September 28 Daily Devotional

The mote and the beam

If you really do want to help others, and to help to rid them of these blemishes and faults and frailties and imperfections, first of all realize that your spirit and your whole attitude has been wrong. This spirit of judging and hypercriticism and censoriousness that is in you is really like a beam, contrasted with the little mote in the other person’s eye.

‘Start with your own spirit ... [says Jesus] face yourself quite honestly and squarely and admit to yourself the truth about yourself.’ How are we to do all this in practice? Read 1 Corinthians 13 every day; read this statement of our Lord’s every day [Matthew 7:1–5]. Examine your attitude towards other people; face the truth about yourself.... It is a very painful and distressing process. But if we examine ourselves and our judgements and our pronouncements honestly and truly, we are on the highroad to getting the beam out of our eye. Then having done that we shall be so humbled that we shall be quite free from the spirit of censoriousness and hypercriticism.

What a wonderful piece of logic this is! When a man has truly seen himself he never judges anybody else in the wrong way. All his time is taken up in condemning himself, in washing his hands and trying to purify himself.... You cannot be a spiritual oculist until you yourself have clear sight. Thus, when we face ourselves and have got rid of this beam, and have judged and condemned ourselves and are in this humble, understanding, sympathetic, generous, charitable state, we shall then be able ... to ‘speak the truth in love’ to another and thereby to help him.... Judge not, except you judge yourself first.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, ii, pp. 180–2