleansed the land of its idols, and made proper provision for the priesthood.
During an invasion by Assyria, the first world empire, he saw God’s power revealed when 180,000 enemy soldiers surrounding Jerusalem were slain in a single night. But when ambassadors from Babylon asked Hezekiah about that miracle — the greatest in his life (2 Kings 20:7-11), Hezekiah’s hidden pride surfaced, and he showed them all his possessions. God had “left him to test him, to know all that was in his heart.” (2 Chronicles 32:31)
Surprise, surprise! The Lord had known that pride was in him, but the good king hadn’t — until the flattery of his visitors surfaced it. The one good thing that came out of all this was that the king had time to rid himself of his pride.
Maybe we too ought to ask God to show us what is hidden deep within us. A thing that might someday surface and bring unwanted trouble. We could then repent beforehand. After all, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”