A Speck and a Log
"Stop judging others, and you will not be judged. For others will treat you as you treat them. Whatever measure you use in judging others, it will be used to measure how you are judged. And why worry about a speck in your friend's eye when you have a log in your own? How can you think of saying, 'Let me help you get rid of that speck in your eye,' when you can't see past the log in your own eye? Hypocrite! First get rid of the log from your own eye; then perhaps you will see well enough to deal with the spec in in your friend's eye." Matthew 7.1-6 (NLT)
Judging others. A part of our lives that is difficult for all of us. How easy it is for us to look around to those around us and evaluate and question their lives and how easy it is for us to tell them they need to change. How easy it is for us to criticize what is that they are doing. How easy it is to be someone on the outside, judging those whom we encounter and pick apart all that they are and what they are doing.
I think we can compare it to a teacher in a sense. Let's think about it. We work hard on a paper. We pour hours upon hours into what it is that we have been assigned to write about and we do research, we interview people, we work hard on this paper. After hours of revision and pushing the spellcheck button a million times, we print off our good work, well in our own opinions we are handing in good work. We take our paper with a grin on our face and pass it forward, drop it in our instructors mailbox or we email it, nonetheless we hand it in with confidence. Now we wait in anticipation.
Days pass, we get busy doing other work and we simply forget about what it is that we handed in. Then the day comes and we get our papers back. Slowly our instructor hands out our papers, calling off the names and you wait with anticipation. The adrenaline begins to kick in more and those moths in your stomach turn into over sized monarchs. Then your name is read aloud. You walk up and the instructor hands your paper face down to you. You turn in over and then you feel sick. You see red marks and blue marks, this correction & that correction, this suggestion and that suggestion, and you look and you did not get what you thought or wanted. Immediately you may feel a variety of emotions. Confusion, despair, bitterness, anger, and hopelessness. You go through all of this all because of criticism on your paper. Of course, you come to realize that no one did well and your instructor schedules times for you to come in and discuss what it is that she expects, what you did not do and what you did great. Through this conversation you come to learn what it means to become a better writer or you learn how to handle criticism better.
Now this may or may not apply to what it is that Jesus is teaching about here. Again I only tell this story so that we could have an idea, an analogy of what it is like when we hear others criticize something of ours that means a lot to us. They may not know the full story, they may not understand all that we put into it, they may not know the importance of why we do/did what we do/did, but they take this piece of work and rip it apart, critiquing and looking at it with eyes that are looking for places we messed up. (Also again I realize I probably could have used a better analogy knowing that this is what instructors/professors/teachers are to do. We learn from them and lean on them for their knowledge. So imagine this teacher as being bogus. See we are already judging them and not knowing truthfully why they do what it is they do.)
What about those we are frustrated with in our lives? Those who do things that go against our own flow of life. Those who drive us nuts because their lifestyles are those that are not honoring to God. But h ow can we be angry or judgemental towards them if in our own lives we do not have "it all together". Often times we look at people and judge them for their actions because those same things that bother us are the same issues that we too are struggling with. Often times our bad habits or the traits that bother us in others are often the traits and habits that we have ourselves. Do you find it easy to magnify others' faults while excusing your own? If you are ready to go out and judge those whom you see not doing something you think they shouldn't be doing, ask the question, am I magnifying this person's mishaps only so mine do not seem so problematic?
If you want your friends or those whom you are judgemental towards to change their habits or to stop being so hypocritical, then we must take a step back, look and evaluate that log that is dwelling in our own eye and begin to take steps forward to working out our own issues before we can point out the speck in theirs. We must also understand that we are all created differently. So we must look past little petty things that separate us and cause frustrations in our relationships. But for those greater issues, again, may we be in prayer for them but also may we be in prayer for ourselves that we too may recognize the hypocrisy that we have stored up in our lives. Judge yourself first, and then lovingly forgive and help your neighbor.
Praise, honor and glory to God!
Judging others. A part of our lives that is difficult for all of us. How easy it is for us to look around to those around us and evaluate and question their lives and how easy it is for us to tell them they need to change. How easy it is for us to criticize what is that they are doing. How easy it is to be someone on the outside, judging those whom we encounter and pick apart all that they are and what they are doing.
I think we can compare it to a teacher in a sense. Let's think about it. We work hard on a paper. We pour hours upon hours into what it is that we have been assigned to write about and we do research, we interview people, we work hard on this paper. After hours of revision and pushing the spellcheck button a million times, we print off our good work, well in our own opinions we are handing in good work. We take our paper with a grin on our face and pass it forward, drop it in our instructors mailbox or we email it, nonetheless we hand it in with confidence. Now we wait in anticipation.
Days pass, we get busy doing other work and we simply forget about what it is that we handed in. Then the day comes and we get our papers back. Slowly our instructor hands out our papers, calling off the names and you wait with anticipation. The adrenaline begins to kick in more and those moths in your stomach turn into over sized monarchs. Then your name is read aloud. You walk up and the instructor hands your paper face down to you. You turn in over and then you feel sick. You see red marks and blue marks, this correction & that correction, this suggestion and that suggestion, and you look and you did not get what you thought or wanted. Immediately you may feel a variety of emotions. Confusion, despair, bitterness, anger, and hopelessness. You go through all of this all because of criticism on your paper. Of course, you come to realize that no one did well and your instructor schedules times for you to come in and discuss what it is that she expects, what you did not do and what you did great. Through this conversation you come to learn what it means to become a better writer or you learn how to handle criticism better.
Now this may or may not apply to what it is that Jesus is teaching about here. Again I only tell this story so that we could have an idea, an analogy of what it is like when we hear others criticize something of ours that means a lot to us. They may not know the full story, they may not understand all that we put into it, they may not know the importance of why we do/did what we do/did, but they take this piece of work and rip it apart, critiquing and looking at it with eyes that are looking for places we messed up. (Also again I realize I probably could have used a better analogy knowing that this is what instructors/professors/teachers are to do. We learn from them and lean on them for their knowledge. So imagine this teacher as being bogus. See we are already judging them and not knowing truthfully why they do what it is they do.)
What about those we are frustrated with in our lives? Those who do things that go against our own flow of life. Those who drive us nuts because their lifestyles are those that are not honoring to God. But h ow can we be angry or judgemental towards them if in our own lives we do not have "it all together". Often times we look at people and judge them for their actions because those same things that bother us are the same issues that we too are struggling with. Often times our bad habits or the traits that bother us in others are often the traits and habits that we have ourselves. Do you find it easy to magnify others' faults while excusing your own? If you are ready to go out and judge those whom you see not doing something you think they shouldn't be doing, ask the question, am I magnifying this person's mishaps only so mine do not seem so problematic?
If you want your friends or those whom you are judgemental towards to change their habits or to stop being so hypocritical, then we must take a step back, look and evaluate that log that is dwelling in our own eye and begin to take steps forward to working out our own issues before we can point out the speck in theirs. We must also understand that we are all created differently. So we must look past little petty things that separate us and cause frustrations in our relationships. But for those greater issues, again, may we be in prayer for them but also may we be in prayer for ourselves that we too may recognize the hypocrisy that we have stored up in our lives. Judge yourself first, and then lovingly forgive and help your neighbor.
Praise, honor and glory to God!
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