Have you ever failed to check yourself, and ended up wrecking yourself? I have. A lot.
Take, for example, the time I ruined our family vacation to the Grand Canyon. Standing on the south rim, soaking in the view and looking for a good spot to take a picture, I decided to drag up some past emotional baggage I had with my dad right there in front of God and everybody in my family. Tears were shed. Voices were raised. Car doors were slammed. Prairie dogs were frightened.
Now, don’t get me wrong; this conversation wasn’t just out of the blue. Some things had happened that day that reminded me of those emotions, and like the steely, self-controlled grown man that I was, I naturally just couldn’t help myself and overflowed with some nasty words. But if I had been a little more self-aware, a little less self-righteous, and a lot more considerate of the rest of my family, I don’t think I would’ve so quickly forgotten (or ignored?) my own failures, both that day and in the days of the past.
I’ve been writing a series here on friends; what is the best kind of friend to have? How can I be the best friend I can be? Jesus gave us a pretty good discourse on those questions called the Sermon on the Mount, and in today’s portion, He addresses checking yourself before you not just wreck yourself, but before you wreck others.
“Do not judge, so that you won’t be judged. For you will be judged by the same standard with which you judge others, and you will be measured by the same measure you use.”
Matthew 7:1-2 CSB
Jesus gets right to His point: the instant you start judging other people for their faults, you fling the door open for them to start judging you. Are you sure you can handle that? You do know that when you criticize them for what they said, they’re just going to turn around and dig into your life to find the last time you said the same thing? “You will be judged by the same standard with which judge others.“
This is why the Bible is so amazing – Jesus said these words over 2,000 years ago and they’re still insanely relevant today. Y’all, this happens to me always. I don’t think a week goes by where I don’t instinctively judge in my mind that I’m better than somebody else because of what they’re doing or saying. Now let me be clear: I hate that I am instinctively this way; it is not my goal and I do not value it highly in the slightest. But it is often my gut reaction, regardless whether I like it or not.
Jesus says I better be careful judging people like that; as soon as I do, I allow them to turn it around on me. So if I’m going to make a comment about somebody else’s faults, I DEFINITELY better have my own issues in that arena handled. But that’s what makes this such a complicated thing; there isn’t a person on earth who has all their problems under control. Our faults sabotage us all.
Jesus didn’t just want to make His points and move on. No, He always made sure that everyone who was listening would have no excuse for not understanding Him. So He gives an example to ensure He is as clear as possible:
“Why do you look at the splinter in your brother’s eye but don’t notice the beam of wood in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the splinter out of your eye,’ and look, there’s a beam of wood in your own eye?”
Matthew 7:3-4 CSB
Can you imagine somebody with a beam in their eye? How ridiculous would that be? A 10-foot long 2×4 just sitting there in your eye socket, bumping into everything and everyone, not to mention the damage it’s probably doing to your own eye. Crazy. But that’s exactly what Jesus is trying to say: your sin is obvious. You’re not fooling anybody when you act like you’ve never done anything wrong, or that you’re not currently doing something wrong. Your sin is just as bad as the next person’s. And most importantly, the only way to live a life that even hints that it’s not true is to straight up ignore that plank sticking out of your face. You can’t avoid your own faults and then turn around and try to fix everybody else’s. You need to acknowledge this. I need to acknowledge this. Otherwise, we’re all walking around with 2×4’s in our eyes destroying everything.
Think about it – you’ve probably been in this situation already, and I’m sure you’ve hated it. Let me help you see it better with a story.
As the oldest of 4 siblings, my behavior was constantly under scrutiny; from my parents as well all three of my younger sisters. When we were younger, one of my sisters and I shared a room at the end of a t-shaped hallway that you would enter at the center. From that entrance, which was probably not even 10 feet from the bedroom door, you could look across the dining room and into the living room to see the TV. So naturally, as a 6-year-old who definitely didn’t want to go to bed, it was super tempting for me to sneak down the hall and poke my head around the door frame of the hallway to see the TV. I watched a lot of Whose Line is it Anyway from that doorway. But without fail, nearly every single time I would sneak to the hall, my sister would eventually realize what I’d done, and sitting in her bed, with a sinister grin on her face, she would call out in a sing-song voice, “Bubby’s out of be-ed!” and I would sprint back to my bed to avoid getting in trouble. And I was fuming. Why? Because I knew that five minutes later, she would do the same exact thing. So naturally I’d call out the exact same accusation: “Sissy’s out of be-ed!” And around and around we we would go.
We hate when people call us out because who are they to tell us why we’re wrong? Did they just forget how bad they messed up yesterday? Who says they get to be the ones who criticize our behavior? This is Jesus’s point exactly. You can’t believe you’re actually somebody’s friend if all you ever do is avoid your own faults. Real friends don’t avoid their faults; fake friends do.
This is a massive reason why so many people get away with terrible behavior. Everybody is avoiding their faults, so whenever a friend of ours does something wrong, one of two things will happen: either we call them out and they turn it right back on us (which always results in more hurt, never in more help), or we say nothing at all because we know we have our own faults but we don’t do anything about them, and the abuse of human dignity continues.
So, what-are we stuck in this forever? Do we have any other options besides endless pain and division? Well, yes we do, but you’re probably not going to like it very much.
“Hypocrite! First take the beam of wood out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to take the splinter out of your brother’s eye.”
Matthew 7:5 CSB
Now look, I need to make sure we understand what Jesus is not saying here: He is not saying that we never call out our friends. Do you see that? Often, our friends do genuinely wrong things and need to be brought to reckon with it because they sure as heck aren’t going to do it on their own. Jesus knows this, but He also knows that our own failures in the areas we call others out on need to be addressed first, otherwise they’ll sabotage us before any good is ever done and everybody only ends up hurt. So He says to take care of your own problem, and then go for your friend’s. The order of events is the issue here. Avoiding our faults and jumping on others’ creates an attitude in our hearts that is destructive, and the only kind of destruction Jesus stands for is the destruction of sin and of destructive behavior like this.
Here’s why I don’t think you are going to like this very much: removing the plank from your own eye is a process that nobody envies going through, even though we all want the results it will bring. Here’s what I mean:
When I was 21, I fell off a 50-foot cliff in the Ozarks. Not a joke. It was awful; a concussion, 30 stitches in my forehead, broken elbow, shattered foot (the doctor said it literally looked like someone had crushed the top of my foot with a sledgehammer), and cuts, scrapes, and bruises all over my body. Legitimately the worst pain I have ever experienced in my life. When I fell, I was wearing Chacos (outdoors sandals), and the rock I hit cut a gash in my left heel so deep it needed staples instead of stitches. When I finally made it to the emergency room (nearly 4 hours after I fell), that gash was going to bleed so bad I’d have lifelong damage unless they did something fast. So they stapled it, with zero anesthetic and zero warning to me.
And I felt every single part of it.
To this day, I believe that 10 seconds of stapling was the most painful part of the entire experience, surgery and therapy included. But without it, my heel wouldn’t have just hurt me – it would’ve been detrimental. I don’t want to relive that for a second. But my body was broken, and it was in desperate need of repair. But the repair that it needed was unavoidably painful.
Our hearts (the center of your thoughts, actions, and emotions) are even worse off than my body was when I fell. Look what the Bible says about us:
“The heart is more deceitful than anything else,
Jeremiah 17:9 CSB
and incurable—who can understand it?”
“The fool says in his heart, ‘There’s no God.’
Psalm 53:1-3 CSB
They are corrupt, and they do vile deeds.
There is no one who does good.
God looks down from heaven on the human race[a]
to see if there is one who is wise,
one who seeks God.
All have turned away;
all alike have become corrupt.
There is no one who does good,
not even one.”
Ever had open-heart surgery? They literally have to break your rib cage open just to get to your heart in the first place, let alone all the stuff they have to cut and stitch and break and re-set to do the actual surgery. They have to put you under because it’s literally so painful that the shock alone could kill you before any bones broke all the way. When something is deeply connected to another thing and it shouldn’t be, removing it is not an easy or enjoyable process. It straight up hurts. Our sin is corrupting our hearts, but none of us want to walk through that pain, so we avoid it by ignoring our sin. But the very definition of sin is moral failure; an inability to hit the mark set for decent and right human behavior.
And we wonder why so many people are using others to feel better about themselves.
The only way to get the plank out of your eye is to quit avoiding it, admit that it’s there, and let the surgeon work. That’s it. There is no other way. You can’t be the friend God made you to be until you admit that you can’t do life alone. You need God because you are poor in spirit.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
Matthew 5:3 CSB
for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.”
People who know that they’re poor in spirit check themselves first. They draw the circle around themselves and let God fix those things before they go around and start trying to fix everybody else. They’re real friends because the fact that they know their own faults and admit them makes them humble enough to ask others to help them fix their faults instead of avoiding them until somebody else has to point it out to them.
Fake friends avoid their faults, but real friends admit them. Do you want good friends? Be a good friend and realize you’re poor in spirit. It’ll drastically change the way you treat other people. There’s only one person in the history of the human race who did nothing wrong and could justifiably criticize others without having to check Himself, and He didn’t. He took that criticism and accusation on Himself and paid for all of it.
Real friends can admit their faults because they know Jesus already died for them.
So what kind of friend are you?
Ty Hirsch 