September 29
September 29
It is spiritually dangerous to be more concerned about the sin of others than you are about your own.
It happens to husbands and wives. It happens to parents. It happens to adult children. It happens to ministry staffs. It happens to neighbors. It happens in friendships. It happens in the workplace. It happens in every situation where we live and work with others. We focus more on the sin of others than on our own sin. This spiritually dangerous habit is a function of self-righteousness that enables us to argue within ourselves that our sin is not so sinful after all.
Apart from God, no one is more influential in our lives than we are, because no one talks to us more than we do. We are in a constant conversation with ourselves, and what we say to ourselves about ourselves forms how we live and understand the nature of our need for God’s grace. Near the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus addresses this, pointedly and graphically:
Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, “Let me take the speck out of your eye,” when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye. (Matt. 7:1–5)
Whenever you minimize your own sin, you deny your need for the forgiving, restoring, transforming, and empowering grace of your Savior. The deceit here is that focusing on another’s sin makes you feel morally superior and righteous, when in fact you are tolerating glaring and obvious sin in your life. Husbands do this when they focus on the little failures of their wives and not on the enormous anger they have harbored over the years. Friends do this when they focus on the small failures of a friend and not their own long-term patterns of gossip. Parents do this when they obsess over their children’s failures and not on their own unkind and unloving patterns of dealing with them.
It is never healthy to be more watchful for the sin of others than you are for your own. The fruit of this is a self-righteous denial of your need for the gospel of God’s redeeming grace. We must all remember that Jesus came to rescue us not from our neighbor, but from ourselves.