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An Angry Ant
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Matthew 7:5 What a hypocrite you are! First, take the wood out of your own eye. Then you will see clearly to take the dust out of your friend's eye.
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Download audio fileAnger is simply a fact of life. We all get angry from time to time. It’s a natural reaction to provocation, to threat, to pain. And yet anger, if we allow it to take root in our hearts, can quickly turn into rage. It can cause us to say and do some terrible things.
I spent just over the first half of my life as an angry ant. Always angry with everyone and everything. Why? Because I had a right to be. People didn’t meet up to my expectations. What’s the matter with them?!
Until one day, I realised that I was being much harder on others, than I was prepared to be on myself. It’s amazing how tough we can be on others, and yet how much slack we’re prepared to cut ourselves. Jesus has a name for that sort of double standard.
What a hypocrite you are! First, take the wood out of your own eye. Then you will see clearly to take the dust out of your friend’s eye. (Matthew 7:5)
No one likes a hypocrite. It’s this terrible duplicity, this terrible double standard. You know that old line, do as I say, not as I do.
When I met Jesus on my journey over twenty-two years ago now, when I started taking Him seriously, listening to Him, spending time in the Bible, it was like holding a mirror up to my face. I was this ugly, self-righteous character constantly pointing out the speck in someone else’s eye when I had a log in my own. And those specks would make me so angry.
As I reflect on that, it just reminds me how stupid that is. But there you have it. That’s how many people live today, when all along, the truth is, that you and I can’t, by and large, change other people. But what we can do, is to get ourselves sorted out; our attitudes, our anger, our selfishness, our hypocrisy.
What situation, what relationship are you dealing with in your life, right at this moment that would benefit from a change of tack? How might you bring healing and peace and reconciliation, simply by dealing with your own bad attitudes?
Because unless and until we remove the log from our own eye, that speck in the other guy’s eye is pretty much irrelevant.
That’s God’s Word. Fresh … for you … today.
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