April 23 - Matthew 7:3-5

April 23 - Matthew 7:3-5

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

One of the classes I've been taking for my Master’s Degree is called “Christian Worldview and Contextualization.”  Exciting stuff, eh? While most of it is over-the-top boring, the main point of the course has been to expose us to other worldviews and how Christianity is impacted by and how it impacts culture. In other words, just because we see the world from one perspective doesn't mean that someone else is wrong in their perceptions.

What continues to be driven home to me is just how narrowly focused the Christian’s worldview is in the United States. The things we focus on are minutiae in terms of what the largest percentage of people in the world have to deal with.

Jesus asks his disciples to remove the plank from their own eyes before seeking to remove the speck from someone else’s eye. In other words, we can’t see the truth of things because your vision is so hampered by our own stuff.  And … we focus on the wrong things when in relationships with people.  We focus on them, rather than on fixing ourselves.

When it comes to other people, we want to make them just like us … all of us with matching planks; when instead, we should look at the world and each other through the eyes of Jesus, who loves without judgment.

Remove the plank, see the world with eyes that are wide open and filled with love.  Look at your friends and family, look at those in your community and then begin to look past that to the world with eyes that love.