What God Sees

“For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”

— 1 Samuel 16:7

When the prophet Samuel went to the house of Jesse to anoint the next king of Israel, he assumed he knew exactly what he was looking for. Jesse’s eldest son, Eliab, stood before him—strong, impressive, and looking very much like a king. Samuel immediately thought, Surely the Lord’s anointed is before me.

But God stopped him.

“Do not consider his appearance or his height… For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7)

One by one, Jesse’s sons passed before Samuel, and each was rejected. The one God had chosen was the youngest son, David—the shepherd boy no one had even thought to bring to the gathering.

The lesson was simple, but profound: what human beings notice first is not what God values most.

We are creatures of sight. We notice beauty, style, youth, strength, and confidence. We make judgments quickly, often without realizing we are doing it. Even in spaces that are meant to be welcoming and affirming—including our own LGBTQ+ communities—it can be easy to measure people by how they look.

And I’ll admit something here: on this blog I often post images of beautiful men. I appreciate beauty. Most of us do.

But the truth is that the outward beauty we see is never the whole story of a person.

The body we see is only the doorway to the heart God sees.

Scripture reminds us again and again that the deeper truth of a person lies beyond what we first notice. Proverbs tells us that “a person’s wisdom yields patience” (Proverbs 19:11). Peter writes that true beauty is “the hidden person of the heart” (1 Peter 3:4). And when the apostle Paul speaks of Christian community, he urges believers to look beyond appearances and recognize one another through love (2 Corinthians 5:16).

God’s vision is different from ours. God sees kindness that others overlook. God sees courage in someone who feels afraid. God sees tenderness behind a guarded face. God sees faith in someone who thinks they are barely holding on.

And perhaps most importantly for many LGBTQ+ people who have spent years feeling judged or misunderstood—God sees the truth of who we are when others only see the surface.

The beautiful truth of 1 Samuel 16:7 is not that appearances are bad. It’s that appearances are incomplete.

Every person you encounter carries a story within them. Every smile, every laugh, every body we admire belongs to a heart full of experiences, wounds, hopes, and love. When we take the time to truly know someone—to listen, to care, to see them as more than what meets the eye—we begin to see people a little more the way God sees them.

And often, what we discover is that the beauty we noticed at first was only the beginning.

Because the most radiant beauty is not the body someone shows the world.

It is the heart God already knows.