“And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye’; and look, a plank is in your own eye? Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” Mt. 7:3-5 NKJV
“For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad.” 2 Corinthians 5:10 NKJV
“When you stand before the Lord and have to give an account of your life, you won’t be giving an account of his life,” my beloved pastor who is now with the Lord told me as we met outside the church years ago on a brutally hot Georgia summer day. “You’ll be giving an account of yours.”
His? Yes. My then husband’s. Who had kept running off. Who treated me heinously. Who had multiple addictions. Who ultimately divorced me. Whom I pointed the finger at continuously as though he were the only sinner in the world, and as though I were the most righteous person on earth. As though I were the perfect wife never doing a single thing wrong. I was obsessed with my then husband, and the marriage, and with my desire for it to be fixed, and with pointing the finger at him incessantly as though he were the worst sinner in the world. For the life of me, and certainly not for the life of Christ for whom I was most assuredly not living to say the very least, I was so blinded by my prideful, arrogant, self-righteous, self-pitying, judging, bitter, angry, unloving heart and attitude and mouth that I couldn’t see past my finger that was ever pointing at him.
Can you relate? What about YOUR sin? Can you see your own? Has the Spirit of God been pointing His glorious holy and righteous and merciful finger at you as He calls you to repentance, as He speaks to your heart to repent and turn, to turn, to turn to Him, away from YOUR OWN SIN and to Him, beautiful, almighty, magnificent Him, the Lord, and His blessed righteous ways as He teaches His Creation in His awesome Word, the Bible? The Lord led me to repentance, to repent of all I did wrong back then, but my repentance didn’t end then. It’s ongoing. Daily. Continuously His Spirit leads me to repent of any sin I fall into, down to the thoughts and feelings in my heart, and to ever learn to live according to His ways. Is it time, my friend, to put your finger down, to stop pointing the finger at someone else’s sin, repent, and place your trust in Christ as Lord, to utterly give your life to Him, to include a lifestyle of following Him, to include repenting continually, of ever learning to live the righteous life to which He has called you, to which He has called us all? What about YOUR sin?