Motes, Beams and Dirty Windows

I received the following in an email this morning and I found it to be absolutely brilliant.

"A young couple moves into a new neighborhood.The next morning while they are eating breakfast, the youngwoman sees her neighbor hanging the wash outside."That laundry is not very clean," she said. "She doesn't knowhow to wash correctly. Perhaps she needs better laundry soap."Her husband looked on, but remained silent.Every time her neighbor would hang her wash to dry, the youngwoman would make the same comments.About one month later, the woman was surprised to see a niceclean wash on the line and said to her husband: "Look, she haslearned how to wash correctly. I wonder who taught her this?"The husband said, "I got up early this morning and cleaned ourwindows."And so it is with life. What we see when watching othersdepends on the purity of the window through which we look.~Author Unknown"

How true!?!? So often we point out the faults of others when often the flaws we are seeing in them are simply reflections of ourselves in a dirty window pane. Jesus told the same story, only he was talking about motes and beams. A small twig, straw or piece of chaff. A beam is, well, a beam. Look at the size difference between a small twig and a beam. Do you think perhaps Jesus was perhaps saying a little something to us about hypocrisy? The flaws we see in others are insignificant in comparison to our own sin and hypocrisy.

"And why worry about a speck in your friend's eye when you have a log in your own? How can you think of saying, `Let me help you get rid of that speck in your eye,' when you can't see past the log in your own eye? Hypocrite! First get rid of the log from your own eye; then perhaps you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend's eye." Matthew 7:3-5 NLT

Pretty clear, isn't it? So why don't more people abide by this scripture? I believe it's because dirty windows don't just affect how we see out, they affect how we see in too. They affect the amount and quality of light that comes in. It is a cycle. Many times, we cannot see our own hypocrisy because our pride is in the way. Have you ever gone weeks without washing your car? It didn't look so bad...until you washed it and realized just how dirty it was.

We are the same way. On a regular basis (daily in my opinion) call on the Lord and ask him to wash our windows so we can clearly see others with love and without judgement or hypocrisy, and so that we can see clearly into ourselves to find the issues over which we need to repent and reform.

Cheers, and God bless!

Hoss