Why do you look at the splinter in your brother’s eye but don’t notice the beam of wood in your own eye?
Matthew 7:3 (CSB)
Jesus paints a funny, awful picture. A man with a whole beam of wood stuck in his eye, leaning in to pick a tiny splinter out of someone else’s eye.
We are quick to spot the small faults in other people. We study them. We could say exactly what is wrong with them. But the bigger problem, the one in us, we walk right past.
And it’s not because our sin is hard to see. A beam of wood is not hard to see. We miss it because we are not looking. It is a lot easier to look at someone else.
Be careful with one thing here. Jesus is not saying other people have no faults. Your brother may really have a splinter. Jesus is not telling us to pretend nobody does anything wrong.
He is telling us where to look first. At ourselves. So before we go to work on someone else’s fault, we should stop and take an honest look at our own.
But the one person who never had a single fault, Jesus, did not stand back and make a list of ours. He came and took our sin on Himself at the cross (Isaiah 53:6). He gives us honest eyes to see ourselves, and His own blood to cover what we find.