When I was younger, I developed a terrible habit. I would listen to sermons and think about all the people I know who should be hearing the message because it dealt with an area of sin I saw in their lives. Sometimes, this would happen when the folks I was thinking about were actually in the room with me. In those cases, I would find myself peeking over to see if they were paying attention and learning their lesson. I was young and dumb back then. Now that I am older, and hopefully wiser (or at least less dumb), I would pay good money for the opportunity to know how many folks were looking at me to see if I was learning my lesson. One of the best things I’ve learned as a follower of Jesus is found in Matthew 7 and is, I believe, one of the most misquoted passages in the scriptures. Jesus warns his disciples not to judge, lest they be judged by the same standard they apply to others. He goes on to illustrate his point through exaggeration. He warns folks not to point out a speck of sawdust in their neighbor’s eye, while ignoring the log in their own eye. It’s easy to take this passage at its face value and say that we should never apply standards in any situation. It’s also easy to try to find a loophole to make it ok to look down on the people around us. Many people misquote the verse to make this point. I think Jesus is talking about what I was doing when I was young. I was so busy looking for other people’s sins and judging myself to be superior, that I could listen to whole sermons and miss any opportunity to see my own faults. I would judge the sawdust in the eye of the guy in the next pew, while missing the elements of the sermon that applied to the log in my own. Sin is easy to see in other people’s lives. Even worse, it’s easy to miss our own sin because we have to sin to begin with. This is why Jesus talks about sawdust and eyes in his illustration. Getting junk in your eyes is blinding. Specifically, sin tends to blind us to our own sin. This blindness often has the opposite effect on our ability to see imperfection in others, largely because concentrating on others makes us seem better. There is another piece to this teaching. Central to Christianity is the teaching that we are all sinners and that we are only made right by Jesus dying in our place, taking punishment on our behalf, and securing our forgiveness. Judging other people for their sins is sort of like ignoring the fact that we needed forgiveness too. We aren’t forgiven because of anything we do, but rather because God is forgiving. This should change us. When we look at other folks struggling with temptation, a forgiven person should empathize with the hardship and pray for the other person to overcome it. Judgment is like throwing a cinderblock to a drowning man, when we should offer them a life preserver. I am not advocating ignoring wrong behavior. Rather, I am talking about the attitude that we approach our own sins with and how we deal with other folks who struggle.
