Friendship Mennonite Church

These verses often impact readers in about the same way that a chain impacts a lunging dog. They bring us up short in our headlong charge against the sins of others.

If we take the verses to heart, we may be chastened and realize that we have done a bad thing and that we have hurt ourselves in the process. If we wrongly understand them, we may focus our efforts on finding some way to ignore the sins of others. We may pretend they don't exist or try to think about something else. We may conclude that Jesus doesn't want us looking at anyone else's sins.

But is that the message that Jesus wants us to take from his words? Is he saying that we should just ignore the sins of those around us?

No! Jesus is not asking us to be oblivious to the sins of others. He is saying that our work, our primary focus, needs to be on our own sins.

Why is that? Are we worse sinners than everyone else? That is not the point. If you have ever had a little bit of sand in your eye you know that there is no such thing as "a little sand in your eye." Isn't it amazing how something so small can cause such upset? Even a little sawdust feels like a plank to the one who has it in their eye.

Yet even though we have eyes full of sawdust, we hold back from dealing with our sin. Like children who will not consent to having a splinter removed, we are afraid of touching the broken place for fear that it will hurt more. We can adjust to the dull continuous ache of our condition but refuse to face the sharp, though brief, pain of healing.

Many of us take steps to keep from seeing ourselves as we really are. We saturate our lives with busyness. We use activity like an anesthetic. We are so busy going places, doing things, and getting stuff, that we can't possibly look within.

Even the clearest pool of water is perfectly opaque when you stir up the surface just a little bit. Throw one rock into a crystal clear spring and the bottom becomes invisible. We do the same with our lives, and so we do not easily see our sins.

Some of the things with which we occupy ourselves may be of the most noble sort. Maybe we are making ourselves over busy in the work of the church. Maybe we are fretting about what is best for our congregation or our family. But if these prevent us from looking within, from having the peace and the calm that it takes to deal with sin, they are causing us problems. You can't get something out of your eye without holding still.

Other things that we may be doing are not just too much of a good thing or the right thing at the wrong time. Some of the things that we do are steps on the path to our own destruction. But, good steps or bad, the effect is the same. We keep ourselves in a state of agitation that prevents insight or self-examination.

But, if we are to be followers of Jesus Christ, if we are to walk this path, we must deal with our sins. Why is this so urgent?

It is urgent because "sin" is not merely an item on an arbitrary list of acts that we must not do for fear of punishment. That is how little children think. They think their parents tell them they can do some things and cannot do others without any rhyme or reason. We may regard sin that way, as so many things we cannot do, just because God will get mad at us.

We need to set that idea aside. Dealing with sin is not a game like avoiding stepping on the crack that will "break your mother's back."

See the deep significance of sin, the grave consequences it has in our lives when we leave it alone to grow and multiply.

• Our sin destroys relationships. You can start with any one of the Ten Commandments and see how violating it violates precious relationships: lying, adultery, coveting, you can go right down the list.
• Sin prevents growth. It makes growth impossible in our hearts. We will stay spiritual babies if we don't take action against the sin that infests our lives.
• Sin alienates us from God. That is where we got in trouble in the first place!
• Sin opens the way for all manner of evil. When we begin to tolerate even the least little sin, when we begin to accept the least little disobedience, we are saying, "The door is open and we don't care." All kinds of things will come in. The flood cannot be stopped when we leave the door open.
• Our involvement in sin destroys life itself. There are consequences. It is not a game.

It is simply not possible for plank-eyed people to be Jesus' disciples.

Now Jesus is using a figure of speech when he says "You have a plank in your eye." But what if you literally did have a plank in your eye? How difficult would everyday life be? You would have to have someone open doors for you. You couldn't turn around too quickly. You would have to get other people to walk in front of you to help carry that thing. You would have to make all kinds of arrangements and you certainly wouldn't be ready to go on any kind of a strenuous journey.

When we have sin in our lives that we are not dealing with, we are unable to help anyone else and almost all of our energy is devoted to hauling around the plank of sin that is in our eye that no one is ever allowed to mention.

In Lamentations 3:40 we read: "Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the LORD."

The fourth step of Alcoholics Anonymous says, "(We) Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves." That is a hard thing to do. The words "searching" and "fearless" are in there for a reason.

Many people find this step, and the fifth step that goes hand in hand with it, "Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs," to be the most difficult steps of recovery.

But if we are to be on the journey of faith with Jesus, they are steps that we, too, must take, even if we have never touched a drop. We need to make a "searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves."

Have you ever had to clean out a neglected refrigerator, not a routine cleaning, but a refrigerator that has been left untouched for six months? It is an unpleasant job. It looks bad, if you have to touch it, it feels bad, and sometimes, it smells bad. But it is an important job.

Our lives are more complicated than refrigerators. How can we begin to "remove the plank?" How can we start to pull out whatever is in our eye, whatever sins are clinging to us?

I will only mention three steps for you to think about:

When we are sick, we say, "Jesus, you are the great physician." He is the great moral physician as well and when he says, there is something in your eye, you had better believe it. Don't be like the Pharisees who asked, "What is he talking about?" When Jesus says we have to deal with sin, accept his diagnosis.

It sounds a lot like cleaning out that refrigerator. If we say, "That milk isn't so bad. It hasn't been here all that long," we are stuck with sour milk. But when we say, "That milk is bad. It has got to go!" then we are making progress. Accept Jesus' diagnosis.

As long as we refuse to admit, or even to see the sin that grips us, we have no hope. First, we cannot take positive action against that which we deny even exists. How can we possibly solve a problem that we don't have?

Sometimes we settle for all kinds of useless activities:

• We settle for just keeping up appearances, just keeping people from getting too close, from getting to know the real "me." We think that that might be enough. Maybe if we just don't open the refrigerator… maybe that will be enough.
• We try to control and manipulate others so that they will not expose our failings, so that, when bad things happen in our relationship, it will appear to be their fault. It's something they did, or something they said. When Sharon and I fight, maybe I can turn the thing around so that my bad temper and foul mood are not are not the problem. Maybe I can make her think it's something that she did. We have seen that happen, haven't we? All our efforts to control and manipulate prove that it's not easy to dance with someone with a plank in their eye.
• We may, like the Pharisees, point out someone else's sins to keep the spotlight off ourselves. "Oh, did you see what she did?" "Did you hear what he said?" Now, it may be that he and she have all kinds of sins to deal with, but our primary focus must be our own healing, our own confessing, our own forgiveness, that is the work that we can do. "Don't confess other people's sins." That is pretty good advice.

All of this only delays or prevents our own healing. It only makes taking action against sin that much more difficult. Why let things go on any longer?

If we want to take action to remove sin from our life, we can let the light of Jesus Christ shine into every dark corner.

Removing the light bulb is one strategy for dealing with the neglected refrigerator. It might make things look a little better. There are things that we don't want to see but remaining in darkness will not help us at all.

Jesus is the light of the world. In our struggle against sin, we hold our every thought, emotion, word, and action up and compare it with his light. Then we can see to what extent we look like him. Then we can see if we are living like children of light or of darkness. In the light, we will not be confused.

Although we may wish it were not so, it quickly becomes obvious what to keep and what needs to be removed, what sins we need to take action against in our hearts.

When we look inside of ourselves it is not like looking in a refrigerator where you can tell right away what is what. Sometimes the sin is hidden. Sometimes we don't know how to begin removing it.

But, when you are ready, look first for areas of anger and resentment in your heart. That will show you the starting point, where the battle must begin.

When we go to the doctor with an illness, he or she examines the places with the most pain first. That is what we want, if we are serious about wanting to get better.

When we admit our anger, resentment, hurt, when we stop saying, "I don't really feel mad at anybody, I'm not really upset about anything," when we stop trying to cover it up and put a nice face on it, then we begin to have insight into our sin. Then we begin to see how we can take steps against it.

When we identify resentment and anger we come to see that we are holding on to something that is only hurting us, that is tearing us down, that is destroying us. Then we can begin the process of letting go.

This work of letting go of sin in your life will be different for each person. A support group or self-help group might be the answer for one. They have blessed many people.

Maybe you will sit down with a notebook. Anyone who makes "a searching and fearless moral inventory" has a notebook. They write things down. Perhaps you will write the completion of a sentence that begins, "Lord, I am really angry about…" Just start writing and see where it will go. Maybe God will show you something about your sin and you will want to write that down too.

Maybe you will reach out to a spiritual friend, to one other person to help you in this process. Perhaps Gizella can help you. Perhaps you will want to talk with me. We struggle together.

In Godward, the book that the adult Sunday School is studying, Ted Koontz talks about this. His is the first story in the book. It is the dramatic account of recognizing his own anger, frustration, and hostility and the horrible effects that all of that sin was having on his own family, on a wife and children who were sometimes afraid of him.

Although I don't think Ted was ever that bad of a guy, he talks in terms of going from death to life, from the darkness to the light, going from sin to wholeness.

That's just what it is like when we come out of the wilderness of sin into the light of Christ.

We can leave the plank in our eye as long as we want. No one will force us and no one can remove it for us. But if we want to go forward, we have to go inward and grapple with our own sinful selves. There is no other way.

David Orr
Friendship Mennonite Church
October 8, 2000