Or how can you say to your brother, “Let me take the splinter out of your eye,” and look, there’s a beam of wood in your own eye?
Matthew 7:4 (CSB)
Yesterday the man in Jesus’ picture had a beam of wood stuck in his own eye. Today he does something worse. He walks over to his brother and offers to help: let me get that little splinter out of your eye.
Eyes are delicate. To take something out of someone’s eye, you need to see well. This man cannot see at all. There is a plank in the way. He has offered to do the one job he is least able to do.
Jesus is not saying it is wrong to help someone. And He is not saying the brother has no splinter. Maybe he does. The problem is who is offering, and the shape he is in.
So when we get the urge to step in and fix someone, to correct them, to set them straight, Jesus tells us to stop and check ourselves first. Usually the same fault, or a bigger one, is sitting in us. We should deal with that before we reach for theirs.
There is one person who could see perfectly and had nothing wrong with His own eyes: Jesus. He did not stand far off and shout at us about our faults. He came close, the way a doctor comes to a sick person, and He carried our sin in His own body on the cross (1 Peter 2:24). That is the one we follow when we deal with our own hearts first.