Today’s Podcast
Today’s Bible reading plan:
Read it in a year – Micah
see the whole year’s plan [here](http://www.bible-reading.com/bible-plan.pdf)
Today’s Devotional
Luke 6:41-42
Jesus: Speaking of blindness: Why do you focus on the speck in your brother’s eye? Why don’t you see the log in your own? How can you say to your brother, “Oh, brother, let me help you take that little speck out of your eye,” when you don’t even see the big log in your own eye? What a hypocrite! First, take the log out of your own eye. Then you’ll be able to see clearly enough to help your brother with the speck in his eye.
What do Jesus’ words mean for us today?
You meet all kinds of people in a lifetime. And you meet all kinds of people in the military. While part of the Army’s Medical Department I ran into all kinds of folks. One in particular I thought about when I read these words today was a physicians’ assistant who worked with me for a while when I was a young officer. One of the responsibilities of the medical platoon I ran at the time was watching over the health of the soldiers assigned to the battalion to which it was assigned. The PA was the primary care provider for that platoon and so for the battalion.
It always amazed me when I heard him talking to soldiers about how they should change their diets, exercise more, or take the meds he prescribed for them. This was in the days just after the Viet Nam war and sometimes NCOs and Warrant Officers and Officers were not always what you would call kind in their instructions to subordinates, and this PA could string together expletives like no one I’d ever heard before in my young life.
The reason I bring up the way he talked to soldiers about their bad habits in their unhealthy living is because he smoked like a chimney. He had a 2 1/2 pack a day habit and smoked unfiltered camels. And worse still, he usually had a plug of tobacco in his mouth while he smoked! Talk about an unhealthy habit. Unless you have lived on a deserted island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with no communication since 1960, you know how bad smoking is for your health. Proven increased lung, mouth, and throat cancer rates. Proven increased heart disease. Proven increased incidents of birth defects in fetuses. Proven addictive behavior for those who smoke. The statistics from study after study show smoking is one of the worst things you can do to your body.
But my PA…smoking like a chimney the whole time he chewed out a soldier for his bad health habits. Could he not see the log in his eye before trying to tackle the speck in his brother’s eye? It was no wonder the soldiers under his care didn’t listen to his advice. How could they? He was a hypocrite. He talked to these eighteen to twenty year old kids about their vices when as a forty year old, he violated them all.
Am I guilty of doing the same? Are you? It’s worth some introspection more than just every once in a while. We need to be on our guard because it’s an easy game Satan will use with us. “Hey, look what she’s doing. As a new Christian, you need to teach her the ropes before she gets too far out of line.” “Hey, did you see him? He better get himself straight or he’ll be headed straight to hell with that attitude.”
It is so easy to find the faults of others and never see those in your own life. We get comfortable with ours. We don’t notice the harm our habits reek on us, but we can almost always see the pain others cause. It’s an amazing thing built into our DNA as part of Adam’s race. We just seem to look for the bad in people instead of looking for the good and in turn, we recognize our best but not our worst.
So what do we do about it? How can we stop the cycle that seems almost impossible to stop? First, a good rule to adopt is the one my grandmother taught me that I’m sure you’ve heard before. “If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all.” That will stop the criticism.
Second, let Jesus become Lord of you life. He will begin to show you the things you need to change about you. But He won’t just point them out, He will help you fix them. He will transform you and make you more like Himself. He will help you bear fruit like love, joy, peace, patience, kindheartedness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. He will make you better than you could ever become on your own.
Third, when Jesus is Lord of your life, you will begin to see others the way He sees them. Jesus always seemed to see others the way He created them. Remember what God said about everything He made at creation? It’s recorded in Genesis 1. And God saw that it was good. So He finds the good in His creation because He made us and know why He made us. He knows we can be redeemed from the sin infested world in which we live. When He lives in us, we can see others through His eyes and see the good in them.
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