I flew to India, a land I’d never visited, and arrived at the Bengaluru airport after midnight. Though there’d been a flurry of emails, I didn’t know who was picking me up or where I should meet him. I followed the streaming mass of humanity to the baggage claim and customs, then out into the sticky night where I tried to spot a pair of friendly eyes among the sea of faces. For an hour, I walked back and forth in front of the crowd, hoping someone would recognize me. A kind man finally approached. “Are you Winn?” he asked. “I’m so sorry. I thought I’d recognize you, and you kept walking in front of me—but you didn’t look how I expected.”

We regularly get confused and fail to recognize people or places we should know. God provides an unmistakable way of recognizing Him, however. He arrived in our world as Jesus, who “is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of [God’s] being” (Hebrews 1:3). Christ is God’s exact representation. When we see Him, we have complete confidence that we are seeing God.

If we want to know what God is like—what He would say, how He would love—then we need only look and listen to Jesus. Are we truly hearing what “he has spoken” (v. 2) through Him? Are we actually following His truth? To be sure that we know how to recognize God, we fix our gaze on the Son and learn from Him.